Rasmus Ahlstrand

Main research areas

• Sociology of work and labour studies
• Work organisation, labour process, migrant labour, precarious work
• Qualitative methods

Current research and teaching

My current research focuses on informal and precarious work among builders, cleaners, and food-delivery workers in the Swedish labour market. Together with colleagues at the Universities of Helsinki, Bergen and Stockholm, I am part of the interdisciplinary project ‘Tackling precarious and informal work in the Nordic countries (PrecaNord)’ that aims to analyse insecure and precarious work in Finland, Norway, and Sweden.

In my previous research, I studied new forms of work organisation in the Swedish building sector. In my dissertation, I show that the sector is undergoing a structural transformation as large parts of production are externalised and both major and minor firms rely heavily on subcontractors.  I demonstrated how the increased use of subcontractors and not least the growing access to foreign labour through the EU-labour market allows firms to not only shift costs and employer responsibilities towards subcontractors, but also how it reveals tensions and contradictions in the labour process – inherent in the changing character of contemporary construction work.

I have teaching experience from a variety of courses on the undergraduate level and I have supervised both bachelor- and master theses. I am currently involved primarily in the Human Resource programmes on both undergraduate and graduate level.