Skip to main content
Warning: Undefined array key 1 in /home/nikkhems/public_html/wp-includes/functions.php on line 1182

Customer Sexual Harassments in the Nordic Service Workplace

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 prioritising the customer, for example how this leads to problematic power relationships between customer and employee.

The project has developed knowledge about if a customer-focused organisation can generate an unequal work environment, by upholding power and gender structures. And if these structures in turn provide an arena for violence and sexual harassment of service and retail employees. 

NORA Conference 2019

The 2019 NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research – conference on critical feminist cross-disciplinary research and activities relying on contemporary and/or historical perspectives was held at the University of Iceland, 22-24 May.

It focused on the theme of material and symbolic borders in a period of nationalist revival. What explains the return to territoriality? What kind of political, cultural, and social boundaries are being constructed or reproduced? How are border regimes in the present and the past shaping and gendering relations? How are new or redefined boundaries affecting work for social justice and equality as well as intersectional, gender, queer and feminist research? And how can feminist resistance be organized against paternalistic modes that reinstate and reinforce relations of inequality?

The conference was co-hosted by RIKK – Institute for Gender, Equality and Difference, the EDDA Research Center and the United Nations University Gender Studies and Training Programme at the University of Iceland.

NORA conference: Voices in Nordic gender research

NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research – is a scholarly journal focusing on Nordic gender research. When the Roskilde and Aalborg Universities held the editorship of the publication, which is published in English, they applied for funding to host a conference in Roskilde in November 2014. The purpose of the conference was to enable Nordic researchers and others with an interest in gender research to share the latest studies and findings with each other. The conference yielded eight keynote lectures and a large number of papers on or related to Nordic gender research within a broad spectrum of theoretical and empirical subject areas: gender equality and the welfare state, knowledge and concepts related to body and embodied experiences, feminist strategies, sexuality, normativity and identity politics.

The conference contributed to increased knowledge about NORA and strengthened the ties among Nordic researchers and research environments. It was also decided that a Nordic gender research conference will be arranged every three years. The planning of the 2017 event began already at the end of the conference.

Updated 21 November 2019