‘Flexibility’ and ‘security’ from rivals to teammates: a short history of flexicurity

Abstract

This article provides a short yet comprehensive historical review of ‘flexicurity,’ an equally acclaimed and debated public policy of the first two decades of the 20th century. Early understandings of ‘flexibility’ and ‘security’ in labor economics placed the two terms in antithetic positions, generally defining ‘flexibility’ as the lack of ‘security’ or considering ‘security’ as the cause for the lack of ‘flexibility.’ The change in social standards in the early 1990s generated the emergence of ‘transitional labor markets,’ a concept that further facilitated the appearance of a new labor market policy – ‘flexicurity.’ The article presents each of these stages in the development of flexicurity. It describes the stories of the three most influential flexicurity cases - the Dutch, the Danish, and the European Union.