Tidigare forskning har visat att relationen mellan klimatomställning och gruvdrift inte är så entydig som gruvindustrins marknadsföring ofta gör gällande. I den ryms historiskt förankrade konflikter om ekologiska värden och kolonialism. Den här artikeln riktar fokus mot gruvindustrins ledare. Med stöd av ett diskursteoretiskt angreppssätt analyseras 16 semistrukturerade intervjuer med högt uppsatta ledare inom områden såsom ekonomi, teknik och hållbarhet. Analysen visar hur ”klimatomställning” fylls med mening genom artikulationer som positionerar gruvdrift både som en möjliggörare av en hållbar framtid och som beroende av ett minskat klimatavtryck. Resultaten synliggör spänningar mellan ekonomiska, tekniska och sociala villkor. Artikeln framhåller att klimatomställningen bör förstås som en social och politisk process – kunskap som är avgörande i strävan efter en rättvis omställning. 

Previous research has shown that the relationship between climate transition and mining is far less straightforward than industry marketing often suggests, encompassing historically rooted conflicts over ecological values and colonialism. This article focuses on the perspectives of mining industry leaders. Drawing on a discourse-theoretical approach, it analyzes 16 semi-structured interviews with senior executives in areas such as economics, technology, and sustainability. The analysis demonstrates how “climate transition” is filled with meaning through articulations that position mining both as an enabler of a sustainable future and as dependent on reducing its climate footprint. The findings reveal tensions between economic, technological, and social conditions. The article argues that climate transition must be understood as a social and political process – knowledge that is crucial in the pursuit of a just transition.

This article focuses on gendered organizational structures in the Swedish mining industry, drawing on empirical material from interviews with 16 senior managers. Understanding these managers as occupying a position of “firstness” in an industry recognized for its economic and geopolitical value for Sweden, the article analyzes managers’ accounts of gender, exploring how they describe and make sense of gender (in)equality and gendered practices in organizational settings. The article contributes empirically to previous research on how gender inequality in mining is framed as a question of numerical imbalance and organizational performance, and theoretically by demonstrating how gendered power relations are reproduced through discursive distancing. In managers’ narratives, awareness of gender does not necessarily translate into a constructive critique of, or challenges to, gendered organizational structures and male dominance. Instead, awareness of gender as “an issue” may function as a discursive resource through which men distance themselves from problematic masculinities while leaving the underlying structures intact.

Online retailing challenges the traditional male coding of warehousing. Based upon an ethnographic study at two Swedish online retail warehouses, this article seeks to understand why certain warehouses are numerically dominated by women. Employees express that men are less focused and more careless and easily bored than women, and hence not desirable for the goods-handling work. The warehouses extend to hard-working women driven by the shame of doing wrong, which reflect their orientation of bodies in the direction of enhancing production and profit. Workers attribute the positive social atmosphere at the warehouses to the numerical dominance of women and the small size of the workplaces. At the one hand, the constructed sameness of (women) workers through hard work and jargon contribute to a collective identity that strengthens them. At the other hand, the binary gendering of work and workers also contribute to making the ware houses into ‘straight spaces’ (Ahmed, 2006).

Sweden is a country where racial/ethnic power relations reflect and reinforce the marginalisation of groups of people. Research has shown that language makes part of such racialised processes through makings of the Swedish language into the norm and a consequent stigmatisation of the ‘non-Swedish’ others. This article explores the role of language in racialisation at the workplace level of online retail warehousing. The empirical material comprises interviews (n = 24) and focus groups (n = 15 groups, tot. of 49 participants) with managers, team leaders, and workers at three online retail warehouses in Sweden, with an emphasis on the perceptions of a Swedish language policy that had been implemented in one of the warehouses. The policy had been implemented to promote inclusion and to create opportunities for workers whose primary language was not Swedish. The article shows that the language policy can be understood as racialising, even though that was not its purpose.

European and International sustainable development agendas aim to reduce inequalities in working conditions and work-related health, yet disparate occupational health outcomes are evident between both men and women and domestic- and foreign-born workers. In Sweden, major growth in online retail warehousing has increased occupational opportunities for foreign-born workers. The rapid change has left research lagging on working conditions, i.e., employment conditions, facility design, work organisation, physical and psychosocial work environment conditions, and their effects on worker health. Further, no known studies have considered patterns of inequality related to these factors. The overall aim of this study is to describe working conditions and musculoskeletal health in online retail warehousing, determine the extent to which differences exist related to sex/gender and place of birth (as a proxy for race/ethnicity), and examine factors at the organisational and individual levels to understand why any differences exist. Three online retail warehouses, each employing 50–150 operations workers performing receiving, order picking, order packing and dispatching tasks will be recruited. Warehouses will, to the extent possible, differ in their extent of digital technology use. Employment conditions, facility design (including digital tool use), work organisation, physical and psychosocial work environment conditions and worker health will be assessed by survey, interview and technical measurements. Analysis of quantitative data stratified by sex and place of birth will consider the extent to which inequalities exist. Focus group interviews with operations employees and in-depth interviews with managers, union and health and safety representatives will be conducted to assess how employee working conditions and musculoskeletal health are related to inequality regimes of sex/gender and/or race/ethnicity in organisational processes and practices in online retail warehousing. The study is pre-registered with the Open Science Framework. This study will describe working conditions and health in online retail warehouse workers and consider the extent to which patterns of inequality exist based on sex/gender and place of birth.

