The Analysis of Mutual Learning Processes in the European Employment Strategy: A Social Constructivist Approach

The paper is structured as follows: Section 2 summarizes the recent debate in the political science literature on analytical approaches to learning, which has gradually developed in a direction of being less and less individualistic. Section 3 follows up on this development and introduces a social constructivist approach to learning that redefines learning as changes in language-constituted relations to others. In section 4 this argument is elaborated into a model for mutual learning. Section 5 contains a qualitative analysis of the organisation of the EES in practice with regard to the possibilities of policy diffusion of the EES learning processes as predicted in the model in section 4. Section 6 deals with the conflictual views on the size and character of the learning processes of the EES in recent studies and proposes a new methodological path to investigate the mutual learning processes based upon a social constructivist approach. Section 7 is the conclusion of the article which sums up the examination of the both the various approaches to learning analysed in the paper and the evaluation of the possibilities of policy diffusion resulting from the learning processes.