This study explores the adaptation to automation in social services, focusing on organizational challenges and skill dynamics to enhance workforce competencies. Using a sociotechnical systems perspective, it examines social workers’ responses to implementing robotic process automation for decision-making. The analysis highlights a shift towards high-skilled labor, requiring advanced digital and interpersonal skills that can lead to job polarization and routine task automation. Key organizational challenges include resistance to automation, ethical considerations, and the need for effective communication and training. These findings emphasize the complexity of integrating automation in the public sector, necessitating transparent and inclusive strategies to build trust among employees and clients. Additionally, the study highlights competence challenges in ‘shrinking’ municipalities, pointing to the need for continuous skill development and organizational restructuring amidst technological advancements.

The attitude of trade unions towards migration and migrants, be it of asylum seekers or those in search of jobs and better incomes, differs substantially across European countries. No matter the original stance, a common current pattern is that of the willingness to accept migrants being eroded over time. To see whether this is the case also in a country that both proved welcoming to labour migrants and refugees during the opening decades of the new millennium, we set out to explore the attitudes of blue-collar trade unions in Sweden. Based on a diverse set of material issuing from the unions themselves, we use sentiment analysis to assess whether there are any changes to be discerned in the opinions of the representatives of 12 blue-collar trade unions and their national confederation. At its most general, the trend appears to turn more negative over time, yet the influence of defining events and legal changes is not so easily observed at the aggregate level. The union representing workers in the industry with the largest proportion of immigrant labour, the Hotel and Restaurant Workers' Union, is therefore selected for closer analysis. To the extent that changes can, or cannot, be observed, we relate those to major events and policy changes that have taken place over the 2010s.

Purpose Economic integration of refugees remains a challenge for developed countries. Although refugees differ greatly from labor migrants in available resources and motivation toward self-employment, prevailing studies on minority and ethnic entrepreneurship tend to lump these different categories of migrants together. Based on theories of migrants economic embeddedness, the purpose of this paper is to analyze the extent to which family- and kinship-based resources affect self-employment duration among refugees and labor migrants. Design/methodology/approach Based on Cox regression models, this longitudinal study estimates the self-employment duration of 10,519 refugees and 2,503 labor migrants starting businesses in Sweden in the period 2006-2012. Findings Results reveal that while refugees are at a disadvantage to labor migrants in terms of self-employment duration, their higher level of family embeddedness in part helps them overcome these disadvantages. For refugees but not for labor migrants, co-location in an ethnic enclave also lowers the risk of them becoming unemployed after a spell in entrepreneurship. Originality/value This original paper provides empirical and theoretical contributions to research on migrants self-employment success. It also discusses contributions for research on entrepreneurs social embeddedness and refugees entrepreneurship.

This chapter gives an overview of the socioeconomic situation of Asian immigrants, and their decedents, in Sweden. With the steady growth in the number of immigrants from Asian countries to Sweden since the 1970s, Asians are becoming increasingly visible among the Swedish population. However, they are rarely represented in the public, political, and academic discussions. As a first step to tackle the “narrative scarcity” (Lee and Ramakrishnan, RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 7 (2):, 1–20, 2021), we use register data to describe the educational position and employment situation of the 10 largest East, South and Southeast Asian groups in Sweden, in comparison to non-Asian immigrant groups. We found differences based on the regions of origin: East Asian groups are highly educated but have lower employment rates. Once employed, they work in highly skilled occupations. Southeast Asians have lower education and, therefore, are underrepresented in highly skilled jobs but have high employment rates. South Asians stand between these two groups.

This chapter examines sorting of workers from various immigrant groups in Sweden into sectors and jobs comparing these patterns to jobs held by natives in the same sectors. A specific focus is put on the skill composition of jobs and how this differs among migrants’ and natives’ job sorting. We use matched data on jobs, employers, and workers in Swedish hospitality, construction, and retail sectors to document patterns of country of origin-based segmentation. Results show that immigrants primarily enter routine jobs requiring a higher level of technical skills compared to natives who are more often found in non-routine jobs requiring interpersonal skills. In construction and retail, immigrants and natives work mostly in non-routine jobs. These stark patterns of job segregation suggests that education and training efforts among migrant workers should consider the acquisition of language and interpersonal skills in addition to formal training and education.

Sweden has allowed immigrants from any country to obtain residence permits for entrepreneurship since 2008. The aim of this study was to explore the outcome of this policy. The study adds time perspective and superdiversity and operationalizes the mixed embeddedness framework to facilitate a quantitative study on three levels of analysis. Detailed register data for two cohorts of immigrants-those who arrived four years before and those who arrived four years after the reform-are used. The results confirm the usefulness of the mixed embeddedness model, that is the institutional regulative context, economic and social context, and individual resources, in the analysis of immigrant entrepreneurship. However, the study shows that the propensity to engage in entrepreneurship is more affected for refugees and students than for migrants with a residence permit for work and entrepreneurship. This indicates a need for further facilitating the process to immigrate for entrepreneurial reasons.

