Dynamics of Working and Living Conditions

For some time now, we have been seeing enormous changes in our local and global world. Key words include globalization, transnationalization and digitalization of work and life, as well as the growing importance of the financial industry in everyday life. These developments intertwine and overlap with the deep ecological crisis.   

At our department, we ask about the associated consequences for everyday life and about the changing opportunities and risks for individual working and living conditions. These opportunities and risks are unevenly distributed both spatially and between social groups and classes. We therefore interested in the question whether and how socio-spatial inequalities are currently being exacerbated, reduced or reshaped. We discuss these issues conceptually and examine them empirically using quantitative, qualitative and audiovisual methods as well as mixed methods designs. We consider current developments to be contradictory. One example is that digital technologies and infrastructures can expand individual opportunities for employment, housing and career choices as well as social participation. However, they can also lead to new forms of surveillance, displacement, the dissolution of boundaries in work and increased stress and exhaustion. 

We analyze education, work and business, housing, family and intimate relationships as well as urban and rural spaces as places where life chances and divergent lifeworlds are (re)produced. We consider the significance of local, national, European and global contexts and developments. Our perspective in projects and teaching is shaped by the specific situation of Salzburg as a location with traditional social inequalities, vulnerable (urban and alpine) spaces and cross-border mobility. In research and teaching, we contribute to the diagnosis of barriers to social sustainability. We discuss approaches to a socially and ecologically sustainable reorganization of work, economy and society, as characterized for example by concepts of degrowth or ecofeminism.