<p>In the wake of state borders becoming more porous the flows of people crossing them in search for opportunities have increased. This trend is evident in Greater Mekong Sub region where the economic boom of Thailand attracts thousands of migrant workers every year from neighboring countries making Thai industries dependent on the cheap labor. Alongside these developments, human trafficking, the slave trade of our time, has emerged as an increasing challenge.</p><p>In Lao PDR the historic ties to Thailand make for a long history of cross-border relations and flows. With the relative economic differences, labor migration to the richer neighbor is becoming an accepted way of improving family conditions. However, the risks involved, exploitation and trafficking, are not widely known in the communities.</p><p>Counter-trafficking work in Lao PDR has been evolving over the passed 10 years. This study has, through an ethnographic approach to organizational work combined with reflections and observations, tried to create a picture of the counter-trafficking work on the ground. Using semi-structured interviews projects, aims and assumptions could be derived and three main problems identified: Trafficking is hard to separate from labor migration, thus making it hard to effectively target; there is a dissonance between perceived and actual inter-sector communication, and; the trafficking sector is isolated from other sectors as dialogue across sector borders appear to be nonexistent. Reasons given for these discords mainly came down to dependency on donors and a need to meet their requirements. Essentially it seems that organizations working with this open-border phenomenon are rigidly closed to each other.</p>

In the wake of state borders becoming more porous the flows of people crossing them in search for opportunities have increased. This trend is evident in Greater Mekong Sub region where the economic boom of Thailand attracts thousands of migrant workers every year from neighboring countries making Thai industries dependent on the cheap labor. Alongside these developments, human trafficking, the slave trade of our time, has emerged as an increasing challenge. In Lao PDR the historic ties to Thailand make for a long history of cross-border relations and flows. With the relative economic differences, labor migration to the richer neighbor is becoming an accepted way of improving family conditions. However, the risks involved, exploitation and trafficking, are not widely known in the communities. Counter-trafficking work in Lao PDR has been evolving over the passed 10 years. This study has, through an ethnographic approach to organizational work combined with reflections and observations, tried to create a picture of the counter-trafficking work on the ground. Using semi-structured interviews projects, aims and assumptions could be derived and three main problems identified: Trafficking is hard to separate from labor migration, thus making it hard to effectively target; there is a dissonance between perceived and actual inter-sector communication, and; the trafficking sector is isolated from other sectors as dialogue across sector borders appear to be nonexistent. Reasons given for these discords mainly came down to dependency on donors and a need to meet their requirements. Essentially it seems that organizations working with this open-border phenomenon are rigidly closed to each other.

Environmental issues have been described as one of society’s wicked problems. In contrast to widespread technological responses to environmental issues, I spotlight social aspects as chief barriers to productive change. I posit that socially constructed frames can influence people’s perspectives, opinions, and behaviors regarding environmental issues. In this project, I explored organizational work and framing processes as a means to bridge the chasm between technological and social approaches to environmental issues. To date, researchers using framing theory have narrowed their focus to testing the effectiveness of different frames. By doing so, however, researchers remain limited to discursive explanations regarding how frames are constructed at a micro level. In contrast, I adopted a multimodal approach that accounts for both discursive and non-discursive modalities to investigate how organizations deploy visual, material, and textual approaches to shape environmental meaning through framing processes. Specifically, I focused on organizational campaigns to construct meaning around the contentious issue of bottled water. I adopted a qualitative approach, using a multimodal analysis, to explore advertisements and campaigns used by bottled water companies and environmental activist groups to shape perspectives, opinions and behaviors of plastic containers and bottled water usage. I found that visual, material, and textual modalities can be used as value-neutral tools to help stakeholders construct different frames and shape the public’s opinion of bottled water. Different multimodal elements serve different functions in constructing different frames. I also identified particular barriers for the framing construction process.

Le projet cherche à comprendre de quelle manière chacun dans l'entreprise concilie les objectifs parfois contradictoires de rentabilité, sécurité et bien-être au travail, à travers deux études de cas : le retour d'expérience des évènements sécurité et l'évaluation des risques psychosociaux. Le terrain cible plus particulièrement les cadres à Fret SNCF dans les années 2010. / The project aims to understand how everyone in a company manage to conciliate objectives that can be sometimes contradictory, like profitability, security, well-being at work, through two case studies : feedback management of security events, evaluation of psychosocial risks. Field concern profesionnals in Fret SNCF in the 2010's.

