https://doi.org/10.1177/0969776417713054 European Urban and Regional Studies 1–20 © The Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0969776417713054 journals.sagepub.com/home/eur European Urban and Regional Studies Introduction During the past two decades, part-time employment has expanded faster than full-time employment across most of the European Union (EU; Horemans et al., 2016). The Euro crisis is also associated with increas- ing shares of involuntary part-time work. As such, part-time employment reflects an underutilization of the labour force, or under-employment (Jenkins and Charleswell, 2016), a phenomenon that not least has hit Greece in a particularly severe manner since the ‘Going under-employed’: Industrial and regional effects, specialization and part-time work across recession-hit Southern European Union regions Stelios Gialis and Kostas Gourzis University of the Aegean, Greece Anders Underthun Work Research Institute, Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences, Norway Abstract The paper explores the regional dimensions of under-employment by analysing the uneven dispersion of part-time jobs in Greece. It understands under-employment as an integral dimension of contemporary flexible labour trends, triggered by devaluation and expanding amid crisis, although in diverse geographical and sectoral terms. It follows a methodology that comparatively analyses statistical data, relevant secondary sources and previous case studies, before moving to a theoretical contextualization of the findings. Based on this framework, NUTS-II level total employment and part-time work data are analysed through location quotients, and a new embellishment of shift-share analysis is implemented for 2005–2008 and 2009–2012 across nine sectors. The findings reveal four distinct, although porous, patterns of under-employment that are distinguished according to different regional productive specializations and the impact of structural or regional effects. The reasons why some regional economies, such as the tourist ones, were more resistant to employment losses, and at the same time the most keen on expanding part-time work, are scrutinized. Concluding, three deeper causal mechanisms, namely productive-technological, organizational and institutional, that determine the under-employment patterns revealed, are discussed and contrasted to relevant literature findings. Keywords Part-time work, shift-share analysis, regional patterns, under-employment casual mechanisms, Greek regions. Corresponding author: Stelios Gialis, Department of Geography, University of the Aegean, University Hill, 81100 Mytilene, Greece. Email: stgialis@aegean.gr 713054EUR 0 0 10.1177/0969776417713054European Urban and Regional StudiesGialis et al. research-article 2017 Standard Article