Projects with keyword Work
Active projects
After Optimism
Despite achieving lower grades on average in lower-secondary school, children of immigrants have high aspirations and choose academic tracks in upper-secondary school at higher rates than their majority peers. Research on this ‘immigrant optimism’ has mainly explored its causes and assessed its impact on degree completion rates. This project adopts a wider life course perspective on this phenomenon and extends this literature in several ways. First, we go beyond degree completion by mapping out the broader educational and labour-market trajectories that these degree choices result in. Second, we advance the primarily quantitative work on the causes of this optimism by examining the socio-biographical forces and affective drives it depends upon. Third, we extend prior work on class and social mobility by studying the social psychological impact of the mobility patterns that this optimism results in. Methodologically, we use a sequential mixed-methods design combining longitudinal register data, survey data, and life history interviews. Theoretically, we innovate by applying recent post-Bourdieusian theory to the empirical challenges of this field and aim to refine this theoretical work in the process. The study also has major societal relevance as it will increase our understanding of the social factors underlying the polarized educational outcomes among children of immigrants and generate key insights into how to maximize the benefits of optimism while minimizing its risks.
Local Governance in Migration and Integration Policy
This project explores how, and to what extent municipalities in Sweden have strengthened their autonomy in the policy fields of migration and labour market integration, despite recently increased centralisation and stricter hierarchies of governance in this policy field. Focus will be put on local efforts to attract, accommodate, and retain migrants, and how this is achieved within the context of an ostensibly anti-migration state, pursuant to austerity politics. In seeking to understand policy divergence between local and central levels of governance, the project aims to explain both why and how it occurs. The former relates to how different levels of governance understands the issue at hand, and the policy frames, institutional logics, and political rationalities that inform it. The latter concerns the material constraints and possibilities associated with local policy implementation, in terms of funding, strategic and operational support, as well as bureaucratic control. Here, subnational cooperative networks and their role in mediating, suppressing, or supporting local policy efforts will be of particular interest. Through a mixed-methods design, including nation-wide survey data and municipal case studies, the project seeks to produce both extensive and rich, detailed data on the Swedish migration and integration regime, laying bare its internal variation.
Domestic worker migration industry from Kenya to the Gulf States
This ethnographic research project deals with women’s labour migration from Kenya for work in domestic service in private households in the Gulf States. Migration from Kenya to the gulf states is well established and while exact numbers are unknown, it is currently estimated that there are up to 300 000 Kenyan citizens working in the Gulf States on temporary contracts (GAATW 2019). Conditions for women domestic workers are particularly harsh. Reports of physical, psychological and sexual violence are frequent (Ibid). To counter the abuses the Kenyan state has developed pre-departure training which includes information on workers’ rights, intercultural competence and technical knowhow. Pre-departure training is now made mandatory and integral to the labour migration process. Using policy analysis, interviews and observations, this project will critically map and analyse the various stakeholders (Kenyan state, NGO’s, recruitment firms, training centres, women workers and women workers’ families) and how benefits, risks and costs are managed and negotiated by the different stakeholders.
The REMESO Database
Martin Klinthäll, Associate professor
The REMESO database is a register-based database that contains information about all individuals, schools, dwellings and companies in Sweden.
The REMESO database is based on Statistics Sweden’s annual registerdata and consists of five parts:
(1) A population register containing information about all individuals who were registered in Sweden as of 31 December for each year;
(2) Longitudinal Integration Database for Health Insurance and Labor Market Studies (LISA);
(3) A business register with information about all economically active companies and organizations in Sweden , whether they belong to the private or public sector;
(4) A school register with information about all elementary schools and upper secondary schools, including student grades;
(5) A real estate register containing microdata administrative and longitudinal information on all properties, buildings, addresses and apartments in Sweden.
Finished Projects
Cultures of Rejection
CuRe gathers five research teams from Austria, Croatia, Germany, Serbia and Sweden. Its goal is to understand the recshift in everyday life towards polarization and radicalization, and the successes of right-wing movements and parties in Europe. We start from the premise that cultures of rejection emerge as the result of crises in Europe’s democracies, as well as due to changes in national institutions and civil society. Since rejection is a threat to all forms of social cohesion and peaceful coexistence, the project seeks to study the conditions that have led to the rejection of, among else, immigration, political elites, media and cultural values such as gender equality and sexual liberty.
Specifically, the research focuses on the way economic and technological changes impact employees in logistics and sales, and in which way employees ascribe any particular meaning to these changes.
The researchers assess the situation along the 2015 migration route across Sweden, Germany, Austria, Croatia and Serbia, thoroughly examining work places, digital and socio-spatial environments in interviews and ethnographic fieldwork.
Project web page: http://www.culturesofrejection.net/
Swedish retirement migrants to Spain and migrant workers:
Swedish retirees are part of a growing stream of Northern Europeans who migrate to Southern Europe to retire in the sun.
