English > Research > Research Plan > Work and organisation

Work and organisation

The "work market and organisation" theme will deal with the way work is regulated, formally and informally, principally in Denmark and Europe. The team's main area of focus will be on the role of trade unions and employers' organisations. The research tradition in employment/industrial relations, which emphasises the significance of collective stakeholders, will therefore constitute a key theoretical focal point. However, the team will also relate to political sociology, industrial sociology, welfare state research, organisational sociology and management theory.

Firstly, the team will study industrial relations at national/sectoral level. In Denmark, collective agreements play a key role in setting wages and establishing working conditions. This used to be done primarily at multi-sectoral level, but now sectoral agreements generally set the frameworks for pay and working conditions. The agreements have greater breadth, which means that more welfare issues are placed on the agenda - and this creates overlap in relation to codification. The focus will therefore be on the interaction between bargaining and the political system, as well as the evolution of labour-market organisations and comparisons with social models in other countries.

Secondly, the team will look at relationships at enterprise level. Although the frameworks for pay and working conditions are often set by sectoral agreements, these are increasingly supplemented by local agreements within companies. This development runs parallel to working practices becoming more flexible and greater demands being placed on the balance between family and work. As well as the institutions responsible for local negotiations on pay and working conditions, so-called "consultation committees" have been developed for co-operation on broader issues.

Thirdly, the team will study labour-market relations at supranational level. Wages and employment conditions are affected both directly and indirectly by EU regulation, and more and more labour- and market-related policy areas (e.g. employment and education) are co-ordinated at EU level. At the same time, the latest EU enlargements created a new wave of labour migration that challenges the national labour-market models, including the Danish one. The team will analyse how supranational regulation emerges and what its consequences are for national labour-market models.

Fourthly, the team will analyse labour-market relations that transcend these levels. Recent conceptualisations of the industrial/employment relations tradition stress that labour-market regulation is multidimensional. Increasingly, this necessitates a simultaneous focus on different types of stakeholder (e.g. government, unions, employers' associations, individual companies, etc.) and on the different levels of analysis with regard to institutionalisation on the labour market.

Finally, research will be conducted that transcends levels of differentiation in labour-market regulation and looks at the consequences for different groups. One important question is how the forms of labour-market regulation and companies' more or less strategic choices create different conditions for different groups. In this context, it is noteworthy that a significant minority of employees in Denmark are not covered by collective bargaining agreements. As a result, the team will study correlations between education gender, age and ethnicity on the one hand, and opportunities on the labour market on the other.

Research group coordinator: Søren Kaj Andersen.