ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to provide a conceptualization of welfare state-labor market interactions. A crucial challenge for comparative research is to begin studying the welfare state as a major complex in modern society that has a profound influence on social institutions as the labor market, the family, the class structure, the systems of distribution and redistribution, the normative structure, and gender relations. The advanced welfare state has developed new principles with regard to its proper role in its citizens’ life cycles. The modern welfare state edifice constructed in the post–World War II era based itself upon certain, increasingly outdated, assumptions regarding economic growth and full employment. Welfare state dominance of the employment structure is very strong in Scandinavia and very low in both the liberal Anglo-Saxon regimes and in the continental European nations. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
