Diversity: changes and challenges in working life

The chief goal of today's labour market policy in Norway is to promote a well-functioning labour market with a high rate of participation in paid employment and inclusive and well-ordered workplaces that make good use of the available labour force.? The available labour force in Norway today is diverse. However, research shows that Norwegian companies are lagging behind companies in other European countries when it comes to recruitment and maintenance of a diverse work force. Recent statistics and resear ch indicate that the situation for some social groups is marked by a significantly difficult relation to the Norwegian labour market. Dimensions like gender, ethnicity, disability, class and age are constitutive of this relation, and in SIP-AFI 2008-09 we have chosen to focus on three dimensions: ethnicity, gender and disability. International research indicates that employers in many cases make up the bottleneck for an inclusive working life. SIP-AFI 2008-09 will not discuss whether diversity actually be nefits business or not. The notion of diversity is neither univocal nor unproblematic. Over the past years the use of diversity in e.g. market economic, competitive and liberal argumentation has been discussed and questioned.Neither will SIP-AFI 2008-09 a rgue that specific actors - e.g. Norwegian employers make up the bottleneck for an inclusive working life. This would be to underestimate the complexity of the interplay between discourses, decisions and practices. Instead, SIP-AFI 2008-09 will investigat e aspects of the disparity between the ambition to make good use of the available labour force and the lack in systematic diversity awareness and management in Norwegian working life by studying and comparing different approaches to and understandings of diversity in labour market legislation and policies.