Patterns of Employment Expansion in Europe, 1995–2007

Abstract

The debate on the structural evolution of the division of labour and its impact on job quality have been central in the Social Sciences for the last 200 years, and they remain so. The issue at stake is nothing less than the impact that technical and organizational change, the ultimate source of all economic progress, has on the condition of human beings as producers (homo faber). As we shall see in the next section this debate was initiated in the late-18th century with a profound pessimism even amongst the most passionate defenders of the division of labour in industrial capitalism, such as Adam Smith; it later inclined towards a somewhat naïve optimism amongst the theorist of the post-industrial society; and recently, it resumed a more-pessimistic tone, although more nuanced this time, asserting that current technical and organizational change tends to generate polarization in employment structures.