Research Programme

Research Programme

The Research Training Group (RTG) 2951 investigates cross-border labour markets with a particular focus on the transnational market makers, infrastructures and institutions that enable their emergence, operation, and consolidation. We conceive of cross-border labour markets not as an abstract principle, but as concrete empirical phenomena with specific histories, infrastructures and embedding institutions. Cross-border labour markets as a phenomenon sui generis constitute a major research gap. The RTG addresses this gap through systematic empirical enquiry and reconstructions of particular cross-border labour markets under a common conceptual framework and a shared research heuristic. 

The RTG research programme extends labour market research, still firmly rooted in national research designs, to a transnational scale. Hence, research undertaken in the RTG moves decisively beyond paradigms that either focus purely on national labour markets or conceive of labour migration dynamics simply in terms of immigration into and/or emigration from national labour markets. 

The RTG draws, for theoretical purposes, on the new sociology of markets to synthesize knowledge in three disciplinary fields that have largely theorized labour markets and migration in parallel without systematic interaction: the sociology of labour markets, labour economics and migration studies. Given the market-sociological approach, the particular focus of the RTG is on investigating the social constitution of cross-border labour markets, i.e. the question of what makes it possible for cross-border labour markets to emerge, operate and be consolidated. We share the main premise of the sociology of markets ‘that markets are highly presuppositional arenas of social interaction in which actors are confronted with profound coordination problems’ (Beckert 2009: 246). The main research questions, then, to be scrutinized are: 

What are the constitutive prerequisites or ‘enablers’ of cross-border labour markets? 

• How do actors draw upon these ‘enablers’ to enact, fashion and consolidate cross-border labour markets?

Within the RTG research programme, three types of ‘enablers’ are considered: 

1. Transnational market makers: What kind of (collective) actors contribute to the social constitution, operation and consolidation of cross-border labour markets, and how? 

E.g.:

• Migrants and their families and networks
• Nation states (sending and destination states)
• Polities above and below the nation state
• Employers and other private actors
• Intermediaries

2. Transnational market infrastructures: What kinds of physical and social infrastructure enable the emergence of cross-border labour markets? 

E.g.:

• Networks, practices, channels, contracts, implicit agreements
• Communication, transportation, platforms, money lending and transfers
• Material and physical supports

3. Transnational market institutions: Which institutions govern cross-border labour markets and how do they contribute to their social constitution? 

E.g.:

• Rules, norms and shared understandings that emerge as binding for actors and practices across territorial jurisdictions
• Multiple scales and types of institution-building involving different sets of institutional actors
• Regulations set by policy makers of different kinds (nation states, supra national polities and organizations, trade unions) and at different scales