The primary aim is to study the reconfiguration of employers' production and staffing strategies within a global but regionally concentrated industry from a comparative perspective and to develop a conceptual understanding of how transnational shifts in production and staffing strategies are negotiated inside the EU/EEA. Secondary objectives include: 1) to investigate how national sectoral industrial relations systems influence and are influenced by such changes in transnational production and staffing strategies; 2) to trace how technological innovations influence employer strategies; 3) to assess how EU level Social Dialogue and re-regulations impact the relationship between production and staffing strategies in different corners of the Single Market.

In cooperation with the University of Gothenburg, Michigan State University, and MIT, we will examine ongoing restructuring processes related to digitalization of work in Norway, Sweden and the U.S, the effects on labour market institutions and vice versa.

Major changes in technology, economic contexts, workforces, and the institutions of work have come in ebb and flow since well before the first industrial revolution in the 18th century. Yet, many argue that the changes we are currently facing are different, and that the rise of digitalized production will entirely transform our ways and views of work.

In this project we will explore how changes associated with the “sharing economy”, or better coined “the intermediation economy”, can be expected to influence workers' rights and labor markets in the Nordic countries.

Since 2010 Fafo Institute for labour and social research and the Frisch center for economic research has cooperated on a joint research program about labour migration to Norway, funded by the Norwegian ministry of labour. The main purpose of the research programme is to develop better understandings of the factors which influence flows of labour migrants to Norway, the development of wages and working conditions among labour migrants, and how labour migration affects the Norwegian labour market and economy. The research questions will be analyzed from different disciplinary perspectives and using different data sources. Sociologists, economists and lawyers participate in the project, and the empirical analyses are based on linked administrative registers, quantitative surveys and qualitative interview data.

The aim of this comparative project is to study how temporary employment influences people’s employment careers and their chances of achieving a permanent establishment in the labour market.

In this application we propose an interdisciplinary and comparative project, the main objective of which is, in a Nordic perspective, to analyse the development of a multilayered system of labour market governance in Europe, focussing in the interpla y between legal and institutional change at the supra-national and national levels in the current context of enlargement and deepened market integration in the EU/EEA.

Study on westward labour migration within the enlarged EU/EEA, focusing on Polish migration to western Europe and in particular Norway.