Differential Europeanisation of Hybrid Institutions: Conditions and Modalities in Using European Social Fund by Labour / Capital Joint Management Institutions in France and Italy

Amongst its many objectives, the European Employment Strategy (EES) aims at increasing the levels of qualifications of low qualified workers and to develop the whole European workforce, in order for the EU “to become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world, capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion”. A major tool used to achieve these goals is the European Social Fund (ESF). While an extremely rich literature has explored the genesis of the EES and the different usages of the ESF in the Member States, as well as the political usages that can be made out of this communitarian resource (either between centralized and decentralized institutions, or against private actors), much attention has also been given to local public institutions empowerment and their patterns of change or continuity because of European resources usages. Eventually, there is an increasing scholarship produced on the everyday qualifications and usages of the ESF, reflecting a very welcome constructivist turn. The latter encourages hypotheses of differentiated paths for Europeanization, not only across member States or sub-national entities, but also across institutions according to the concerned economic sector. We wish to contribute to the panel’s collective reflexion with evidence gathered during our PhD investigation, consisting mainly in documents analysis, semi structured interviews (n=50 up to January 2013) and some field observations with training counsellors. We argue in the first stage that the many labour / capital joint management commissions (OPCA in France, FPI in Italy) are reacting differently to the pressures associated to European resources. In a second stage, we then seek to identify the causes of these differences.