1. Workshop 3 Career development over the life course: how can it best be ensured and
adapted?
The management of career paths is a major issue across Europe. Economic and social
changes are bringing about a radical transformation of employment relationships:
- Businesses must give themselves the means quantitatively and qualitatively to adapt
their resources in order to survive in constantly changing markets; individualised
management of career paths is necessary in order to address people’s changing
interests and needs over time. At the same time, it is important for the company to
have workers available who complement each other with their different knowledge
and skills.
- Employees have to face up to a professional situation which is less stable, a career
path which is less linear and is now longer, while at the same time reconciling the
demands of work with those of their private lives at the various stages of their lives.
The possibility of building a satisfactory career path depends to a large extent on the
resources which people are able to mobilise and develop throughout their lives.
From this point of view, work and employment conditions contribute to the construction of
career paths according to the extent to which they favour, or otherwise, the development of
competences, a valid professional identity, relational networks, work-life balance, and the
preservation of physical and mental health.
Indeed, this dynamic sometimes reinforces the discrepancies in resources: some employees,
often the most vulnerable, are repeatedly confronted with barriers and have little chance of
developing their resources.
Career path management is increasingly depicted as the management of transitions between
job, unemployment and inactivity. Career paths and transitions have to be developed
throughout the lives of workers. The growth of ‘flexicurity’ is part of the intersection of the
need for flexibility and reactivity on the part of business and the need to make career paths
more secure for those in employment and those out of work.
How can we prevent or make up for these discrepancies in resources linked to working and
employment conditions in order to avoid the phenomenon of progressive segmentation of the
labour market and society?
What resources can be used, and at what level (businesses, territories, branches, public
policies), in order to accompany people throughout their career paths, and especially in the
transition phases?
How can we enable businesses to meet the challenges of adapting to markets, while at the
same time offering sustainable working conditions and career paths for employees?
Jean-Yves Boulin
(See abstract in the French participant file)
CNRS sociologist. Researcher at IRISES (Sociology, Economics and Political Science
Interdisciplinary Research Institute), Paris Dauphine University.
Member of the editorial board of Futuribles (Paris) and Transfer (Institut Syndical Européen,
Brussels).
Deputy Chairman of the Tempo Territorial Association
Institut des Villes Expert
Research areas (key words): working time; non-working time; social time (linkage between
various types of social time); time use; social organisation of time; urban time/local policies

2. on time, social policies; social negotiation; trades unionism and social relationships; Europe
(European comparisons).
Leads research into working time, time use, linkage between working time and non-working
time, and local policies on time.
Recent publications:
Anxo, D.; Boulin, J. Y. (2005) (coordinators): Working time options over the life course:
changing social security structures. European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and
Working conditions (Dublin) (87 pages)
Anxo, D.; Boulin, J. Y. (2006) (coordinators): Working time options over the life course: New
work patterns and company strategies. European Foundation for the Improvement of Living
and Working conditions (Dublin) (129 pages)
Boulin, J.Y.; Lallement, M.; Messenger, J.; Michon, F. (editors) (2006) : Decent working time.
New trends, new issues. (ILO, Geneva).
Author of Villes et politiques temporelles, (to be published October 2008), La Documentation
Française
Frédéric Bruggeman
(See abstract in the French participant file)
Specialist in economic changes and restructuring, Frédéric BRUGGEMAN is Economic
Change Director at Cabinet Amnyos. He leads and takes part in a number of studies in
France and Europe and from late 2004 to mid-2007 was international coordinator for the
‘Monitoring Innovative Restructuring in Europe’ project (ESF art.6). In collaboration with
Bernard Gazier, he has recently completed coordination of a collective work on restructuring
in Europe: Restructuring Work and Employment in Europe: Management and Policy
Responses, Edward Elgar 2008.
David Foden
The presentation will discuss a number of working time arrangements in the light of their
implications for work-life balance, drawing on the findings of the Foundation’s 2004-5
European Company Survey (Establishment Survey on Working Time). Data will be presented
on the incidence, motivations for and outcomes of arrangements such as part-time work and,
flexible arrangements (including working-time accounts). Arrangements with a life-course
perspective (long-term leaves and phased retirement) will also be discussed. Findings
relating to the different ways in which companies combine flexibility measures will also be
discussed, and a typology of companies
David Foden has been a research manager in Eurofound since 2002, and currently works in
the Monitoring and Surveys Unit. He was born in Birkenhead in 1957. After studying
economics at Cambridge University, he worked from 1979 to 1985 in the economic
department of the Trades Union Congress, dealing with a range of economic and industrial
policy issues. In 1985 he moved to Brussels as research officer in the European Trade Union
Institute, and was subsequently coordinator of the research unit on employment and labour
market policies and social protection. In Eurofound he was project leader for the first
European Company Survey and is currently project leader for the Foundation’s Network of
European Observatories (EIRO, EWCO and ERM).

