Activating employment policies has become a new paradigm for welfare and work. Labour market policies have shifted towards the aim to activate broader parts of society by facilitating the access especially of women, younger and older people, migrants, young mothers and unskilled and disabled people to the labour market. While the activation paradigm has thus been established as principal concept in labour market and employment policies, its implications reach far beyond the labour market. The activation paradigm implies also important challenges for related policy fields (training and education, social security and assistance, family and life course policy, health policy, migration, integration and even housing policies). Especially in times of crisis, employment-friendly reforms thus raise issues how welfare states integrate and (re-)align the different policy fields according to a coherent logic of activation. Taking up the issue of integrated employment and activation policies, this call invites contributions on the following questions: How are coordination demands of integrated policies handled in welfare states? What different forms of activation policies are pursued in different countries and how far have different strategies shaped other policy fields? What are the governance mechanisms, reform paths, patterns of change and conflict in related policy fields, when countries decide to reform their employment systems? And finally, what are the implications of integrated activation strategies in a multi-level welfare system including European influences and local implementation?

Prospective participants should contact Martin Heidenreich (martin.heidenreich@uni-oldenburg.de), bearing in mind that they will be expected to present and circulate a paper and should, therefore, be currently conducting advanced research in this area. Graduate students are welcome to apply.

Deadline for applications: 15 May 2012

An application to participate should include the title of the paper, name, affiliation, and contact information of the author(s), and a short description of the contents of the paper (maximum 1-2 pages) including the research method of your contribution, the theoretical framework and the empirical material to be used. Please provide an indication as to how the paper will fit into the general theme of the workshop, as outlined above.

We will inform applicants as to whether they have been accepted shortly after the deadline for applications has passed. Then the participants will be asked to submit a paper two weeks before the Milan Conference. The papers must be submitted in English and must not exceed 8,000 words all inclusive. Where the paper includes Tables and Figures, this word total will be commensurately reduced, so as to allow space for them. Longer submissions may not be considered. The contributions are planned to be published in an edited book or journals after a reviewing process and agreement by the authors. The conference organizers will pay for travel expenses. The conference can accommodate 15 papers at the maximum. No parallel session will be held. Each paper will be granted 30 minutes (20 minutes for presentation, 10 minutes for discussion).

Prof. Dr. Martin Heidenreich Jean Monnet Centre for Europeanisation and Transnational Regulations University of Oldenburg, Germany

Prof. Dr. Paolo R. Graziano Department of Policy Analysis and Public Management Bocconi University Milano, Italy

-- Dipl.-Soz. Patrizia Aurich

Institut für Sozialwissenschaften, Fk. I Jean Monnet Centre for Europeanisation and Transnational Regulations CvO-Universität Oldenburg D-26111 Oldenburg

mail: patrizia.aurich@uni-oldenburg.de phone: +49 (0)441-798-4582 http://www.sozialstruktur.uni-oldenburg.de/58448.html

LOCALISE - Local Worlds of Social Cohesion www.localise-research.eu