Diamond Ashiagbor – författare

Labour law and social policy have long provided an arena within which key debates over the depth and pace of European integration have taken place. Increasingly, as the European Union's employment policy has matured, employment and economic policy discourses have come to displace discourses around social policy and social law, a displacement which has occurred in tandem with a shift from legislative harmonisation to the use of 'soft law' and governance by means of guidelines.This book charts the evolution of the European Employment Strategy and the new forms of governance to which it has given rise, in particular the 'open method of coordination'. It offers an interdisciplinary exploration of European social law and employment policy, scrutinizing the law and economics of labour market regulation in the European context and responding to the economic critique of traditional notions of social protection. Through a detailed examination of the legal and economic underpinnings of the European Employment Strategy, the author outlines the implications of this strategy for labour law, social protection and industrial relations within the EU.Using the open method of coordination in the European Employment Strategy as a case study, the book also provides a timely contribution to the growing literature on 'new governance' in the EU. This innovative form of governance has the potential to forge a middle course through the regulatory choices facing the EU: the choice over the appropriate level of regulation in the EU, whether national or supranational; that over the legitimate role for the state in regulating or deregulating the labour market; and ultimately, the choice between centralised harmonization and regulatory competition.

This volume of essays casts light on the shape and future direction of the EU in the wake of the Lisbon Treaty and highlights the incomplete nature of the reforms. Contributors analyse some of the most innovative and most controversial aspects of the Treaty, such as the role and nature of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and the relationship between the EU and the European Court of Human Rights. In addition, they reflect on the ongoing economic and financial crisis in the Euro area, which has forced the EU Member States to re-open negotiations and update a number of aspects of the Lisbon 'settlement'. Together, the essays provide a variety of insights into some of the most crucial innovations introduced by the Lisbon Treaty and in the context of the adoption of the new European Financial Stability Mechanism.

Reflecting a developing trend towards interdisciplinary research in economics and law, this agenda-setting volume makes the case for economic sociology of law – an emerging field that draws on empirical, analytical and normative insights from sociology to investigate relationships between legal and economic phenomena. It locates this novel subject in a wider socio-legal tradition and identifies common ground between Polanyian and Weberian approaches to the law, economy, and society, despite the two theorists’ divergent views on the functionality of the capitalist model. The volume provides a platform for researchers’ critical responses to the ‘social embeddedness’ of market societies.Contributors demonstrate the value of applying a combination of methods in their work, from heterogeneous disciplines such as legal history and ethnography. They consider the position in the western and developed nations, as well as in post-colonial polities. The resulting publication is a well-crafted primer on a specialism that, by combining the insights of socio-economic analysis with the formative influences exerted by their specific legal contexts, informs a more nuanced assessment of law, economics and society.

The aim of this book is to explore labour law’s conceptual and normative narrative. If labour law is informed by the wider political and economic landscape within which it operates, then given the declining prevalence of the post-war model of full employment within a formal welfare state regime, what shape does or should labour law assume in response to the transformation of the political economy in countries of the global North? Correspondingly, what is the proper role to be played by labour law and labour relations institutions in the development process within industrialising countries of the global South, where informal employment has long been, and remains, the predominant form? Drawing on the expertise of leading labour law scholars, this collection addresses those questions by examining the growth and continued prevalence of informality. Offering research that is both empirically grounded and doctrinally astute, the book explores the changing character of labour law in the global North and South.