In Chapter 4, we identified commodification as the policy orientation most relevant to our analysis of the nexus between EU economic governance and labour politics and developed a corresponding novel analytical framework to assess new economic governance (NEG) prescriptions in the areas of employment relations and public services. Before engaging in this assessment however, we need to understand the prescriptions’ meaning, for which we must make an additional analytical move. The meaning of NEG policy prescriptions depends not only on their wording but also on their location in larger policy scripts and their uneven coercive power across countries, time, and policy areas. Hence, NEG prescriptions are embedded in larger semantic fields and taxonomies, in power struggles over the definition of appropriate solutions to social problems, and in the EU’s integrated but also uneven political economy. Chapter 5 thus first explains the semantic, communicative, and policy contexts in which we situate NEG prescriptions and then outlines the implications of this analytical move for our research design, including case selection, data collection, and comparative approach.

Chapter 4 first reviews earlier studies of the EU’s new economic governance (NEG) regime and discusses the methodological challenges that they pose for the assessment of NEG documents. Earlier studies of NEG policy prescriptions flattened the semantic relationships between the different terms used in them and the power relations between the actors involved in their production. We therefore outline a novel research design that accounts for the links between the policy orientation of NEG prescriptions and the material interests of concrete social groups as well as the hierarchical ordering of NEG prescriptions in larger policy scripts unevenly deployed across countries, time, and policy areas. We address the first point in Chapter 4 and the second in Chapter 5. In 4.2, we identify commodification as the most relevant dimension for analysing the nexus between EU economic governance and labour politics. In 4.3, we operationalise the concepts of commodification and decommodification in employment relations and public services and outline the analytical framework against which we assess the policy orientation of the EU’s NEG prescriptions in the policy areas of employment relations and public services.