Introduction

There is a growing interest in the role of employers in the delivery and success of activation policies. In this chapter, we put forward a typology of policy approaches to employer engagement in activation policies. We identify three main policy approaches: regulation, facilitation and negotiation. The policy approaches rely on different assumed problems and different target groups of unemployed and apply different types of governance and policy instruments. The typology that we put forward can be used to classify national policy approaches in the emerging field of employer engagement in activation policies.

The chapter begins with a discussion of the growing attention for employer engagement in activation policies and research. In the second section, we describe the typology of policy approaches to employer engagement. The third section illustrates the typology by analysing and comparing recent developments in activation policies aimed at strengthening the role of employers in the UK, Denmark and The Netherlands. We conclude with a discussion of our contribution to debates about the role of employers in activation policies.

Activation policies and employer engagement

In more than three decades of active welfare state and labour market reforms, and a vast associated scholarly literature, the role of employers has received surprisingly little attention in policies, debates and research. Since the early 1990s, when the diffusion of active labour market policies accelerated across a range of countries, activation policies have mainly focused on the supply side of the labour market. Their objectives have been to motivate unemployed people through supportive and disciplinary measures to actively look for jobs, develop their skills and competences and be more flexible with respect to the kinds of jobs they are willing to accept (Dingeldey, 2007; Bonoli, 2013; Ingold and Stuart, 2015; Bredgaard, 2018).

Similarly, activation researchers have mainly focused on the supply side. Scholars have been preoccupied with classifying and categorizing different types of (supply-side) activation policies, such as workfare versus enabling regimes (Dingeldey, 2007); labour market attachment versus human capital approaches (Lødemel and Trickey, 2000); and liberal versus universal types (Barbier and Ludwig-Mayerhofer, 2004).