Jonas Toubøl | University of Copenhagen (original) (raw)

Journal articles by Jonas Toubøl

Public Opinion Quarterly, 2021

This article demonstrates the utility of combining individual survey data with social media conte... more This article demonstrates the utility of combining individual survey data with social media content data in order to analyze how social context predicts individual behavior. The lack of valid and reliable measures of the contexts of social interaction in which individuals are embedded has remained an Achilles heel of the survey method. The reason is that the collection of direct observation of social interaction requires qualitative analysis of the context, which, hitherto, has been too costly to collect on a large scale. Instead, researchers have resorted to indirect measures such as aggregate group composition, respondent reports of social context and institutional accounts. However, with the recent advent of social media data, contemporary social scientists now have social interaction data on an unprecedented scale. To utilize these data for quantitative analysis researchers have to transform text prose into good measurement. We combine qualitative content analysis and supervised machine learning in order to ensure both semantic validity and accuracy in our measure of social interaction in Facebook groups. To test the substantive performance of the direct measures of social interaction we use it to predict individual participation in refugee solidarity activism in Denmark. Additional testing indicates that the direct measure cannot easily be replaced by indirect measures of social interaction derived from group composition and institutional accounts. We also show how contexts and individual respondents can be effectively sampled using Facebook groups. Lastly, the article discusses the limitations of social media data and points to alternate settings where our design is applicable.

Public Management Review, 2022

This paper explores how other-oriented motivations: Sense of Community Responsibility (SOC-R) and... more This paper explores how other-oriented motivations: Sense of Community Responsibility (SOC-R) and Public Service Motivation (PSM) relate to voluntary support during the Covid-19 crisis. Drawing on original panel survey data, collected spring 2020, it compares SOC-R and PSM for civic participation. The study reveals that while both forms of motivations relate to voluntary support, PSM remains stable over time while SOC-R varies. Furthermore, SOC-R develops differently over time for those who engage in voluntary support and those who do not. Such heterogeneity is not observed for PSM. Based on these findings, the paper discusses SOC-R’s contribution to public service resilience.

The Sociologial Review, 2022

This paper contributes to the sociology of care-relational justice by identifying, conceptualisin... more This paper contributes to the sociology of care-relational justice by identifying, conceptualising and unpacking 'imposed volunteering' as one mechanism that shape societal caring arrangements. Contemporary societies allocate care work disproportionally to women, ethnic minorities and working-class citizens, which exacerbates social inequalities. Distribution of caring responsibilities is a political question but often not recognised as such, because it is deeply immersed in everyday routines. Our study uses the context of the COVID-19 pandemic to dissect the distribution mechanisms that became unusually palpable when the lockdown of public welfare provision in Denmark relocated some forms of care work from professionals to volunteers. With the term imposed volunteering, we conceptualise the feeling of being coerced into taking on new caring responsibilities, which some womenand menexperienced during the lockdown. Drawing on a national, representative survey, we document that, compared to men, women carried out significantly more voluntary care work and organised voluntary work through informal personal networks rather than through formal civil society organisations to a significantly higher degree. We unpack the experience of imposed volunteering as it unfolded during the lockdown through qualitative case studies, and clarify how relational and institutional factors, such as gendered expectations and the sense of personal obligation, imposed volunteering. Our study illuminates the importance of public care, reciprocal caring relationships and care for carers, and demonstrates why the mobilisation of care work volunteers must take gendered implications into account if it is to be consistent with democratic commitments to justice, equality and freedom for all.

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 2020

In this paper, we supplement existing scholarship on the interactional process within volunteerin... more In this paper, we supplement existing scholarship on the interactional process within volunteering with one that focuses on how inequality between volunteer and recipient of help is handled and (re)produced through interactions within voluntary groups. We focus on how empowerment projects with different interactional styles produce different forms of (in)equality on an interactional level despite dealing with very similar structural inequalities. We define interactional inequality as taking place along four dimensions: role distribution, framing rights, competencies, and sacrifice. Drawing on two different empowerment projects in the refugee solidarity movement in Denmark, we show how these dimensions of inequalities play out in the interaction between volunteers and refugees. We identify two strategies for overcoming the initial inequality between refugee and volunteer, one based on mutuality and another based on collectivity. Lastly, we show how these strategies produce interactional inequalities of their own.