Exploring the relations between streams of migrants who meet in Spain, and their intermediaries, this project explores issues of mobility and the globalization of care/service, of crucial importance to welfare states and the future of work, elderly care and retirement conditions in Ageing Europe
Education, Work and Civic Agency
Aleksandra Ålund, Professor Emerita
The project illuminates, with Stockholm as a case study in a national and international perspective, how institutional changes and reforms of compulsory and upper-secondary schools affect the social inclusion/exclusion of young people with immigrant backgrounds; their careers and experiences of education and employment in segregated metropolitan environments. Special attention is paid to local cooperation involving the family, ethnic associations, and local educational institutions. The overall research question concerns the impact of education, work and civic agency on social inclusion and full citizenship in multi-ethnic society. Reforms in the system of education and changes on the labour market are related to local community development in order to elucidate the interplay between structural and institutional change, civic agency and individual social mobility.
Ethnicizing employability
This research project aims to highlight the European Social Funds (ESF) task to increase the labour supply with “a particular focus on target groups with a foreign background”. My aim is to examine how this mission is formulated, practiced and made comprehensible in various empirical material related to labour market projects co-funded by the ESF.
More specific, my aim is to analyze how ethnicities (and other social categories) are constructed and problematized in relation to ideas about individual employability. Furthermore, I am interested in examining how different techniques are described as suitable (or not suitable) to address target groups with a foreign background, in order to make the individual employable according to certain norms. How, and what ethnicities are made problematic in relation to norms are also questions of interest.
Foucaults notions of power/knowledge relations and governmentality are central to my theoretical understanding of these questions.
Managing transnational work in Sweden
This project aims at investigating shifting migration regimes and how employment and labor differentiates categories of migrants in Sweden. Relations between employers and migrants become increasingly crucial for opportunities and restraints in migrant life situations in systems of managed migration. Employers also become engaged in global economic relations and at the same time negotiate the relations between the nation and the migrant workers.
Transition from School to Work and the Impact of Social Capital
Young people with the same educational qualifications do not reach the same place in the social hierarchy, because educational credentials are never separable from the individuals that hold them. The economic and social return of educational credentials (in terms of salary and the status of the job) depends mainly on the social capital of their holders. How much social capital an individual has access to, depends, among other things, on her socio-economic background, gender and ethnicity.
The aim of this project is to examine: 1) what is the impact of social capital (compared with socio-economic background and education) on labour market outcomes of young people in obtaining their first jobs, and 2), is there any differences between young natives and children of immigrants in regard to their access to and return from social capital when they get their first employment?
In order to achieve the aim of the project, we will examine the labour market outcomes (salary and the work’s status) of young people with the same education, three years after completed studies from universities and secondary schools.
The method design of the project combines quantitative and qualitative method (questionnaire – and interview studies).
Career Choices for Young People with Immigrant Background
This project focuses on career-choices of youth with immigrant background. It explores questions of exclusion and inclusion, the importance of of social and cultural capital for school performance. It records reflections on career-paths in a Swedish and transnational perspective. The main result of the project is a PhD thesis on Ethnic Studies focusing on young persons’ career-choices, their strategies and orientations and their reflections on these choices. The central research question of the thesis is how young persons with foreign background make their choices relating to education or work. Which are the ambitions, conceptions and visions of these young people? On the background of which influences, conditions, limitations and opportunities do they make their choices? The study reflects on youth’s own understandings of their choices, agency and motives. Methods employed are individual and focus group interviews with youth in secondary school combined with participant observation in secondary schools in Stockholm. Teachers and other staff are also interviewed.
Trade union renewal and social dialogue in post-communism
Charles Woolfson, Professor Emeritus
This project continues a key theme of Charles Woolfson’s European Commission Marie Curie Chair Excellence Award (2004-2007) in the Baltic states – social dialogue and trade union renewal in the post-communist states. The Baltic states are among the most open new market economies and their transformation from Soviet republics to new European Union member states reveals many of the problems of European integration, not least the development of employee representational rights in the workplaces. This project comparatively examines the reasons for the very low levels of union membership and the rather weak structures of social dialogue which exist both nationally, and at workplaces in the Baltic countries. Its key findings so far are that the difficulties facing trade union renewal have as much to do with the pathway of “illusory corporatism” pursued since independence from the Soviet Union, as with the actual negative legacy of pro-regime trade unions in the previous era.
Migration, Citizenship, and the Welfare State
Carl-Ulrik Schierup, Professor
The project surveys, in international comparative perspective, changing welfare states and the transformation of their multiethnic societies through two complementary analytical lenses: on the one hand, the welfare state’s capacity for accommodating migration and ethnic diversity through policies of border control and the allocation of rights of citizenship and, on the other hand, migration and ethnic diversity as a dynamic factor for change in the economic, political and cultural foundations of welfare states. It focuses on changing ethnic divisions of labour related to processes of social inclusion/exclusion and politics of European integration.