A case of ritual compliance? The role of European Structural Funds in the shaping of the Greek employment policy (1995‐2008)

The relation of the Greek employment policy to the European one, as it was formulated within EES and the Lisbon strategy, was a particular one. The Greek employment policy fully adopted the form, the structure and the discourse of the EES but it was only marginally influenced by the “way of doing things.” The compliance of the Greek employment policy with the European guidelines for employment was primarily aimed at ensuring the precious flow of the European resources, and only secondarily at improving the effectiveness of the implemented policies. In that sense, the case of Greece, can be described as a case of “ritual compliance”; that is an adherence to the form rather than to the substance of the matter, a practice whose main objective is the unobstructed flow of European funding