European Societies, 2020

This paper unfolds how informal civil society quickly mobilised citizen-to-citizen support when g... more This paper unfolds how informal civil society quickly mobilised citizen-to-citizen support when government and non-government organisations locked down during the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper focuses on two elements of the mobilisation: the role of social networks and social media groups. It reveals that the vast majority of this support was distributed through existing social networks and, therefore, not available to those lacking social connections. However, we also find that social media groups played an important role in the mobilisation, that support organised on social media does not diverge significantly in commitment or kind from support organised in other settings. The paper concludes by discussing the potential of social media to mitigate the impact of social networks on the distribution of support, pointing to some of the potential barriers to social media groups' successful facilitation of support to those without a social network.

Social Forces, 2020

This article proposes a theory of how interaction in groups influences differential participation... more This article proposes a theory of how interaction in groups influences differential participation in political activism and interrogates this theory through an empirical analysis of online Facebook group interaction. We study the refugee solidarity movement in a mixed methods design employing online ethnography, survey, and "big" social media data. Instead of conceptualizing the group as a social network or social movement organization (SMO), we argue that the group's culture emerges as patterns of interaction that have implications for what kind of activities in which group members participate. Based on observations from our online ethnography, we suggest that group interaction influences differential individual participation through processes of 1) encoding different habits and 2) attuning the activist to different aspects of situations. We support our theoretical propositions with six statistical tests of the relationship between the group-level variable of contentious group style and the individual-level variable of participation in political protest. The dependent variable, political protest, and a comprehensive set of controls stem from an original survey of the Danish refugee solidarity movement with 2,283 respondents. We link the survey data with "big" social media data used to estimate the focal explanatory variable, contentious group style, generated from content analysis of online interaction in 119 Facebook groups quantified with supervised machine learning. The results show that group style has a consistently positive relationship with the individual's degree of participation independent of networks, SMO framing, and individual attributes. for their valuable comments along the way. Funding: Jonas Toubøl's research for this paper was supported by the Carlsberg Foundation as part of the project entitled Mobilization in the era of social media: Introducing the decisive role of group level factors (grant number CF17-0199).

Sociological Forum, 2020

Acting in solidarity with disadvantaged others has become a central topic in social movement rese... more Acting in solidarity with disadvantaged others has become a central topic in social movement research. The explanations of solidarity activism are few, but social movement researchers have claimed that solidarity with out-of-group others is a by-product of in-group interaction. Based on studies of the Danish refugee solidarity movement, we argue that interaction with the deprived other and the formation of a solidary relationship is central to the ebb and flow of solidarity activism. The meeting with the deprived other 1) brings about an interaction order which makes an ethical demand on the activists to care for the other both within the bounds of the situations and in the future and 2) enacts and amplifies activists' values and beliefs because the deprived other becomes an exemplar of the injustice and the need to help the wider group of people in the same fragile situation. We develop and test this theory drawing on both 42 life-history interviews and a social media dataset containing a panel of 87,455 activists participating in refugee solidarity groups.

Mobilization: An International Quarterly, 2019

This article presents a quantitative study of differential participation in low- and high-risk ac... more This article presents a quantitative study of differential participation in low- and high-risk activism in the Danish refugee solidarity movement. Distinguishing between low- and high-risk activism, it shows the fruitfulness of combining what are often considered competing theoretical explanations related to (1) values, (2) microstructures, and (3) emotions. We analyze data from a unique survey of 1,856 respondents recruited via Facebook. The results show that low- and high-risk participation strongly correlate but are influenced by different factors. For low-risk activities, the most important factors are emotional reactions, structural availability, and predispositions in the form of basic human values. For high-risk activity, the important factors are prior history of activism and emotional reaction. Values, microstructures, and emotions interact in relation to participation in both kinds of activism, which points to promising avenues for integrating and developing the theoretical framework of differential participation and recruitment.

