Organisational Learning and Systems of Labour Market Regulation in Europe

This paper establishes a link between international differences in the organisation of work and modes of regulation of labour markets within Europe. The paper operates with four forms of work organisation (discretionary learning, lean production, Taylorism and simple or traditional). Through a factor analysis three dimensions of national labour market systems (flexible security, passive security and job support) are defined. Using a multilevel logistic regression model that takes into account both characteristics of individuals and of national labour market systems it is shown that
there is a significant positive correlation between flexible security and the prevalence of discretionary learning. On this basis we point to an extension of flexible security in Europe’s labour markets as an adequate response to the current crisis.