Johan SvanbergAssociate Professor
About me
I am Senior Lecturer in Economic History and Associate Professor in History.
My research focuses on migration history, labour history and European integration history. I have also conducted several oral-history projects. Primarily, my publications deal with Second-World-War-refugees, work-related migrations during the post-war boom, encounters between migrants and majority populations, as well as the Swedish and the international labour movement.
Currently, I manage two different projects dealing with European integration in an international trade-union perspective. The first one (supported by VR) focuses on the metal- and engineering industry, and the other one (supported by Forte) studies industrial relations in the textile and garment industry. These projects analyses the mutual interplay between the international and national level of the trade-union movement, for example considering the development of the “free” movements. In addition, I work in the project “Free and Unfree labour” (supported by VR), where I, for instance, investigate post-war migrations in Sweden, from the Northern parts to textile and garment factories in the south.
My latest research project, “Labour Recruitment to a Gender Divided Labour Market” (2012–2016), emphasised recruitment of German women to the Swedish garment industry during the 1950s. The overall aim was to examine how actors at different levels of society reproduced and altered the Swedish labour market – along the lines of gender, ethnicity, age, and class – in conjunction with migration processes. The aim was also to study how the migrations and the various sorting mechanisms in the labour market affected the people concerned in their working life. The project illuminated industrial relations on international, national, and local level.
My dissertation (2010), focussed on the reception of refugees during the Second World War, and the early post-war recruitments of foreign-born workers, to Sweden. The main purpose was to analyse migrants as a party in the relationship between labour and capital; it explored, on the one hand, how the relative strengths of the parties in the Swedish labour market affected the migrations, and, on the other hand, how the migrations affected the industrial relations. Chiefly, the dissertation dealt with Estonians and industrial relations at a car-factory in southern Sweden.