British Journal of Sociology, 2019

Adding to the literature on non-institutional political action and trust, this article... more Adding to the literature on non-institutional political action and trust, this article argues that the loss of institutional trust is not only a cause but also an outcome of political activism. Studying the Danish refugee solidarity movement in a mixed-methods research design including survey and qualitative interview data, the article shows that three kinds of activism – political activism, humanitarian activity, and civil disobedience – relate differently to the loss of trust in the institutions of the Parliament, the legal system, and the police. Political activism primarily affects a loss of trust in the Parliament due to low external efficacy and a closed political opportunity structure. Civil disobedience affects a loss of trust in the legal system and the police due to a perceived lack of procedural justice. Humanitarian activity does not affect a loss of institutional trust because it does not imply interaction with the institutions to the same extent as the other kinds of activism. The consequence of losing trust in the political institutions is not an abandonment of democratic values, nor political apathy, but rather a change in civic engagement from a mode of democratically legitimizing participation in the institutions to a mode of contending and ques-tioning the legitimacy of the political institutions. This finding indicates that in turn loss of institutional trust may cause an increase in extra-institutional political action which is consistent with the commonly assumed causality in the literature. This leads to a final integrating argument for conceptualizing activism and loss of institutional trust as reinforcing factors in a process where, in line with the main finding of this study, activism may cause a loss of institutional trust which, in turn, may cause additional activism, as argued in the existing literature.

Sociology, 2017

This article develops a new explorative method for deriving social class categories from patterns... more This article develops a new explorative method for deriving social class categories from patterns of occupational mobility. In line with Max Weber, our research is based on the notion that, if class boundaries do not inhibit social mobility then the class categories are of little value. Thus, unlike dominant, theoretically defined class schemes, this paper derives social class categories from observed patterns in a mobility network covering intra-generational mobility. The network is based on a mobility table of 109 occupational categories tied together by 1,590,834 job shifts on the Danish labour market 2001-07. The number of categories are reduced from 109 to 34 by applying a new clustering algorithm specifically designed for the study of mobility tables (MONECA). These intra-generational social class categories are related to the central discussions of gender, income, education, and political action by providing empirical evidence of strong patterns of intra-generational class divisions along these lines.

European Sociological Review, 2017

In this article, we investigate the effect of social customs on one of the most important instanc... more In this article, we investigate the effect of social customs on one of the most important instances of collective action, namely, workers uniting in trade unions. Although many studies have used social custom theory to explain unionization, existing studies have not adequately analysed social customs at the workplace. Using workplace union density as a proxy for social custom, this analysis improves existing studies in a number of ways. First, multi-level analyses of a large panel data set from Denmark reveal that there is a significant positive effect of workplace union density on the probability that new employees join unions. Secondly, using nonparametric regression, we find that the functional form of the relationship between the two variables is accelerating. These results hold for various subsamples. The accelerating functional form indicates that large initial investments in unionization are required to create self-sustaining social customs for union membership. Thirdly, we test the acceleration using segmented regression analysis and find a significant acceleration around 45–65 per cent workplace union density. In the conclusion, we discuss the implications of our study for unionization strategies and for research on unionization.

Skitse af flygtningesolidaritetsbevægelsens historie og organisering - og diskussion af bevægelse... more Skitse af flygtningesolidaritetsbevægelsens historie og organisering - og diskussion af bevægelsens bredde med hensyn til de aktives værdier og baggrunde

Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research, 2014

Against the background of the general decline in union membership in Western countries, this stud... more Against the background of the general decline in union membership in Western countries, this study analyses factors influencing an individual's choice whether to join a trade union. The focus is on the effects of workplace union density and individual political attitudes. Micro data covering the entire Danish workforce combined with European Social Survey data enable for the first time the statistical analysis of the effect workplace union density has on union recruitment. Workplace union density is used to measure the power of social custom in workplace union membership, constituting an instrumental motive for joining the union. Self-placement on a political left-right scale measures political attitude which is assumed to constitute a value-rational motive. The statistical results indicate that workplace union density is the main predictor of whether or not an employee is going to join a union, even when other variables such as gender, occupation and industry worked in are taken into consideration. In addition, the results indicate that political attitude is also an important factor. 2 Résumé Dans le contexte du déclin général de l'affiliation syndicale dans les pays

