Contextualising the EU’s NEG Prescriptions and Research Design

In Chapter 4, we identified commodification as the policy orientation most relevant to our analysis of the nexus between EU economic governance and labour politics and developed a corresponding novel analytical framework to assess new economic governance (NEG) prescriptions in the areas of employment relations and public services. Before engaging in this assessment however, we need to understand the prescriptions’ meaning, for which we must make an additional analytical move. The meaning of NEG policy prescriptions depends not only on their wording but also on their location in larger policy scripts and their uneven coercive power across countries, time, and policy areas. Hence, NEG prescriptions are embedded in larger semantic fields and taxonomies, in power struggles over the definition of appropriate solutions to social problems, and in the EU’s integrated but also uneven political economy. Chapter 5 thus first explains the semantic, communicative, and policy contexts in which we situate NEG prescriptions and then outlines the implications of this analytical move for our research design, including case selection, data collection, and comparative approach.