Atypical and precarious employment has become an increasingly important issue in the last 30 years. However, atypical employment includes very heterogeneous forms of work and is difficult to capture empirically. In this paper we propose a configurational approach in order to overcome these difficulties. We conceptualise the labour market as a field and investigate the data of the 2004 sweep of the Swiss Household Panel with a multiple correspondence analysis. We discover four configurations of atypical work and then relate these configurations to possible explanatory factors and possible consequences. Our findings show that in Switzerland only one, very specific configuration of atypical employment leads to social suffering and vulnerability: jobs that combine the absence of biographical prospects, forced flexibility and low wages. Other atypically employed fractions use their specific resources to deploy compensation strategies which render atypical employment socially bearable.

La régulation du marché du travail suisse se signale par la volonté des divers acteurs en présence de privilégier les solutions de compromis, que ce soit au niveau politique ou à ceux de la branche et de l’entreprise. Dans ce contexte prédomine un type de négociation largement intégratif où chacun des participants au jeu négociatoire trouve un avantage. Les récentes transformations du marché du travail suisse remettent en cause les fondements de ce modèle. La question se pose dès lors de la possibilité même d’une négociation intégrative: ces évolutions qui tendent à accroître les exigences de flexibilité et la pression à la compétitivité ne risquent-elles pas de déboucher sur des formes de négociation distributives, où les gains d’une partie coïncident avec les pertes de l’autre? L’objectif de cet article consiste à apporter des éléments de réponse à cette interrogation. Après avoir présenté le contexte d’émergence et les caractéristiques principales du modèle helvétique de compromis, il met en lumière les défis posés par les évolutions récentes et les illustre au moyen d’une étude de cas portant sur une entreprise de l’industrie des machines.

A longitudinal approach is used to describe and explain processes of social inclusion and exclusion among different groups of migrants in Antwerp and Stockholm (1846–1926), in terms of access to marriage and reproduction. In this way we want to get a better idea about the factors which facilitated or hampered the social inclusion of migrants upon arrival in two different Western European port cities. The results of the discrete time event history analyses show that social inclusion of migrants was easier in Antwerp and became easier over time, while in Stockholm it was more difficult and became even more complicated over time. This finding might be interpreted as the result of greater societal openness in Antwerp, as the Belgian port-city’s economic success depended largely upon foreigners and international trade. Higher odds for social inclusion in Antwerp might also have been related to differences in the chances of finding an urban niche, which in turn might have been a result of disparities in economic and demographic growth. Most likely it was a combination of differences in the local opportunity structure and the level of societal openness. Furthermore, it was found that region and place of birth, age at arrival, historical time period, and, in the case of Stockholm, gender and social class had an important impact on the chances of successful inclusion.

The number of expatriates from global firms has been continuously increasing over the past decades as multinational companies still view expatriation as an important tool for sharing and transferring knowledge, controlling subsidiaries and developing workforce competencies. Expatriate management is still a costly and complex task for multinational companies. Adjustment, which has been defined as an individual's degree of comfort, familiarity and ease with several aspects of a new cultural environment, is considered to play a central role in expatriation success. In a context characterized by the rise of dual career couples, the increasing number of female expatriates and the growing awareness concerning work life balance, private life issues are increasingly important for multinational companies. On the basis of 126 expatriate couples' questionnaires, this paper compares adjustment of male and female expatriates working in multinational companies in a specific host country environment: the Geneva Lake region in Switzerland where many MNCs have settled their European headquarters. Furthermore, our paper investigates the impact of two variables - gender and employment status - on adjustment of expatriate spouses.