Major changes in organizational structural paradigms have been occurring. Recent journal articles propose that the older philosophies of expanding organizations and increasing internal specialization are no longer viable means to enhance competitiveness as espoused in earlier journal articles. Downsizing, rightsizing, and business process reengineering have all been used as methods of accomplishing organizational work force reduction (OWFR) and enhancing organizational posture. It has been established that as organizations grow, specialization increases. Causes for OWFR have not been established nor have effects upon structure been studied. Previous structural factor studies have focused upon organizations engaged in end-game strategies done during periods of internal and economic growth. This study evaluates the impacts of OWFR and its relationship to the structural factor of specialization during a non-munificent economic period. Three independent variables, dis-integration, change in the number of employees, and change in technology, were used as measures to determine whether specialization decreased when organizations downsized. The dependent variable, specialization, was obtained through a pre-tested questionnaire. The three independent variables were obtained using the Compustat data base as a secondary source of information. The Compustat data was verified using data from Compact Disclosure. Questionnaires were mailed to fifty-one fully integrated oil companies. Forty were returned after three mailings yielding a response rate of seventy-eight percent. The unit of analysis for the data collected was the firm. The data were analyzed using multiple regression to determine the strength of the relationship between the variables. Results indicate a significant relationship between two of the independent variables and the dependent variable: dis-integration and specialization and change in the number of employees and specialization. Findings were insignificant for the third independent variable and the dependent variable: change in technology and specialization. Analysis of the quantitative results and the qualitative responses of the participants show that dis-integration and a change in the number of employees are both useful for measuring structural change for organizations engaged in organizational work force reduction.

In recent years, studies have discussed the abusive supervision behavior in the organizations. Especially, supervisors¡¦ abusive supervision behaviors were believed to have negative effects on subordinates. However, the relationship between supervisors¡¦ abusive supervision behaviors, subordinates¡¦ work-family conflict, and deviant behavior remained unclear. For this reason, this study intends correlating supervisors¡¦ abusive supervision behaviors and subordinates¡¦ work-family conflict with deviant behavior. In this study, abusive supervision is the independent variable; Deviant behavior is the dependent variable; Work-family conflict is the mediator. Besides, we defined social support (family-supportive policies, perceived organizational work¡Vfamily support, and perceived coworker support) as a moderator not only between supervisors¡¦ abusive supervision behaviors and subordinates¡¦ work-family conflict, but also between work-family conflict and deviant behavior. The subjects of the study who are selected by convenience sampling and the data are collected using dyad-approach are common enterprise employees from manufacturing, high-tech industry, and service industry in Taiwan. Two hundred and twelve effective questionnaires (106 supervisor-subordinate dyadic data) of the survey are retrieved. Moreover, the analytic tools such as descriptive analysis, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), linear structural relation, hierarchical regression analysis, and sobel test are utilized to analyze the result of the survey and to verify the assumptions of the study. The findings of the study are as follows. (1) Abusive supervision correlates positively with work-family conflict. (2) Work-family conflict also has significantly positive correlation with deviant behavior. (3) Mediating effect of work-family conflict is significant. (4) Family-supportive policies moderate the relationship between Abusive supervision and work-family conflict. The findings highly support the hypothesis I made, and also testify some researcher¡¦s suggestions. Further from this research, I also offer some suggestions for management and practice to the issue and following related research.

While recent publications indicate that employees in human service professions have higher risk of sickness absence and mental ill-health, little is known about the association with other health outcomes and possible mechanisms behind the differential risk. This study investigates differences in burnout, self-rated health and sickness absence between those in human service professions and other professions and examines whether differences in psychosocial and organizational work environment can explain possible variations. Data were derived from the Swedish Longitudinal Occupational Survey of Health (SLOSH), an approximately representative sample of the Swedish working population (n=4486). Results from binary logistic regressions suggested that those in human service professions had higher odds of burnout and sickness absence those in other professions. Differences in burnout were explained by background variables while differences in sickness absence were explained by psychosocial and organizational work factors. Employees in human service professions had lower odds of suboptimal self-rated health than others in the fully adjusted model. Women were at higher risk of burnout, sickness absence, and all adverse psychosocial and organizational work environment factors except social support. Future studies should investigate the most crucial psychosocial and organizational work factors in human service professions with the objective to improve employee health.

