Karlstad Universitet
Working Life Science (WLS)
Karlstad University was established in 1999. Although research and teaching activities were already extensive before 1999, the acquisition of university status led to a dramatic development with regard to research, graduate education, and Ph.D.-programs. The strategy for a young university with limited resources has initially been to encourage researchers in different disciplines to co-operate in multi-disciplinary research. An example of this is Working Life Science (WLS), which started in the 1970s as a multidisciplinary research group and became an academic discipline in 2000, with the right to provide Ph.D.-education. Altogether 24 teachers/researchers and doctoral students are affiliated to WLS. The researchers do not only come from Working Life Science, but also from disciplines such as sociology, pedagogy, business administration, economic geography and psychology.
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Birgitta Eriksson will be the principal investigator for the Swedish team. She is the head of the department of Working Life Science. She will be responsible for the Swedish part of the study. She is associate professor in Working Life Science at Karlstad University and received her Ph.D. in Sociology from University of Gothenburg 1998. Her research interests include labor market and labor-market policy, consequences of organizational changes, working and living conditions and small business management.
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Tuula Bergqvist is a researcher and a lecturer at the department of Working Life Science, Karlstad University, where she also received her Ph. D. in 2004. Her research started in the empirical field of entrepreneurship and for the last three years continued in studying flexibility and changing conditions of work. This project, financed by the Swedish Research Council for Social Sciences, has been a cooperation with the Østfold University College, Norway. During the last two years she has also participated in an international educational co-operation called Nordplus, a network between Scandinavian universities, university colleges and advanced vocational education and training in Sweden, Finland and Norway.
Jennifer Hobbins is a research assistant for the Swedish team. She graduated from Karlstad University in 2008 with a dissertation on teachers' emotional work. She holds a M.A. degree in Working Life Science and Sociology, and her main research interest domains are social exclusion, structures of power, gender relations and emotional work.