3. Roberto Pedersini
Flexicurity and industrial relations in the European Union
The presentation provides an overview of the relevance and implementation of flexicurity in
the European Union. After a brief illustration of recent developments on the issue of
flexicurity at European Union level and a review of policies at national level, the analysis
focuses, in particular, on the contribution of social dialogue and collective bargaining to the
definition of distinctive approaches to flexicurity at national level and on the positions of the
social partners.
Roberto Pedersini is associate professor of economic sociology at the University of Milan.
His main research interests concern labour issues and industrial relations, with a special
focus on the connections between economic and social regulation and labour market
outcomes.
Robert Salais
From competency to capability
The Capability Approach, developed from Amartya Sen’s works, widens the concept of
individual competency towards a broader concept, that of capability. Capability refers to the
scope of possibilities that, in a given situation and time, a person can effectively achieve in
her work and her life. The broader the capabilities, the wider and the more effective the
freedom to act and to choose is. In such an approach, quality in employment is understood
as the extent to which a person can master and freely choose her professional future. To the
direct connection too often made between individual competency and responsibility, Sen
invites us to substitute a triangular relationship between capability, effective freedom and
responsibility. Developing capabilities cannot be only an individual affair. This objective calls
for collective action on both sides of the labour market, the supply side (employability and
placement) and the demand side (jobs and manpower management, training and work
organisation). It implies shared responsibilities and an adequate distribution of rights and
duties between the state, the workers and the employers. Key levels of collective action are
territories and branches.
Robert Salais is director of the IDHE laboratory at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (teacher-
training institute) in Cachan, France. He is an economist, specialising in the history of work
and employment, and the economy of conventions. He is also coordinator of CAPRIGHT, a
European integrated research project 2007-2010 dealing with the relations between labour
markets, employment and welfare regimes. His main published works are: L’invention du
chômage (PUF, 1999), Les mondes de production (with Michael Storper, Editions de
l’EHESS, 1993), Europe and the politics of capabilities (co-editor with Robert Villeneuve,
Cambridge University Press, 2005) [in French: Développer les capacités des hommes et des
territoires en Europe, Editions de l’ANACT, 2006].
Michael Whittall
Work life balance: Making the workplace attractive
In recent years there have been noticeable increases in flexible employment practices,
particularly the growing predominance of flexible working time, temporary agency work and
fixed term contracts. According to a survey conducted by Eurofound 48% of European
establishments with more than 10 employees have some form of working time flexible
arrangement. Such a figure makes for positive reading for the Lisbon strategy committed to
increasing productivity through flexible employment practices in a way which has positive
outcomes for employees. The following presentation considers the findings of a European

4. project concerned with amongst other things work life balance. The presentation discusses
factors which accounted for the positive outcomes for both employers and employees. Three
case studies are considered which highlight the win-win nature of developing work-life
balance policies.
Dr Michael Whittall, based in the Department of Sociology at the Technische Universität
München, is currently an EU-Level correspondent for the European Foundation for the
Improvement of Living and Woking Conditions. A former ESRC post-doctoral fellow, he is
internationally known for his research on European Works Councils, the changing landscape
of German industrial relations, working time flexibility and more recently on work-life balance.
Furthermore, he is a member of the highly respected Lasaire research group on European
Social Dialogue.