Mattias Bengtsson

My main research areas are in labour market and welfare research. I have studied issues related to opportunities and obstacles for transnational trade union cooperation within the EU, the working poor in a European perspective, the Swedish work strategy and how it is expressed in changes in active labour market policies and in unemployment and sickness insurance systems, and reforms in the Swedish Public Employment Service and its consequences for caseworkers and clients. My research has often been based on issues of social inequality, particularly from a class perspective. For example, I have studied social class in relation to issues such as the individualisation of working life, social comparisons, social mobility, class identification, attitudes towards trade unions and political attitudes. Over the past decade, I have, together with Professor Marita Flisbäck, developed an existential sociology perspective in relation to studies of individuals’ meaning-making in the retirement process, attitudes to work as a calling, and older workers’ competencies and existential driving forces for prolonged working lives. In 2021-2025, I am working on a research study comparing policy changes and labour market effects of the pandemic in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. I also have a strong commitment to leading, developing, and reviewing new research – I am regularly hired as a reviewer of dissertation texts and I am the main supervisor of five PhD students in sociology and work science at the University of Gothenburg.

My page at ResearchGate

Assignments

• Board member of Work and Employment Research Centre at the University of Gothenburg
• Member of the editorial board of the journal Arbetsmarknad & Arbetsliv
• Research group leader for the research group Working Life and Welfare in Transition, University of Borås
• Organiser of the Working Life and Welfare Seminar at the Department of Sociology and Work Science, University of Gothenburg

Doctoral thesis title

The individual is clocking in. Work, union and pay in sociological illumination [Individen stämplar in. Arbetet, facket och lönen i sociologisk belysning] (2008)

External Publications

List of publications (University of Gothenburg)