OECD, EU, governments, and isomorphic processes. The Jobs Strategies in the 1990s and 2000s

Vincent Gayon (1)

1 IRISSO - Institut de Recherche Interdisciplinaire en Sciences Sociales

Based on interviews and original archives and with a process-tracing approach, my purpose aims to analyse the respective and linked works of OECD and European Union on employment/unemployment policies, namely and respectively the Jobs strategy and European Employment Strategy. An examination of the job and unemployment programs of the OECD and the European Commission in the two decades since 1990 shows that their homologous circuit of production and legitimation has been marked by the domination of governments and these organizations’ "economic" sectors over "social" sectors. Despite their own specificity, each of these institutional universes is characterized by an asymmetric relationship between the “economic” and the “social”, something that affects the content of their diagnostics and prescriptions, the social and bureaucratic status of the different actors, as well as the flow of transactions between them. This contribution thus takes seriously the effects and actualizations of the process of isomorphic differentiation between the “economic” and the “social” that has over the long term been pursued by Western states, a process that affects the very structures of these internationalized spaces and that informs in this case on the paths of making and of dissemination of neoliberal public ideas and policies.

Mots clés: OECD; EU; OMC; Jobs study; Jobs strategy; European employment strategy; institutionnal isomorphism; structural homology; neoliberalism

Domaines: Sciences de l'Homme et Société

Vincent Gayon. OECD, EU, governments, and isomorphic processes. The Jobs Strategies in the 1990s and 2000s. International Organizations and the Globalization of public instruments and ideas: micro-processes and actors’ configurations, Sep 2016, Strasbourg, France. pp.26. ⟨hal-01400660⟩