Completed projects

Digitization of the labor market

Intermediaries, infrastructure, and institutional change

Digital intermediaries have triggered far-reaching transformations in the mediation processes on the labor market: Online job boards (e.g., Monster, Stepstone) make it easier to find jobs, crowdworking platforms (e.g., Upwork, Twago) organize contract relationships for self-employed people, and career networks (e.g., LinkedIn, Xing) open up a wide range of information and contact opportunities. With the participation of traditional intermediaries, especially temporary employment agencies and recruitment firms, they are creating a new infrastructure for both personnel placement and the flexible employment of freelancers and online workers. Research is being conducted into the interactions between the strategies of intermediaries, the modes of operation of the digital infrastructure, and the institutional framework conditions on the labor market. The aim of the project is to take an empirical inventory of this transformation process and to interpret its potential for change from a social analysis perspective.

The empirical basis consists of case studies of intermediaries and development scenarios for digital infrastructure, for which expert interviews and document analyses are conducted using qualitative methods. The theoretical framework is provided by social analytical concepts of platforms and their intermediary functions, which are widely found in the sociology of work, organization, technology, and economics; The final interpretation refers to institutional analytical approaches in labor market research. The focus on mediation processes in the labor market enables fundamental research contributions to the sociology of intermediary organizations, the transformation of the platform economy, and the flexibilization of employment relationships.

The project was funded by the German Research Foundation as part of its priority program "Digitization of Working Life."

EMPOW

Vulnerability and Empowerment: Participatory approaches to health promotion with refugees

The EMPOW project aims to work with refugees at three locations (Berlin, Hanover, Munich) to develop health promotion measures for people with refugee experience. In line with the participatory research approach, refugees are involved as co-researchers and community partners. In addition to the LMU team, social and health care institutions and civil society organizations are also involved as partners.

Theoretical background

The concept of vulnerability plays a central role in public health: it serves to identify groups that require targeted support and special protection. However, in its practical application, the concept has ambivalent effects, as it is used as a "label" that perpetuates unequal power relations and neglects existing heterogeneity within groups, thus contributing to a tendency to underestimate the groups' capacity to act.

The EMPOW project aims to further develop the concept of vulnerability, paying particular attention to the perspectives of refugee groups themselves and their individual and collective agency and empowerment. The project promises to yield insights not only into health-related vulnerability and empowerment processes, but also into forms of "benevolent othering," i.e., well-meaning constructions of refugees as "others" that can shape helping relationships and also research relationships.

The concept of health promotion offers the opportunity to focus on social determinants and improve the mental, physical, and social well-being of refugees in a variety of ways in the settings and

Goals:

• Analyzing everyday communities, health-related needs, and resources of selected groups with refugee experience at three locations in a participatory and community-based manner
• Working together to develop practical health promotion measures for people who have fled their home countries (practice)
• Understanding how vulnerability, othering, and empowerment are experienced by people with refugee backgrounds in relation to their health (theory)

Participatory research

Participatory research means involving the people concerned in the process with decision-making power. The aim is to better understand and change social reality: social participation should be strengthened and social and health disadvantages should be reduced. The community-based participatory research approach focuses on communities. In the EMPOW project, people with refugee experience are involved as co-researchers and community partners: they play a key role in determining the choice of topics, the objectives, the methodological approach, the evaluation, and the development of practical health promotion measures at the three locations. Participatory research methods that are (or can be) used range from art-based methods, community mapping, and photovoice to regular methods of empirical social research.

PH-Lens research group: Refugee migration to Germany: a magnifying glass for broader public health challenges (coordination: Oliver Razum, Bielefeld University)

Locations and partner institutions

• Berlin: Global Empowerment and Development Association (GEDA) e.V. and Projekt Afrikaherz
• Hanover: State Association for Health and Academy for Social Medicine Lower Saxony e.v. (LVG & AFS)
• Munich: Refugio Munich

ZOMiDi

Civil Society Organizations and the Challenges of Migration and Diversity: Agents of Change

The three-year project investigates how and why civil society organizations change in response to migration and societal diversity. Such organizations play a key role in processes of social self organization and participation, and they are indispensable for societal integration in developed democracies. While we now know that migration processes transform host societies, we are also aware of the persistence of institutions and organizations and of the related processes of exclusion and discrimination. This project investigates this tension while focusing on the conditions and actors that further change towards more openness, diversity and participation. A focus is placed on organizations for which difference and participation are constitutive because they represent particular, potentially disadvantaged population groups.

The Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, the Humboldt University of Berlin and the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich are involved in this collaborative project. The sub-project conducted at the Max Planck Institute investigates the Lebenshilfe, as an organization that brings together and represents people with a disability and their families, and the LSVD as an organization from the field of LBGT/sexual identity. The sub-project at the Humboldt University of Berlin investigates Ver.di as an organization of employees and the sub-project at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich studies the Deutsche AIDS-Hilfe as a key organization in the field of health/HIV. The goal is to analyze the extent to which the self-conceptions, interpretations of tasks and target groups as well as the practices of the analyzed organizations change and what accounts for these changes.

Do organizations that focus on differences respond in similar ways to the challenges linked with migration? What ‘best practices’ for organizational change can they offer? The aims of the project are relevant for both academic and applied contexts.

The methodology of the collaborative project includes documentary research, qualitative interviews, focus groups, mapping procedures following situational analysis and participant observation.

Partner institutions

• Bundesverband der Lebenshilfe e.V./ the Federal Association of Life Support, Berlin/Marburg
• Deutsche AIDS-Hilfe e.V. / National association of AIDS Service organisations, Berlin
• Lesben- und Schwulenverband in Deutschland e.V. (LSVD) /Lesbian and Gay Association in Germany (LSVD),Köln
• Vereinte Dienstleistungs-Gewerkschaft (ver.di)/United Service Trade Union (ver.di), Berlin

Changing Categories

Migrants in epidemiological, preventive and legal discourses on HIV and tuberculosis – A discourse analysis comparing Germany and the UK

Since the 1990s there has been an increase in knowledge produced in public health about the health and illness of migrants, particularly regarding communicable infectious diseases. The epidemiological categories and classifications which serve to generate this knowledge have been changing, both in Germany and other European countries. Currently, there are efforts at the European level to make the categories and classifications used for migrant populations and ethnic minorities more comparable.

The aim of this three (3) year research project is to explore these processes from a sociological point of view. We compare the epidemiological categories and public health discourses in Germany and the UK with regard to migrants and two infectious diseases, HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis. The theoretical framework is informed by the sociology of knowledge and discourse analysis. We reconstruct the development, application and change of the categories in their socio-historical context. Furthermore, we explore how the categories might have become incorporated into preventive and legal discourses thus deploying ‘power-effects’ for example in travel, testing and residency regulations or in the definition of prevention target groups. The project makes a contribution to an understanding of the sociality of epidemiological knowledge and its effects. The comparison of actor formations and speaker positions will shed light on the previously unexplored dynamic of changing categories in the health sciences.

The project’s methodological approach is based on the research programme of the sociology of knowledge approach to discourse analysis (SKAD) and integrates elements of grounded theory and situational analysis. It includes document analysis and expert interviews in Germany, the UK and at the EU level.

Completed PhD projects