Introduction to 2020-4

Abstract

This issue of Nordic Journal of Working Life Studies collects six research articles from the Nordic countries. The first article, Reconceptualizing Job Control in Participatory Interventions – Collective Sensemaking as a Missing Link, authored by Esben Langager Olsen, Christian Dyrlund Wåhlin-Jacobsen, and Johan Simonsen Abildgaard, investigates the connection between participatory organizational-level interventions (POLIs) and job control. The literature on this topic leaves many uncertainties on the effectiveness of POLIs in increasing job control. Through a qualitative study of a POLI in a Danish pharmaceutical company, the authors focus on the collective sensemaking processes in relation to the POLI and demonstrate the intricate contingencies that appear as participants are engaged in sensemaking processes in arranged action-planning workshops. It is concluded that studying the link between POLIs and job control as a sensemaking process has advantages in highlighting the stable aspects of the job and the dynamic properties of the situations involved in enacting job control (...)