Nested Ethnographies of Skills Transfer (NEST)

Abstract:

The NEST project investigates the conditions under which employees in Danishfirms and public organisations create social networks that contribute to skillstransfer. A key concern here is how diversity can contribute to skills transfer inDenmark while avoiding parallel societies emerging among migrant and expatriate communities. NEST examines a series of cases based on differences in three dimensions: skill level (unskilled to professional), spatial mobility (national to transnational), and personal characteristics (homogenous to heterogenous in gender and ethnicity). Eight cases are examined covering a range of Danish firms and public organisations. NEST applies a nested ethnography approach, embedding the cases in a ‘nest’ from Statistics Denmark data on individual employee and organisational characteristics. The nest is the context for the ethnographic work, which provides in-depth analyses of network formation and skill transfer that can be generalised with the nested data.