Spanning 2021-2023, NIKK was administering a research initiative on sexual harassment in the workplace on behalf of the Nordic Council of Ministers. The initiative was especially focused on prevention and methods for intervention through industry studies and comparative studies of different industries. Two calls for research funding were made during 2021.
Violence, harassment and other forms of vulnerability in the workplace are major societal challenges with serious consequences for individuals and workplace organisations. But there are major gaps in our knowledge about methods for preventing and stopping violence and harassment, protecting victims and being proactive in workplace environments. Research and evidence-based knowledge is essential to be able to develop new and effective measures to combat sexual harassment in the workplace.
With this background, the Nordic Council of Ministers decided on a cross-sectoral research initiative jointly with several sectors within the Nordic cooperation. These collaborative sectors were gender equality, culture, working life and the Nordic Committee for Children and Young People.
2021 The Power Plays project seeked to break the silencing of sexual harassment in workplaces of care, by promoting workplace cultures prone to actively prevent and deal with sexual harassment. First, the Power Plays project developed a typology of existing sexual harassment prevention tools accompanied by guidelines for how to choose the right prevention strategy. Second,
2021 This interdisciplinary project took an intersectional approach to address concerns about the lack of prevention and intervention strategies within the tourism and hospitality sectors in the Nordic countries. The project utilised practice-based research activities in collaboration with working life actors in Iceland, Norway and Sweden to try and answer three research questions: Through close examination
2021 Responding to the call for prevention efforts being more aware of “intersecting stigmatized identities” which make some employees more vulnerable to sexual harassment than others, the SUSH project was positioned in the ethical infrastructure tradition and targets bystanders, whose actions may affect sexual harassment situations positively or negatively. The main aim of the SUSH project
2021 Following standardized methods for questionnaire development, this project developed and validated a questionnaire to assess sexual harassment in a standardized manner, across the Nordic countries of Denmark, Norway and Sweden. The Danish questionnaire Inventory of Workplace Sexual Harassment (IWS) was translated into Norwegian and Swedish. Using these Norwegian and Swedish versions of the questionnaire, survey
2021 This project aimed to carry out a critical analysis of how Nordic ideals regarding management and organisation impact the work environment of employees within service and retail. The project had a particular focus on ideals concerning customer orientation, often perceived as “natural” and self-evident to Nordic service organisational practice. The project analysed the consequences of