THE FAILED CAMPAIGN FOR ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY AS A FACTOR IN THE POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE LABOUR... more THE FAILED CAMPAIGN FOR ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY AS A FACTOR IN THE POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE LABOUR MOVEMENTThe campaign for Economic Democracy (ED) running from 1973 to 1986 was the Danish labour movement’s most extensive campaign after World War II. It was also relatively radical as it called for a transfer of large parts of the economy from private to collective ownership placed under the workers’ democratic control through their trade unions.In the campaign material, ED was framed in relation to the two major components of Danish social democratic ideology, namely, democracy and socialism. The campaign was relative successful in targeting the wage earners by framing ED as both a realisation of these two major goals of the labour movement as well as being a practical and efficient answer to unemployment, low wages, lack of influence on workplace policies etc.Despite the relative success of the campaign, ED was never turned into law and was de facto abandoned in the 1980s. Thus, the ED campaign – running for more than a decade, including the distribution of campaign materials counted by the 100,000’s as well as massive agitation and grass root activity – turned out to be a futile endeavour. In this perspective, it seems reasonable to hypothesize that as a consequence of the failure of the ED program the ideas of democracy and socialism suffered a defeat as well: on the one hand a loss of centrality in the ideology of the labour movement, and on the other hand a loss of credibility in the general public. Thus, it might be the case that the failure of the ED-program have been one among several causes which brought about the rather abrupt ideological shift from socialism and collectivism to an ideological turn towards social-liberal and individualistic ideas in the labour movement, in the late 1980s and 1990s.

Book chapters by Jonas Toubøl

Dissertations by Jonas Toubøl

This dissertation is the first major academic analysis of the Danish refugee solidarity movement ... more This dissertation is the first major academic analysis of the Danish refugee solidarity movement that mobilized more than 100,000 citizens in the fall 2015 when the European refugee crisis reached Denmark. The dissertation makes four main contribution to the two questions of differential recruitment—what accounts for activists’ involvement in different activities—and the question of social movement outcome in the form of changes to the activists’ political perceptions. First, it argues that in solidarity activism an ethical demand to care for the unfortunate is a central driver that may lead to involvement in high-risk activism. This ethical demand is mediated by values of altruism. Second, such basic human values are argued to be important for how we react emotionally to major events which, together with effects of network and socialization, influence our propensity to engage in activism of varying risk. Third, values are also expressed in variation between the style group interaction. No matter prior experience with activism, activists in groups with a style that focuses on the immediate compassion and care for the refugees engage to a lesser degree in political protest, than do activists in a group culture that focuses on the political and contentious dimension of the matter. Fourth and finally, for activists engaged in the legal cases of refugees, experiencing an immigration-bureaucracy with little or no care for the human beings behind the dossiers combined with an experience of systematic bias against the refugee, results in a loss of institutional trust. Given the fact that the activists also prior to their involvement in the movement had a high level of participation in democratic civil society, the operation of the institutions causing loss of trust, may pose a unintended threat to Danish democracy by alienating key actors in civil society from the institutionalized political process.

Research reports by Jonas Toubøl

Public Opinion Quarterly, 2021

This article demonstrates the utility of combining individual survey data with social media conte... more This article demonstrates the utility of combining individual survey data with social media content data in order to analyze how social context predicts individual behavior. The lack of valid and reliable measures of the contexts of social interaction in which individuals are embedded has remained an Achilles heel of the survey method. The reason is that the collection of direct observation of social interaction requires qualitative analysis of the context, which, hitherto, has been too costly to collect on a large scale. Instead, researchers have resorted to indirect measures such as aggregate group composition, respondent reports of social context and institutional accounts. However, with the recent advent of social media data, contemporary social scientists now have social interaction data on an unprecedented scale. To utilize these data for quantitative analysis researchers have to transform text prose into good measurement. We combine qualitative content analysis and supervised machine learning in order to ensure both semantic validity and accuracy in our measure of social interaction in Facebook groups. To test the substantive performance of the direct measures of social interaction we use it to predict individual participation in refugee solidarity activism in Denmark. Additional testing indicates that the direct measure cannot easily be replaced by indirect measures of social interaction derived from group composition and institutional accounts. We also show how contexts and individual respondents can be effectively sampled using Facebook groups. Lastly, the article discusses the limitations of social media data and points to alternate settings where our design is applicable.

Public Management Review, 2022

This paper explores how other-oriented motivations: Sense of Community Responsibility (SOC-R) and... more This paper explores how other-oriented motivations: Sense of Community Responsibility (SOC-R) and Public Service Motivation (PSM) relate to voluntary support during the Covid-19 crisis. Drawing on original panel survey data, collected spring 2020, it compares SOC-R and PSM for civic participation. The study reveals that while both forms of motivations relate to voluntary support, PSM remains stable over time while SOC-R varies. Furthermore, SOC-R develops differently over time for those who engage in voluntary support and those who do not. Such heterogeneity is not observed for PSM. Based on these findings, the paper discusses SOC-R’s contribution to public service resilience.

