WP1 – Regional industrial mix, specialization and un-/ under-employment in Greece
Leader: UoA – Participants: UoP, Work Research Institute Norway.
The aim of the WP is to identify the role of different industrial compositions and specialisation in unemployment and underemployment patterns across the regions of Greece. Underemployment is identified in non-voluntary part-time work, a form of expanding atypical employment, which is related to the intensifying precariousness of the Greek labour market under crisis. In this way: (i) an analytical framework will be formed, allowing for identifying the interfaces between diverse regional patterns of unemployment and underemployment and production restructuring processes, and (ii) the study of unemployment and underutilization of labour force in selected Greek localities (i.e. Sparta, Tripoli, Rhodes and Kastoria) performed in WP2, will be both theoretically informed and integrated within its regional setting. The following Tasks will be executed in the frame of WP1.
Subproject 1.2: Announcement of research results to international conference with title Regional industrial mix, specialization and un-/ under-employment across Greek regions: estimating the harsh impact of austerity based on location quotient analysis
Subproject 1.3: Article submitted to Scientific journal Going under-employed’; Industrial and regional effects, specialization and part-time work across recession-hit Greek regions
WP2 – Local production structures, Entrepreneurship and Labour Surplus
Lead Partner: UoP – Participants: UoA, IME
The aim of the WP is to identify the conjunction of economic structures and un/underemployment patterns and its consequences at the local level. This is a two-way process, as both ‘components’ interact with each other. WP3 will identify the interface and incompatibility between: (a) existing local entrepreneurship patterns and (b) locally embedded human resources, which are hit by the crisis or remain unexploited. To this purpose, the research will focus on the 4 target localities. WP2 will build upon the framework developed in WP1 to analyze how different economic structures and production specialization define the patters of unemployment and underemployment in local labour markets. The results will provide feedback to WP3, indicating potential directions and ways integrating the local labour force in sustainable economic recovery.
Subproject 2.2: Article submitted to international conference with title Regional resilience to crisis in Greece: exploring demand and supply mismatch in local labor markets
WP3 – Participatory Action Research
Lead Partner: UoP, Participants: Work Research Institute Norway
The aim of the WP3 is to empower the unemployed themselves and other interested social actors / stakeholders to transform, through reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action, the results produced by the previous WPs, in order to address effectively the problem of underutilization of the un-/under-employed at their locality. Furthermore, the WP3, will initiate an iterative reflective cycle (data collection, reflection, action, data collection….) in the selected localities, where participants will collect and analyse data, then determine what action should follow which is then further researched and the participants eventually become researchers themselves. The WP3 will be implemented in 2 out of the 4 target localities, namely Sparta and Tripoli (where the leader organisation, UoP, maintains its seat). The most important reason for the focus on these two towns is that UoP has already worked closely with social actors in both localities over the last 3 years, through the research project Policy Workshop. Thus, WP3 will build on this work and the existing relationships of trust and cooperation, a key element for this participatory methodological approach which considers participants (subjects) as co-researchers, on an equal footing with researchers.
Subproject 3.1: Article submitted to international conference with title Αddressing un/under-employment at the local level: Participatory action research in Greece of crisis
Subproject 3.2: Article submitted to Scientific journal with evaluation H. Svare & E. Vathakou, Field Configuring Events and Action Research: A case study from Sparta, International Journal of Action Research, (revised and resubmitted),
http://www.hampp-verlag.de/hampp_e-journals_IJAR.htm
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