Susanne Urban

This project is part of a larger project analyzing the implications of school choice reforms, school choice and its long-term consequences for individuals' social mobility in Sweden in general, with a particular focus on three medium-sized Swedish cities; Örebro, Norrköping and Jönköping. The project as a whole examines the general political context and implementation of school choice reforms at the local level, the experience of school choice at the individual level and the long term consequences for young people's future educational and professional careers. This particular part of the project examines the implementation of the school choice reform at the local level, through interviews with politicians and officials, and analysis of policy documents at the national and local levels. Overall, the project offers new knowledge about whether school choice reform has led to increased freedom of choice, and the long-term effects of school choice reforms for individuals' social mobility.

The aim of this project is to critically review the actual concepts on informal economy, and its relation to structural changes of the labour market, and migration. The project also has an ambition to highlight the borderline between formal and informal economy, and to develop a theoretical framework, suitable for empirical research on informal economy in its relation to the re-commodification of labour and migration.

The project analyses how changes in policies and regulations affect conditions and opportunities for small business development in different industries over time, and how self-employed persons act in response to changes in opportunity structures. We study strategies of growth and survival within specific industries and markets, but also transitions of self-employment across industries and types of markets. The project will contribute new knowledge through a systematic and coherent longitudinal and spatial investigation of the dynamics of self-employment among immigrants in Sweden. The project systematically applies and develops instruments from recent international research on ethnic minority businesses (EMB). Theory in the field is developed through the integration of entrepreneurship theory and new theoretical contributions from EMB research. Theoretical perspectives on strategies and self-employed as actors is combined with theory on opportunity structures (the framework of ?mixed embeddedness?). Methodologically, the approach implies coordinated analyses of different dimensions on different levels, using a combination of policy studies, case studies and quantitative analyses.

The project surveys, in international comparative perspective, changing welfare states and the transformation of their multiethnic societies through two complementary analytical lenses: on the one hand, the welfare state's capacity for accommodating migration and ethnic diversity through policies of border control and the allocation of rights of citizenship and, on the other hand, migration and ethnic diversity as a dynamic factor for change in the economic, political and cultural foundations of welfare states. It focuses on changing ethnic divisions of labour related to processes of social inclusion/exclusion and politics of European integration.

Studies of neighbourhood effects, school effects, ethnic networks, and other kinds of social contacts have shown that social environments and networks influence establishment and career in the labour market in different ways and, hence, may explain why newly arrived immigrants frequently face difficulty in becoming established in the labour market. The purpose of this project is to study the comparative importance of different kinds of social relations. Several types of social contexts are studied and put in contrast to each other; neighbourhoods, schools, workplaces, national and transnational ethnic networks, as well as formal competence and the situation in the labour market. Hence, the project takes into account both the characteristics of the individual and the opportunities and constraints of the context.

Tänk Om consists of four local labour market projects that are being developed in Norrköping and Linköping. Susanne Urban have in collaboration with Centrum för kommunstrategiska studier, CKS, been given the assignment to evaluate the project. The general aim of the project is to contribute to local development and to develope methods to assist long term unemployed to get into the labour market. The project is a three year long local development project in selected districts of the municipalities and is funded by European Social Fund for activity in the years 2008-2011.

The project illuminates, with Stockholm as a case study in a national and international perspective, how institutional changes and reforms of compulsory and upper-secondary schools affect the social inclusion/exclusion of young people with immigrant backgrounds; their careers and experiences of education and employment in segregated metropolitan environments. Special attention is paid to local cooperation involving the family, ethnic associations, and local educational institutions. The overall research question concerns the impact of education, work and civic agency on social inclusion and full citizenship in multi-ethnic society. Reforms in the system of education and changes on the labour market are related to local community development in order to elucidate the interplay between structural and institutional change, civic agency and individual social mobility.