This dissertation studies the organization of warehouse work and inequality in Swedish online retailing. Online retailing relocates the work of providing service to individual customers, usually performed by frontline workers in retail stores, to warehouses backstage. In line with the on-demand characteristics of online retail warehousing, where a fast and smooth goods handling process becomes a competitive advantage for the companies, the manual warehouse work has been shown to be associated with routinization, and a high work tempo and monotony for workers performing it. Little is known about these issues in Sweden. Union reports and news media have shown that online retail warehousing involves a generally poor work environment and low wages. Research-based findings from other geographical contexts explain that the workforce mainly consists of those who cannot find a job elsewhere and whose subordinated position limits their possibilities for resistance against the working conditions. Herein, inequality appears. Inequality is understood in the dissertation as a consequence of the practices that organize the work, which tend to be shaped by gendered and racialized processes. The inequality as such often, but not always, take the form of class relations (Acker 2006).

Based on an ethnographic study of five online retail warehouses in Sweden – Homeware, Electronic, Recreational, Pharmacy, and Grocery – the dissertation aims to explore and understand how practices and processes to organize online retail warehouse work relate to inequality, and it aims to contribute with knowledge in this regard. As part of this, the dissertation also aims to make visible the work, workplaces, and workers that online retail warehousing brings about. The methods and materials include interviews with managers, workers, and union and health and safety representatives (n=30); focus groups with workers and pharmacists (n=15 groups, a total of 49 participants); and ethnographic observations (a total of eleven weeks). The dissertation also comprises material from a systematic literature review of 21 articles focused on warehouse working conditions and inequality, and employment data from Statistics Sweden divided into occupations groupings. My ambitions with the dissertation have been empirical – in how I have worked to contribute with knowledge about online retail warehousing, in particular in with regards to the Swedish context – and theoretical – in how I have strived to contribute with perspectives on how we can analytically approach inequality.

The results show that the warehouse work was organized in relation to the ‘on-demand’ element of online retailing, wherein flexibility becomes a necessity for online retail warehouses in the strive to fulfil the (over time fluctuating levels of) customer orders on time. While Homeware, Electronic, Recreational, Pharmacy, and Grocery all strived for profit by making warehouse workers provide a fast and satisfactory service for customers, the differences between them with regards to how the warehouse work was organized meant that there were variations in the shape and the degree of the inequality (cf. Acker 2006). This is exemplified in the dissertation with the practices and processes of the division of work tasks, the monitoring of workers’ performance through productivity data, and a Swedish language policy. In addition to inequality expressed in gendered and racialized class relations between managers and warehouses workers, and other groups of employees, the dissertation also found inequality produced by class and shaped by gender and race/ethnicity between groups of warehouse workers. The variations of the inequality seemed to be associated with the differences in the size and spatiality of the online retail warehouses, the size of the workforce, and the extent of technology applied in the goods handling process. Furthermore, the dissertation suggests that there are three analytical points of entry to from where to approach inequality – the workplace level, the field of work level and the worker level – which together help us understand its manifoldness, how the severity of inequality varies and the lived and embodied realities of it.

Objectives

Studies in the goods supply chain in areas outside of warehousing show evidence of gender and racial/ethnic inequalities in working conditions (i.e. in work organization, work environment, and employment conditions). This review aimed to identify, summarize, and discuss research focused on inequality in warehousing and its effects on warehouse working conditions. In the review, racial/ethnic inequality includes inequality related to country of birth and (im)migration status.

Methods

We performed a systematic search in the Scopus and Web of Science databases to identify warehouse studies that addressed working conditions and (in)equality at a workplace level. Screening of records was performed using the Rayyan systematic review tool. Risk of bias was assessed according to established methods and checklists.

Results

Database searches yielded 4910 articles. After title-abstract-keyword and full-text screenings, 21 articles were included. Results showed inequality based on gender and race/ethnicity in both work organization (different tasks were performed by different groups of employees), work environment conditions (physical and psychosocial aspects differed), and employment conditions (disparate employment types and incomes between groups of employees). Health differences, as a possible result of unequal working conditions, were evident between different racial/ethnic groups of employees. A hierarchy that included both gender and race/ethnicity was found, with (im)migrant and racialized women positioned at the bottom.

Conclusions

We found evidence that gender and race/ethnicity influenced work organization, work environment conditions, and employment conditions. Evidence was found for an intersection between gender and race/ethnicity. To improve working conditions, and subsequently occupational health, we encourage researchers to simultaneously consider gender and race/ethnicity factors at work, and to consider both why inequality is present and how it impacts working conditions in future studies of warehousing, particularly in online retailing.