NWLC 2012 - Report from the Conference in Elsinore, Denmark, April 2012

Abstract

From 25th to 27th of April 2012, the 6th Nordic Working Life Conference took place at LO-skolen in Elsinore, Denmark. LO-skolen, the School of the Danish Confederation of Trade Unions, a beautiful place with a long tradition of educating Danish trade union representatives, shop stewards, and safety reps, located with an excellent sight over the narrow waters between Denmark and Sweden, filled with many inspiring pieces of modern Danish art, and for this occasion around 130 working life researchers, was the perfect spot for this conference. The conference series seems to have a mysterious past as some of the old-timers at the conference came up with competing suggestions for the first couple of conferences, but there was an agreement on that the last conference was in Stavanger thirteen far too long years ago.Perhaps one reason for the long wait has been a general feeling that the Europeanization and globalization of both work and research (publication expectations in particular) might make the Nordic forum less relevant than other forums. However, there seemed to be a widespread recognition at this conference that such conclusions had proven too hasty and inadequate. Nordic researchers still have a lot to exchange and share if they want to make an impact on the international agenda as well.I was asked to summarize and reflect on what I heard at the conference. Based on that I made a presentation at the closing session of the conference - and I write this short report. But I have no intention to adequately summarize the papers and the conference. I haven't read more than a small fraction of the papers and only heard some 20% of the workshop presentations at the conference. What I present here is fairly kaleidoscopical - there are patterns, but I might be the only one that sees this particular version of them; I make no excuse for that.The conference was nicely framed by Lisbeth Pedersen, head of the Research Unit on Employment and Labour Market Issues, at one of the co-organizers of the conference, The Danish National Centre for Social Research. In the Danish case, she pointed at the tension between the solutions suggested by the National Welfare Commission in relation to the impact of the rising of life expectancy and globalization and the recommendations suggested by the Danish Family and Working Life Commission. The former commission was heavily committed to increasing the labor supply, whereas the latter commission primarily wanted the labor market to become more accommodating to the needs of parents with young children. Oh yes, we want to maintain our welfare state provisions, but to what extent is that possible?The first question that did attract attention is the Nordicness of our field and research: In what respect are working life different in the Nordic countries compared with other countries, how do we grasp the differences, and to what extent are the features under pressure (as suggested by the subtitle of the conference: Nordic Working Life and Research under pressure) and with what consequences?That the Nordic countries are special was acknowledge by many speakers. Torsten Bjorkman, the Swedish keynote speaker, suggested that there is an abundance of European work-related statistics that put the Nordic countries (and often the Netherlands, too) at one end of the scale. A paper by Armi Mustosmaki and colleagues showed this in relation to job quality. And all the other keynote speakers had points in their presentations to the same effect: We are special!What then is the foundation of this distinctiveness? This question had less prominence, but I would still like to point out a couple of presentations that due to their historical angle touched upon this question. First there was Hansen, Carlsson, and Skorstad, who compared the paper mill of the fifties, which was the empirical foundation of Sverre Lysgaard's (in the Nordic countries) famous study of arbeiderkollektivet, the workers collective, with the same paper mill in the new millennium. …