ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the labour market and welfare state reforms in five European countries, and outlines the basic features of the regulation approach. The regulation approach has developed a bridgehead between general theories of capitalist development and empirical research on political economy and labour market structures. The chapter examines if, and to what extent, measures of de-regulation and re-regulation in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Sweden, Spain, and Germany can be understood against the background of the model. Among the proponents of the regulation school there is a consensus that the Fordist compromise began to disintegrate in the late 1970s. The chapter discusses the classic Fordist compromise and its major pillars and deals with 'Fordism in Europe', which permits national peculiarities to be emphasised. It shows that the institutional arrangements have been challenged in the course of the economic crisis which began in the mid-1970s, and led to significant changes to the Fordist capital-labour nexus.