The Sociologial Review, 2022

This paper contributes to the sociology of care-relational justice by identifying, conceptualisin... more This paper contributes to the sociology of care-relational justice by identifying, conceptualising and unpacking 'imposed volunteering' as one mechanism that shape societal caring arrangements. Contemporary societies allocate care work disproportionally to women, ethnic minorities and working-class citizens, which exacerbates social inequalities. Distribution of caring responsibilities is a political question but often not recognised as such, because it is deeply immersed in everyday routines. Our study uses the context of the COVID-19 pandemic to dissect the distribution mechanisms that became unusually palpable when the lockdown of public welfare provision in Denmark relocated some forms of care work from professionals to volunteers. With the term imposed volunteering, we conceptualise the feeling of being coerced into taking on new caring responsibilities, which some womenand menexperienced during the lockdown. Drawing on a national, representative survey, we document that, compared to men, women carried out significantly more voluntary care work and organised voluntary work through informal personal networks rather than through formal civil society organisations to a significantly higher degree. We unpack the experience of imposed volunteering as it unfolded during the lockdown through qualitative case studies, and clarify how relational and institutional factors, such as gendered expectations and the sense of personal obligation, imposed volunteering. Our study illuminates the importance of public care, reciprocal caring relationships and care for carers, and demonstrates why the mobilisation of care work volunteers must take gendered implications into account if it is to be consistent with democratic commitments to justice, equality and freedom for all.

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 2020

In this paper, we supplement existing scholarship on the interactional process within volunteerin... more In this paper, we supplement existing scholarship on the interactional process within volunteering with one that focuses on how inequality between volunteer and recipient of help is handled and (re)produced through interactions within voluntary groups. We focus on how empowerment projects with different interactional styles produce different forms of (in)equality on an interactional level despite dealing with very similar structural inequalities. We define interactional inequality as taking place along four dimensions: role distribution, framing rights, competencies, and sacrifice. Drawing on two different empowerment projects in the refugee solidarity movement in Denmark, we show how these dimensions of inequalities play out in the interaction between volunteers and refugees. We identify two strategies for overcoming the initial inequality between refugee and volunteer, one based on mutuality and another based on collectivity. Lastly, we show how these strategies produce interactional inequalities of their own.

European Societies, 2020

This paper unfolds how informal civil society quickly mobilised citizen-to-citizen support when g... more This paper unfolds how informal civil society quickly mobilised citizen-to-citizen support when government and non-government organisations locked down during the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper focuses on two elements of the mobilisation: the role of social networks and social media groups. It reveals that the vast majority of this support was distributed through existing social networks and, therefore, not available to those lacking social connections. However, we also find that social media groups played an important role in the mobilisation, that support organised on social media does not diverge significantly in commitment or kind from support organised in other settings. The paper concludes by discussing the potential of social media to mitigate the impact of social networks on the distribution of support, pointing to some of the potential barriers to social media groups' successful facilitation of support to those without a social network.

Social Forces, 2020

This article proposes a theory of how interaction in groups influences differential participation... more This article proposes a theory of how interaction in groups influences differential participation in political activism and interrogates this theory through an empirical analysis of online Facebook group interaction. We study the refugee solidarity movement in a mixed methods design employing online ethnography, survey, and "big" social media data. Instead of conceptualizing the group as a social network or social movement organization (SMO), we argue that the group's culture emerges as patterns of interaction that have implications for what kind of activities in which group members participate. Based on observations from our online ethnography, we suggest that group interaction influences differential individual participation through processes of 1) encoding different habits and 2) attuning the activist to different aspects of situations. We support our theoretical propositions with six statistical tests of the relationship between the group-level variable of contentious group style and the individual-level variable of participation in political protest. The dependent variable, political protest, and a comprehensive set of controls stem from an original survey of the Danish refugee solidarity movement with 2,283 respondents. We link the survey data with "big" social media data used to estimate the focal explanatory variable, contentious group style, generated from content analysis of online interaction in 119 Facebook groups quantified with supervised machine learning. The results show that group style has a consistently positive relationship with the individual's degree of participation independent of networks, SMO framing, and individual attributes. for their valuable comments along the way. Funding: Jonas Toubøl's research for this paper was supported by the Carlsberg Foundation as part of the project entitled Mobilization in the era of social media: Introducing the decisive role of group level factors (grant number CF17-0199).

