Irena Kogan, Michael Gebel and Clemens Noelke (Eds.)
	Europe Enlarged
	A handbook of education, labour and welfare regimes in Central and Eastern Europe
	389 p., Bristol: Policy Press; 2008
	ISBN 978 1 84742 064 0 (hardcover)

Abstract

The expansion of the European Union (EU) has put an end to the East-West division of Europe. At the same time it has increased the cultural heterogeneity, social disparities and economic imbalances within the EU, exemplified in the lower living standards and higher unemployment rates in some of the new member states.
This important new reference work describes the education systems, labour markets and welfare production regimes in the 10 new Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) countries. In three comparative chapters, discussing each of these domains in turn, the editors provide a set of theory-driven, comprehensive and informative indicators that allow comparisons and rankings within the new EU member states. Ten country-specific chapters follow, each written by experts from those countries: Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. These chapters provide detailed information on each country's education and training systems, labour market structure and regulations, and its provision of formal and informal welfare support. An important component of each country chapter is the explanation of the historical background, and the specific national conditions for the institutional choices in the transitional years.
The handbook provides policy makers with the tools to assess the institutional changes in CEE countries, and scholars with ways to apply the proposed indicators to their analytic research. It will be a vital resource that no major research library should be without.

Contents

List of tables and figures
List of abbreviations
Notes on contributors
Acknowledgements

Introduction
Walter Müller

Index

Notes on Contributors

Anna Baranowska is Research Associate in the Labour Market Division of the Department of Economic Analysis and Forecasts at the Ministry of Labour and Social Policy in Poland and a PhD student at the Warsaw School of Economics. Her research interests cover labour markets and demography.

Rastislav Bednárik is Senior Researcher in the Institute of Labour and Family Research, Bratislava (Slovak Republic) and Assistant Professor at universities in Trnava and Nitra. He is interested in problems of social protection, labour market and sociological research methodology.

Erzsébet Bukodi is Research Officer at the Centre for Longitudinal Studies, Institute of Education, University of London, UK. Her research interests include educational inequalities, trends in intergenerational mobility, different aspects of life-course analysis and the relationship between social and cultural stratification.

Michael Gebel is Researcher at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES), University of Mannheim, Germany. His main research interests are labour economics, educational inequality and the dynamics of school-to-work transition.

Angela Ivančič is Senior Researcher at the Slovenian Institute for Adult Education in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Her research work is mainly focused on areas such as patterns of participation of adults in lifelong learning, lifelong learning and the labour market, workplace literacy, labour market careers and social exclusion.

Ján Košta is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Economic Research, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava (Slovakia). His main research interests are in the area of education, labour markets and social policy.

Irena Kogan is Professor of Sociology at the University of Bamberg and external fellow at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES), Germany. Her main research interests include school-to-work transitions, social stratification, immigration and inequality in comparative perspective.

Dobrinka Kostova is Head of the Department of Labour and Social Policy at the Institute of Sociology at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Her main interests are in the field of Eastern European transformation, employment risks and management of intercultural relations.

Kristina Lindemann is affiliated with the Institute of International and Social Studies and the Department of Social Stratification of Tallinn University, Estonia. Her research interests are education, labour markets, youth, transition from school to work and ethnical stratification.

Cristina Mocanu is Researcher at the National Scientific Research Institute for Labour and Social Protection, Bucharest, Romania. Her main research interests include education, labour markets and social protection.

Walter Müller is Professor-Emeritus at the University of Mannheim, Germany. He has published extensively in the areas of social stratification and labour market development, in particular on social inequality in educational participation and attainment, the role of education for job allocation and social mobility, the development of self-employment in advanced economies and on class cleavages in political party preferences.

Clemens Noelke is Researcher at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES), University of Mannheim, Germany. His scientific interests include comparative labour market research, specifically labour market entry dynamics and the labour market consequences of structural change.

Péter Róbert is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social Sciences, ELTE University, Budapest, Hungary. He is also Senior Researcher at the TÃRKI Social Research Institute. His research interests include social stratification and mobility with a special focus on educational inequalities and life-course analysis. He also researches lifestyle differentiation and attitudes toward social inequalities.

Ellu Saar is Professor of Social Sciences at the Tallinn University and Senior Researcher at the Institute of International and Social Studies, Estonia. She has published extensively in the areas of social stratification, job mobility and transitions in youth.

Jana Straková is Senior Researcher at the Department of Sociology of Education and Stratification at the Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Among her main research interests are educational inequalities. She is a member of the Institute for Social and Economical Analyses where she is engaged in educational research leading to recommendations for educational policy.

Meilute Taljunaite is Head of the Department of Sociology of Business and Education at the Institute for Social Research and a Professor at the Vilnius Pedagogical University, Lithuania. She deals with EU citizenship and European social integration, gender policy and migration.

Ilze Trapenciere is professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, in Riga, Latvia. Her main research interests are society, population, policy, and labour market.