HWF - Households Work and Flexibilty

About the Project HWF

The EU-Project aims to look at how changing forms of flexibility affect work and family life. 8 partner countries should give a comparison especially between Eastern und Western Europe und show consequences of different social policies.
Project co-ordination: Institute for Advanced Studies / Institute für Höhere Studien IHS, Austria

Project partners: Sweden, Netherlands, UK, Slovenia, Hungary, Czech Republic, Romania and Bulgaria

Duration:

The project began in April 2000 and continues untilMarch 2003.
Understanding flexibility:
The project is based upon a sample survey of people in each country who are asked about their own experiences of different kinds of employment along with those of other members of their households. The questionnaire considers paid as well as unpaid work and the strategies through which households approach these different kinds of work. Flexibility is construed as flexibility of time, place and conditions of work.

Project coordination:

The project is co-ordinated by Professor Claire Wallace who works in the Department of Sociology at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna, Austria. The project is co-ordinated by the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna, otherwise known as the Institut für Höhere Studien und Wissenschaftliche Forschung. The institute comprises around 140 research staff and covers the areas of Sociology, Political Sciences, Economics and Finance. The institute is a private non-profit organisation which was set up in 1963 by Paul Lazarsfeld and Oskar Morgenstern to develop social science education and research in Austria.
Claire Wallace is also visiting professor at the University of Derby, UK and has been undertaking work on transformations in Eastern and Central Europe for the last decade. Before that she worked on projects associated with unemployment, informal economies and changing patterns of work in the UK.

Slovenian partner in the international consortium

SICENTER (Socio-economic Indicators Center) is a private non-profit research institution. Its main focus of activities is research and consultancy in the field of analysis of economic, social and technological indicators at various levels of aggregation, with application in economics, sociology, informatics, political science, management, and statistics. Research projects executed by the SICENTER were financed by the National Bank of Slovenia, the Government Office for European Affairs, Institute for Macroeconomic Analysis and Development and the Ministry of Education, Science and Sport, and by the European Commission. The coordinator of the HWF project for Slovenia is Professor Pavle Sicherl. He is Director of SICENTER and has published extensively on development and on time distance as a novel measure of disparities. He was also consultant to the World Bank, OECD, UN, ILO, UNIDO, INSTRAW, UNRISD, and Harvard Institute for International Development.

LITERATURE REVIEW:

Chapter Five, in Claire Wallace (ed.), Critical Review of literature and discourses about flexibility, HWF Research Report # 1, Vienna, 2002 Slovenia (PDF document)
          Summary in Slovenian

   Contents, Executive summary
   Chap. 1: Patterns of flexibility
   Chap. 2-4: Work & household
   Chap. 5: Three flex. groups
   References and Appendixes

   Full text