Utrikes födda entreprenörer är ett ämne som diskuteras flitigt idag, både på ett politiskt och ett teoretiskt plan (Aliaga-Isla & Rialp, 2013). Med tanke på den senaste tidens ökade migrationstrender i världen och flyktingkrisen i Europa 2015 (Giulietti, Schlutery, &Wahba, 2011) betraktas egenföretagande ofta som en av lösningarna på de utmaningar – till exempel arbetslöshet – som följer med ökade migrationsströmmar. Regeringar i västerländska välfärdsstater försöker ofta främja och stödja invandrares företagande genom olika näringspolitiska åtgärder. Målen med dessa politiska åtgärder uttrycks ofta i ekonomiska termer, till exempel att öka skatteintäkterna. Åtgärderna kan emellertid få effekter som går utanför de ekonomiska målen och märks exempelvis i minskad arbetslöshet, minskad fattigdom och brottslighet samt minskade kostnader för välfärdssystemet (Kazlou, 2019). Men den forskning som bedrivits om åtgärderna externa effekter på andra politiska områden har hittills varit mycket splittrad, och det finns endast begränsade och anekdotiska bevis för dessa effekter. I vår systematiska litteraturgenomgång tar vi oss an detta outforskade område i syfte att kartlägga hur andra delar av samhället påverkas av näringspolitiska insatser för utrikes födda entreprenörer.

Immigrant entrepreneurs are known to be heterogeneous in terms of available resources and entrepreneurial outcomes. However, this heterogeneity, as well as immigrant entrepreneurs’ embeddedness in social networks and the institutional context of high-income welfare states such as Sweden, remains understudied. Sweden represents an interesting case as a popular immigration destination which liberalized its migration policy for entrepreneurs and changed other regulations, encouraging immigrant entrepreneurship after 2008.

Theoretically, the dissertation contributes to the mixed embeddedness approach to immigrant entrepreneurship by considering three stages of the entrepreneurial process – entry, performance, and potential exit – in a changing institutional environment.

Methodologically, the dissertation operationalizes the mixed embeddedness approach by studying these three stages – entry (propensity to start a business), performance (entrepreneurial incomes), and potential exit (duration in business) – among different categories of immigrants. Explanatory factors are drawn from three levels of analysis: institutional change (macro), social, ethnic and family networks (meso), and the individual’s human capital (micro). A range of statistical tools is used for empirical analyses: Difference-in-difference methods in combination with Coarsened Exact Matching and Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition are used to investigate the influence of institutional change on entrepreneurial entry and performance. Survival models based on Cox regression are applied to investigate the influence of social and family ties on the likelihood of entrepreneurial exit. A combination of clustering and association analysis allows heterogeneity to be approached via the categorization of immigrant entrepreneurs.

Empirically, based on rich data from Swedish registers, the dissertation reveals that the propensity to start businesses in expanding ICT industries among labour immigrants was increased, and performance in terms of income among new immigrant entrepreneurs was improved after institutional change, compared to earlier. It also stresses that family networks mitigate a lack of other resources for refugee entrepreneurs, allowing them to stay in business longer. Two main categories of new immigrant entrepreneurs were distinguished in the overall heterogeneous population.

The dissertation consists of four papers and an introductory chapter.

Invandrarföretagare uppvisar stor heterogenitet när det gäller tillgängliga resurser och framgång i sitt företagande. Denna heterogenitet, liksom invandrarföretagens inbäddning i sociala nätverk och i den svenska välfärdsstatens institutionella kontext, är emellertid understuderad. Sverige utgör ett intressant fall eftersom det är ett land med relativt stor invandring som efter 2008 liberaliserade migrationspolitiken för företagare och på olika sätt uppmuntrade invandrares företagande.

Teoretiskt bidrar avhandlingen till mixed embeddedness-perspektivet genom att analysera tre stadier i entreprenörsprocessen: uppstart, utveckling och eventuell avveckling, i förhållande till institutionell förändring.

Mixed embeddedness operationaliseras i avhandlingen genom att olika kategorier invandrare studeras vid olika steg i entreprenörsprocessen; uppstart (benägenhet att starta ett företag), utveckling (företagarinkomster) samt eventuell avveckling (varaktighet i företaget) och genom att förklarande faktorer studeras på tre analysnivåer: institutionell förändring (makro), sociala, etniska och familjenätverk (meso) samt individens humankapital (mikro). En rad statistiska verktyg används för de empiriska analyserna; Difference-in-difference-metoder i kombination med Coarsened Exact Matching och Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition används för att undersöka hur institutionella förändringar påverkar uppstart och utveckling. Överlevnadsmodeller baserade på Cox-regression tillämpas för att undersöka hur sociala nätverk och familjeband påverkar sannolikheten för avveckling. Med en kombination av klusteranalys och associationsanalys undersöks mönster i heterogeniteten bland invandrarföretagarna genom kategorisering.

Empiriskt, baserat på detaljerade data från svenska register, visar avhandlingen att benägenheten att starta verksamhet inom IKT-branschen ökade bland arbetskraftsinvandrare, samt att inkomsterna bland nya invandrarföretagare förbättrades efter en period av institutionell förändring. Avhandlingen visar även att familjenätverk motverkar bristen på andra resurser för företagare med flyktingbakgrund, vilket gör att de kan stanna i verksamheten längre. Två huvudkategorier går att urskilja i den heterogena gruppen av företagare.

Avhandlingen är en sammanläggning av fyra artiklar och en inledande kappa.