Work Places in the Health Care Sector: Gender, Class, Ethnicity

The starting point for this project was the growing recruitment of immigrants to the Norwegian health care sector.

In Norway, as in other rich countries, an increasing need for health care personnel led to a growing recruitment of immigrants to this sector. Little research on the significance of the multicultural aspect of the workplace and labour market had been done. The foci of the project were organisation and recruitment on the one hand and interaction and communication at work on the other, as well as on the interrelations between these levels.

Through qualitative studies and fieldwork in two different institutions in (a hospital and a nursing home), the aim was to gain insights into how ethnicity interacts with existing professional and genderised hierarchies.

The relevant contexts for analysis were migration and new economic management, both related to globalisation. Theoretically, the study drew on the sociology of professions and of work, on theories of gender and feminism, and on the anthropology of ethnicity and migration.