"This is a timely and significant contribution to current debates on the widening gap between insiders and outsiders in rich societies. Going beyond a structuralist view, this comparative study reveals the contentious politics as well as the dividing policies of employment deregulation and welfare retrenchment. Eminent experts map a variety of dualization patterns across continental European, Scandinavian, Anglophone, and Asian-Pacific welfare states. The book's essential message is that dualization is no necessity, but rather the result of divisive politics and dualist policies." -- Bernhard Ebbinghaus, Professor of Sociology, University of Mannheim
"The broad, comfortable middle class that western democracies built up in the wake of WWII has contracted and William Beveridge's five giants of want, disease, ignorance, squalor, and idleness are again looming large. Most observers point helplessly at economic and social globalization, but this comprehensive international comparison of social and labor market policies reveals how the growth of inequalities is exacerbated, deterred, or contained by national politics. Here, for the first time, we can learn systematically which policies to avoid, and which may, in fact, keep the giants at bay." -- Stephan Leibfried, Professor of Public Policy, University of Bremen
"This terrific volume brings together cutting-edge scholarship on a very important topic. Taken as a whole, the volume makes a compelling case that growing differentiation of insiders and outsiders represents a common trend in the advanced capitalist countries, with long-term consequences for politics and social cohesion. The authors emphasize social policy changes as a source of dualization and demonstrate that patterns of dualization vary across countries for fundamentally political reasons." -- Jonas Pontusson, Professor of Comparative Politics, University of Geneva