Sociological Forum, 2020

Acting in solidarity with disadvantaged others has become a central topic in social movement rese... more Acting in solidarity with disadvantaged others has become a central topic in social movement research. The explanations of solidarity activism are few, but social movement researchers have claimed that solidarity with out-of-group others is a by-product of in-group interaction. Based on studies of the Danish refugee solidarity movement, we argue that interaction with the deprived other and the formation of a solidary relationship is central to the ebb and flow of solidarity activism. The meeting with the deprived other 1) brings about an interaction order which makes an ethical demand on the activists to care for the other both within the bounds of the situations and in the future and 2) enacts and amplifies activists' values and beliefs because the deprived other becomes an exemplar of the injustice and the need to help the wider group of people in the same fragile situation. We develop and test this theory drawing on both 42 life-history interviews and a social media dataset containing a panel of 87,455 activists participating in refugee solidarity groups.

Mobilization: An International Quarterly, 2019

This article presents a quantitative study of differential participation in low- and high-risk ac... more This article presents a quantitative study of differential participation in low- and high-risk activism in the Danish refugee solidarity movement. Distinguishing between low- and high-risk activism, it shows the fruitfulness of combining what are often considered competing theoretical explanations related to (1) values, (2) microstructures, and (3) emotions. We analyze data from a unique survey of 1,856 respondents recruited via Facebook. The results show that low- and high-risk participation strongly correlate but are influenced by different factors. For low-risk activities, the most important factors are emotional reactions, structural availability, and predispositions in the form of basic human values. For high-risk activity, the important factors are prior history of activism and emotional reaction. Values, microstructures, and emotions interact in relation to participation in both kinds of activism, which points to promising avenues for integrating and developing the theoretical framework of differential participation and recruitment.

British Journal of Sociology, 2019

Adding to the literature on non-institutional political action and trust, this article... more Adding to the literature on non-institutional political action and trust, this article argues that the loss of institutional trust is not only a cause but also an outcome of political activism. Studying the Danish refugee solidarity movement in a mixed-methods research design including survey and qualitative interview data, the article shows that three kinds of activism – political activism, humanitarian activity, and civil disobedience – relate differently to the loss of trust in the institutions of the Parliament, the legal system, and the police. Political activism primarily affects a loss of trust in the Parliament due to low external efficacy and a closed political opportunity structure. Civil disobedience affects a loss of trust in the legal system and the police due to a perceived lack of procedural justice. Humanitarian activity does not affect a loss of institutional trust because it does not imply interaction with the institutions to the same extent as the other kinds of activism. The consequence of losing trust in the political institutions is not an abandonment of democratic values, nor political apathy, but rather a change in civic engagement from a mode of democratically legitimizing participation in the institutions to a mode of contending and ques-tioning the legitimacy of the political institutions. This finding indicates that in turn loss of institutional trust may cause an increase in extra-institutional political action which is consistent with the commonly assumed causality in the literature. This leads to a final integrating argument for conceptualizing activism and loss of institutional trust as reinforcing factors in a process where, in line with the main finding of this study, activism may cause a loss of institutional trust which, in turn, may cause additional activism, as argued in the existing literature.

Sociology, 2017

This article develops a new explorative method for deriving social class categories from patterns... more This article develops a new explorative method for deriving social class categories from patterns of occupational mobility. In line with Max Weber, our research is based on the notion that, if class boundaries do not inhibit social mobility then the class categories are of little value. Thus, unlike dominant, theoretically defined class schemes, this paper derives social class categories from observed patterns in a mobility network covering intra-generational mobility. The network is based on a mobility table of 109 occupational categories tied together by 1,590,834 job shifts on the Danish labour market 2001-07. The number of categories are reduced from 109 to 34 by applying a new clustering algorithm specifically designed for the study of mobility tables (MONECA). These intra-generational social class categories are related to the central discussions of gender, income, education, and political action by providing empirical evidence of strong patterns of intra-generational class divisions along these lines.

European Sociological Review, 2017

In this article, we investigate the effect of social customs on one of the most important instanc... more In this article, we investigate the effect of social customs on one of the most important instances of collective action, namely, workers uniting in trade unions. Although many studies have used social custom theory to explain unionization, existing studies have not adequately analysed social customs at the workplace. Using workplace union density as a proxy for social custom, this analysis improves existing studies in a number of ways. First, multi-level analyses of a large panel data set from Denmark reveal that there is a significant positive effect of workplace union density on the probability that new employees join unions. Secondly, using nonparametric regression, we find that the functional form of the relationship between the two variables is accelerating. These results hold for various subsamples. The accelerating functional form indicates that large initial investments in unionization are required to create self-sustaining social customs for union membership. Thirdly, we test the acceleration using segmented regression analysis and find a significant acceleration around 45–65 per cent workplace union density. In the conclusion, we discuss the implications of our study for unionization strategies and for research on unionization.