Intresset för att genomföra studien väcktes under hösten 2017 när rörelsen #metoo spred sig på sociala medier och ett stort antal individer vittnade om deras utsatthet av sexuella trakasserier på sina arbetsplatser. Rörelsen intygar att trakasserier av sexuell karaktär förekommer i ett flertal branscher, där vårt intresse väcktes att undersöka sjuksköterskors erfarenheter av sexuella trakasserier. Tidigare genomförda studier som utgör den forskningsfront som föreligger har ett fokus på individen och de individuella konsekvenser som sexuellt ofredande medför. Den kunskapslucka som identifierades var hur organisationer påverkas av förekomsten av sexuella trakasserier likväl hur de kan bedriva ett förebyggande och åtgärdande arbete kring frågan. Studiens syfte är därför att belysa förekomsten och de konsekvenser som sexuella trakasserier medför. Ett delsyfte är att redogöra för hur organisationen arbetar med frågor rörande sexuellt ofredande. Teorier som redogör för definitionen av begreppet sexuella trakasserier, hur ofredandet påverkar såväl individen som organisationen, makt, tystnadskultur, organisationskultur och arbetsgivaransvar föreligger för att besvara studiens syfte. Studiens datainsamling bygger på en triangulering där en kvantitativ webbaserad enkät använts liksom kvalitativa semi-strukturerade intervjuer. En avgränsning har gjorts till kvinnliga sjuksköterskor anställda i en organisation i mellersta Sverige. I studiens resultat framkom det att sexuella trakasserier förekommer på arbetsplatsen samt att det råder en tystnadskultur kring ämnet där de tillfrågade medarbetarna saknar kunskap kring var de bör vända sig för att berätta om sina erfarenheter. De anställda visar även stor okunskap kring organisationens policy, handlingsplan samt vilket stöd de är berättigade att få. Resultaten från det insamlade datamaterialet har analyserats med hjälp av den teoretiska referensramen och koncentrerats till fyra huvudområden som även diskuteras. Dessa är problematiska gränsdragningar, tystnadskultur, organisationskultur och organisatoriskt arbete. / The interest in conducting the study was raised in the autumn of 2017 when the #metoo movement spread on social media and a large number of individuals witnessed their vulnerability to sexual harassment at their workplaces. The movement certifies sexual harassment in a number of industries, where our interest was raised to investigate the nurse's experiences of sexual harassment. Past studies that constitute the research front are focused on the individual and the individual consequences of sexual harassment. The knowledge gap that was identified was how organizations are affected by the occurrence of sexual harassment as well as how they can carry out preventive and remedial work on the issue. The purpose of the study is therefore to highlight the occurrence and the consequences of sexual harassment. One purpose is to explain how the organization works with issues related to sexual harassment. To answer the purpose of the study theories describing the definition of the concept of sexual harassment, individual- and organization effects, power, culture of silence, organizational culture and employer responsibility is all brought up. The data collection of the study is based on a triangulation using a quantitative web-based survey as well as qualitative semi-structured interviews. A demarcation has been made to female nurses employed in an organization in central Sweden. The results of the study shows that sexual harassment occurs at the workplace and that there is a culture of silence about the subject where the asked employees do not know where to turn to tell their experiences. Employees also show great unknowledge about the organization's policy, action plan and what support they are entitled to receive. The results of the collected data have been analyzed using the theoretical reference framework and concentrated on four main areas that are also discussed. The main areas are where to drawn boundaries, culture of silence, organizational culture and organizational work.

Married women in the banking and management consulting firms in Nigeria encounter challenges that affect their commitment to their families while working long hours in demanding jobs. This study explores the challenges married women encounter and the impacts they have on women’s family lives, social lives, and health. I analyze primary and secondary sources to understand how organizational work culture such as long working hours, work competitiveness, and Nigeria’s unstable economy negatively affect the work-life balance of married women in banking and management consulting firms. Although participants shared the belief that their workplaces practiced “equality,” their descriptions of daily life activities indicate that women did not enjoy egalitarian conditions at work or at home. This study brings to light the challenges faced by married women and suggests how the Nigerian government can promote gender equality in the workplace through the review and amendment of the Nigerian Labor policy.

The aim of the study was to investigate how hired consultants experience their form of employment and how it affects their work situation. To investigate how the form of employment is experienced and influenced, a qualitative method has been used with semi-structured interviews. A total of six hired consultants were interviewed, collected data were analyzed through a manifest content analysis. The results show that the hired consultants perceive their form of employment as uncertain and insecure because it is dependent on the client company's production. At the same time, the form of employment can contribute to increased work experience due to the varying labor market of work assignments that the staffing company can offer. Factors that the hired consultants highlight that affects the work situation are stress and perceived requirements because they can not control or always affect the distribution of work tasks, workload. Termination periods at the client company by hired consultants create fear and anxiety to lose the work assignment. The conclusion of the study is that the hired consultants feel that the advantages of the form of employment are that it can contribute to increased work experience and that the disadvantages are that it is perceived as insecure and insecure. The factors that affect the organizational work environment are stress, perceived demands, and fear of getting rid of the work assignment. The social work environment was positively affected by support from colleagues and assignment managers. / Syftet med studien var att undersöka hur inhyrda konsulter upplever sin anställningsform samt hur den påverkar deras arbetssituation. För att undersöka hur anställningsformen upplevs och påverkar har en kvalitativ metod använts med semistrukturerade intervjuer. Sammanlagt intervjuades sex inhyrda konsulter och insamlad data analyserades genom en manifest innehållsanalys. Resultatet visar att de inhyrda konsulterna upplever sin anställningsform som osäker och otrygg för att den är beroende av kundföretagets produktion. Samtidigt som anställningsformen kan bidra till ökad arbetslivserfarenhet tack vare den varierande arbetsmarknaden av arbetsuppdrag som bemanningsföretaget kan erbjuda. Faktorer som de inhyrda konsulterna belyser som påverkar arbetssituationen är stress och upplevda krav, för att de inte kan kontrollera eller alltid påverka fördelning av arbetsuppgifter eller arbetsbelastning. Uppsägningsperioder på kundföretaget av inhyrda konsulter skapar en rädsla och oro för att bli av med arbetsuppdraget. Slutsatsen med studien är att de inhyrda konsulterna upplever att fördelarna med anställningsformen är att den kan bidra med ökad arbetslivserfarenhet och att nackdelarna är att den upplevs som otrygg och osäker. De faktorer som påverkar den organisatoriska arbetsmiljön är stress, upplevda krav och rädsla att bli av med arbetsuppdraget. Den sociala arbetsmiljön påverkades positivt genom stöd från kollegor och uppdragschefer.