Grenzüberschreitende Arbeitnehmerüberlassung. Die Konstitutierung von Märkten und transnationaler Regulierung im interregionalen Vergleich
Final Report Abstract
The research developed a cross-border perspective on the sociology of labour markets, and a comparative inter-regional analysis of transnational market-making in two world regions – Europe and the Asia Pacific. Transnational labour markets are defined as exchanges of labour which are undertaken between and across a country of labor origin and a country of destination, typically through state sponsored outmigration policies linked to host country immigration controls for specific jobs and sectors. The theoretical work in the project involved developing a more explicitly sociological theory of cross-border labour markets, building on the new sociology of markets, specifying the coordination problems inherent to market exchanges of labour power, and extending this to conceptualize and study the coordination problems of cross-border labour markets. On this basis a theory of the social order of migration markets was developed, which explains the strong role played by private intermediaries in the form of recruitment brokers and staffing firms in the operation of cross-border labour exchanges. The empirical work demonstrated that intermediaries were not, as often assumed, only involved in the recruitment and placement of staff, but strongly involved in coordinating dimensions of commodification, competition and control of cross-border labour. The fact that intermediaries are profit-oriented market actors however, limits their interests in finding market solutions which address the risks faced by crossborder labourers. Cross-border labour markets continue to confront considerable uncertainties. The research design took specific corridors of cross-border labour exchange as the unit of analysis, and explored the practices through which labour was recruited, contracted, controlled and eventually returned to countries of origin. The transnational comparison confirmed the original hypotheses of deliberate market-making in the European regulatory context, and more diffused forms of cross-border institution-building in East and Southeast Asia. Despite the different directions (top-down and horizontal), very similar practices of labour exchange were found in both regions, where a shift became evident from direct and triangular labour contracts, to hidden and indirect forms of intermediated cross-border labour exchange. While the focus was on medium skilled fields of labour, several collaborations with international researchers allowed an extension of the analysis to low wage and student migrations. These analyses found cross-regional similarities in the evasion of labour standards in low wage, and new lines of segmenting skilled migrant labour in destination countries. Intermediation, not only of recruitment, but also of employment became well established in low skilled fields of work in major destination countries in both regions, enabled by changes in immigration controls in Japan, and the impact of the expansion of the EU on mobility to Germany. Published results included contributions to a theory of cross-border labour markets and modes of transnational regulation. During the research period, a new cooperation was developed with the research group In Search of Global Labour at the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies (ZiF, Univ. Bielefeld), together with which research results were presented at a mini-conference of the annual meetings of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics in 2018 in Kyoto.
Publications
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(2020) The social order of transnational migration markets. Global Networks 20 (3) 434–453
Shire, Karen
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2018: Private Labour Market Intermediaries in Cross-Border Labour Markets in Europe and Asia: International Norms, Regional Actors and Patterns of Cross-Border Labour Mobility. In: Quack, Sigrid, Ingo Schulz-Schaeffer, Karen Shire and Anja Weiss (Eds.) Transnationale Arbeit. Wiesbaden: Springer VS, pp. 155-183
Shire, Karen, Steffen Heinrich, Jun Imai, Hannelore Mottweiler, Markus Tünte and Chih-Chieh Wang
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2018: Transnationalisierung der Arbeit (The Transnationalisation of Work). Wiesbaden: Springer VS Verlag
Quack, Sigrid, Schulz-Schäffer, Ingo, Shire, Karen and Weiß, Anja (eds.)
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Labour Subcontracting in Cross-Border Labour Markets: A Comparison of Rule Evasion in Germany and Japan. In: Posted Work in the European Union: The Political Economy of Free Movement,' edited by in Nathan Lillie and Jens Arnholz. Routledge (2019). S. 185–
Wagner, Ines and Shire, Karen
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Transnational research in Japan Studies—an oxymoron? Studying cross-border labour mobility in globalising Japanese production organisations. In: Studying Japan: Research Design, Field Work and Methods, edited by Cornelia Reiher and Nora Kottmann. Baden-Ba
Shire, Karen
