The Center (represented by Marek Kwiek and Piotr W. Juchacz) became a partner in an EU 7th Framework Programme project WORKABLE, /Making Capabilities Work/ (2009-2012), a large-scale collaborative research project, coordinated by Professor Hans-Uwe Otto from Bielefeld University, Germany (October).

WORKABLE

Making Capabilities Work  (2009-2012) funded by Seventh Framework Programme

„Making Capabilities Work” (WorkAble) will provide knowledge on how to enable young people to function as capable citizens in the labour markets of European knowledge societies. It assesses the political and institutional strategies aiming to cope with the high rates of youth unemployment, early school leaving and dropouts from upper secondary education. The young adults concerned often exhibit multiple strains and remain stuck longer in a transitional state between insecure employment conditions, short-term educational and employment support projects and educational and social welfare support systems. Their situation poses major challenges to European knowledge societies. Yet, European societies are shaped by a diversity of economic conditions and political traditions resulting in different national and regional policies and practices, different welfare policy arrangements and different vocational and educational regimes. Therefore, WorkAble will adopt a comparative perspective and analyse institutional employment policies and educational regimes on a local and regional, a national and a European level. This will provide a consistent framework for reconstructing commonalities and differences, identifying best-practice solutions and providing knowledge that will enable each regime to learn from the others through comparative research.