Skitse af flygtningesolidaritetsbevægelsens historie og organisering - og diskussion af bevægelse... more Skitse af flygtningesolidaritetsbevægelsens historie og organisering - og diskussion af bevægelsens bredde med hensyn til de aktives værdier og baggrunde

Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research, 2014

Against the background of the general decline in union membership in Western countries, this stud... more Against the background of the general decline in union membership in Western countries, this study analyses factors influencing an individual's choice whether to join a trade union. The focus is on the effects of workplace union density and individual political attitudes. Micro data covering the entire Danish workforce combined with European Social Survey data enable for the first time the statistical analysis of the effect workplace union density has on union recruitment. Workplace union density is used to measure the power of social custom in workplace union membership, constituting an instrumental motive for joining the union. Self-placement on a political left-right scale measures political attitude which is assumed to constitute a value-rational motive. The statistical results indicate that workplace union density is the main predictor of whether or not an employee is going to join a union, even when other variables such as gender, occupation and industry worked in are taken into consideration. In addition, the results indicate that political attitude is also an important factor. 2 Résumé Dans le contexte du déclin général de l'affiliation syndicale dans les pays

THE FAILED CAMPAIGN FOR ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY AS A FACTOR IN THE POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE LABOUR... more THE FAILED CAMPAIGN FOR ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY AS A FACTOR IN THE POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE LABOUR MOVEMENTThe campaign for Economic Democracy (ED) running from 1973 to 1986 was the Danish labour movement’s most extensive campaign after World War II. It was also relatively radical as it called for a transfer of large parts of the economy from private to collective ownership placed under the workers’ democratic control through their trade unions.In the campaign material, ED was framed in relation to the two major components of Danish social democratic ideology, namely, democracy and socialism. The campaign was relative successful in targeting the wage earners by framing ED as both a realisation of these two major goals of the labour movement as well as being a practical and efficient answer to unemployment, low wages, lack of influence on workplace policies etc.Despite the relative success of the campaign, ED was never turned into law and was de facto abandoned in the 1980s. Thus, the ED campaign – running for more than a decade, including the distribution of campaign materials counted by the 100,000’s as well as massive agitation and grass root activity – turned out to be a futile endeavour. In this perspective, it seems reasonable to hypothesize that as a consequence of the failure of the ED program the ideas of democracy and socialism suffered a defeat as well: on the one hand a loss of centrality in the ideology of the labour movement, and on the other hand a loss of credibility in the general public. Thus, it might be the case that the failure of the ED-program have been one among several causes which brought about the rather abrupt ideological shift from socialism and collectivism to an ideological turn towards social-liberal and individualistic ideas in the labour movement, in the late 1980s and 1990s.

This dissertation is the first major academic analysis of the Danish refugee solidarity movement ... more This dissertation is the first major academic analysis of the Danish refugee solidarity movement that mobilized more than 100,000 citizens in the fall 2015 when the European refugee crisis reached Denmark. The dissertation makes four main contribution to the two questions of differential recruitment—what accounts for activists’ involvement in different activities—and the question of social movement outcome in the form of changes to the activists’ political perceptions. First, it argues that in solidarity activism an ethical demand to care for the unfortunate is a central driver that may lead to involvement in high-risk activism. This ethical demand is mediated by values of altruism. Second, such basic human values are argued to be important for how we react emotionally to major events which, together with effects of network and socialization, influence our propensity to engage in activism of varying risk. Third, values are also expressed in variation between the style group interaction. No matter prior experience with activism, activists in groups with a style that focuses on the immediate compassion and care for the refugees engage to a lesser degree in political protest, than do activists in a group culture that focuses on the political and contentious dimension of the matter. Fourth and finally, for activists engaged in the legal cases of refugees, experiencing an immigration-bureaucracy with little or no care for the human beings behind the dossiers combined with an experience of systematic bias against the refugee, results in a loss of institutional trust. Given the fact that the activists also prior to their involvement in the movement had a high level of participation in democratic civil society, the operation of the institutions causing loss of trust, may pose a unintended threat to Danish democracy by alienating key actors in civil society from the institutionalized political process.

