Job Quality in an Era of Flexibility

2Job quality in Europe

Stephen Bouquin

Introduction

In this chapter, we will take a close look at the issue of ‘job quality’ as an element of the public discourse part of the employment policies elaborated on the European level. We will first of all present the context in which the theme of job quality and other similar themes emerged. Job quality but also ‘quality of work’, ‘decent work’ and precarisation are relatively recent topics in the literature. On the level of public policies, we wanted to analyse the emergence of this vocabulary as part of a broader discourse on the problems of employment and social exclusion. In order to do that we have chosen to apply a lexicographical discourse analysis. We measured between 1995 and 2015 the ...