Shift It: Shaping healthy work in Future
Objectives: Changing nature of work brings new forms of threats to health and well-being of employees. Due to an intensification of work, globalisation, flexible labour, and an increasing diversity of work forces, psychosocial risk factors have increased over the last years. Health statistics document the rise of mental disorders as reasons for sick leaves, and early retirement. Hence, the call for theoretically well-founded and evidence-based management of occupational health programs is omnipresent. The IP is designed to build competencies, hard- as well as soft skills of future framers in the field of occupational health psychology. Based on the most current knowledge in the field, the IP focuses on "hands-on"-methods for designing, implementing, monitoring, and evaluating real life occupational health programs in organisations. A first aim of the IP is to enhance competencies of future framers in the field of occupational health psychology. A second major aim of the IP is to bring together PhD-students from the collaborating departments, discussing their research, and making plans for joint publications. A third aim is to foster international exchange and to learn from different traditions, organisational structures, and programs in the field of occupational health in the involved countries.
Processes of globalization since the 1980s increasingly have evoked debates in the humanities and social sciences, which paradigms are appropriate to describe this global change. Within these debates concepts, influenced by a spatial turn have gained attraction among scholars, questioning conventional approaches and narratives, circulating around the nation and the nation-state. “Space” in these concepts is no longer treated as essentialist and “given” category, but configurations of the Local, the regional, the national and the transnational are seen as constructed and contingent entities. Within the field of “global history”, these debates in the meantime have found an interdisciplinary frame, increasingly being even institutionalized within universities.These discussions, however, up untilnow have had only limited repercussions within the field of Southeast-European Studies. How “global history” concepts and how questions of transnationalism and spatial entanglements can be applied for the study of south-east European history and societies, and how Southeastern Europe on the other hand can be inscribed into a “global history” largely is undebated. Alsouniversity curricula and programs, both in the region itself and in other European countries, still have not responded to this. Being still organized largely along national or at best regional lines, they, up until noware leaving little room for interdisciplinary and transnational approaches.