The aim of this paper is to present a new network analytical method for analysis of social mobili... more The aim of this paper is to present a new network analytical method for analysis of social mobility between categories like occupations or industries. The method consists of two core components; the algorithm MONECA (Mobility Network Clustering Algorithm), and the intensity measure of Relative Risk (RR), which enable us to identify clusters of inter-mobile categories. We apply the method to data of the labour market mobility in Denmark 2000-2007 and demonstrate how this new method can overcome some long standing obstacles to the advance of labour market segmentation theory: Instead of the typical theory driven definition of the labour market segments, the use of social network analysis enable a data driven definition of the segments based on the direct observation of mobility between job-positions, which reveals a number of new findings.

Samfundsøkonomen

Beslutningen om at nedlukke samfundet og velfærdsstaten for at inddæmme COVID19-epidemien i forår... more Beslutningen om at nedlukke samfundet og velfærdsstaten for at inddæmme COVID19-epidemien i foråret 2020 overlod for en stund mange velfærdsopgaver til det frivillige civilsamfund. Et centralt spørgsmål, der også angår den pågående diskussion i politik og forskning om frivillighedens rolle i velfærden, er nedlukningens ulighedsmæssige konsekvenser. I denne artikel analyserer vi uligheder i hvem, der giver og modtager frivillig hjælp, med udgangspunkt i køn og beskæftigelsesstatus. Resultaterne indikerer, at eksisterende uligheder blev reproduceret og i nogle tilfælde forstærket.

European Sociological Review

In this article, we investigate the effect of social customs on one of the most important instanc... more In this article, we investigate the effect of social customs on one of the most important instances of collective action, namely, workers uniting in trade unions. Although many studies have used social custom theory to explain unionization, existing studies have not adequately analysed social customs at the workplace. Using workplace union density as a proxy for social custom, this analysis improves existing studies in a number of ways. First, multi-level analyses of a large panel data set from Denmark reveal that there is a significant positive effect of workplace union density on the probability that new employees join unions. Secondly, using nonparametric regression, we find that the functional form of the relationship between the two variables is accelerating. These results hold for various subsamples. The accelerating functional form indicates that large initial investments in unionization are required to create self-sustaining social customs for union membership. Thirdly, we test the acceleration using segmented regression analysis and find a significant acceleration around 45–65 per cent workplace union density. In the conclusion, we discuss the implications of our study for unionization strategies and for research on unionization.

Challenges For Public and Private Sector Industrial Relations and Unions in Times of Crisis and Austerity, Jun 28, 2012

Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research, 2014

Against the background of the general decline in union membership in Western countries, this stud... more Against the background of the general decline in union membership in Western countries, this study analyses factors influencing an individual's choice whether to join a trade union. The focus is on the effects of workplace union density and individual political attitudes. Micro data covering the entire Danish workforce combined with European Social Survey data enable for the first time the statistical analysis of the effect workplace union density has on union recruitment. Workplace union density is used to measure the power of social custom in workplace union membership, constituting an instrumental motive for joining the union. Self-placement on a political left-right scale measures political attitude which is assumed to constitute a value-rational motive. The statistical results indicate that workplace union density is the main predictor of whether or not an employee is going to join a union, even when other variables such as gender, occupation and industry worked in are taken into consideration. In addition, the results indicate that political attitude is also an important factor. 2 Résumé Dans le contexte du déclin général de l'affiliation syndicale dans les pays

Samfundsøkonomen

Beslutningen om at nedlukke samfundet og velfærdsstaten for at inddæmme COVID19-epidemien i forår... more Beslutningen om at nedlukke samfundet og velfærdsstaten for at inddæmme COVID19-epidemien i foråret 2020 overlod for en stund mange velfærdsopgaver til det frivillige civilsamfund. Et centralt spørgsmål, der også angår den pågående diskussion i politik og forskning om frivillighedens rolle i velfærden, er nedlukningens ulighedsmæssige konsekvenser. I denne artikel analyserer vi uligheder i hvem, der giver og modtager frivillig hjælp, med udgangspunkt i køn og beskæftigelsesstatus. Resultaterne indikerer, at eksisterende uligheder blev reproduceret og i nogle tilfælde forstærket.