PhD education in work science

2/28451
label Burse autorenew 2025-09-29, 17:00 history_edu Diana Ignat
The scientific objective of this PhD education (Early Stage Researcher) position is to examine the impact of contemporary forms of work and employment flexibility (flexicurity or precariousness) on the quality of working life. Workplace surveys and interviews will be conducted with different employee categories including temporary agency workers and user firm employees.

This will be supplemented by analysis of national agency employment data vs a vs national and international rise in agency work and its impact on notions of workplace and employment security-insecurity; and a study of relevant employment agreements at both national, sectoral and company level. The comparative analysis takes into account the capacity of industrial relations actors at the enterprise or organisational level to establish and coordinate flexicurity practices via bargaining mechanisms.



The PhD education position is part of the Marie Curie Initial Training Network (ITN) within the EU Seventh Framework Program (FP7). The University of Gothenburg is one of nine full partners in the project “Changing Employment”. The overall objectives of the Marie Curie project are to identify the nature of the restructuring of European labour markets and economies as a result of current economic and social change, and to explore the impact on work relations and working lives, recognising that this will have implications for gender, ethnicity and young and older people at work. The project will explore these questions around three themes: (1) Management and Employee relations; (2) Inclusion and Exclusion at work, including examination of the character of democratic engagement (3) Impact of the quality of work itself and change on Employee Well-being and Work-Life Quality. In total, the project will include 12 PhD students and 3 Post doc positions. This PhD education position is within the third theme.

The daily work for this PhD education position is at our research group in the Department of Sociology and Work Science at the University of Gothenburg. Data collection will also take place in three Volvo plants; Volvo Bus in Bors (60 km from Gothenburg), in Volvo Trucks, Ghent Belgium and Volvo Bus, Wroclaw Poland. The data collection in Leuven and Wroclaw entails secondments to K. University of Leuven and University of Wroclaw, Wroclaw for a total period up to 5 months.