Interdisciplinarity

Sexual harassment is a complex problem and knowledge from several research areas is needed to understand what the problem looks like and what can prevent and counteract sexual harassment and its consequences. Knowledge about the division of labour in the labour market, about different positions and power in working life and in the workplace, about people’s varying backgrounds and how this affects their choice of occupation, and about development and change in organisations are just some examples of areas that contribute towards this understanding. These areas overlap and affect each other to a great extent and often come from different fields of research. An interdisciplinary approach is crucial if we are to understand what sexual harassment is and its impact on the individuals, workplaces and industries affected and on the labour market as a whole.

Interdisciplinary research enables expertise in different areas and methods to help to solve common questions, which in turn can lead to more effective and well-founded work for change in practice. Interdisciplinarity paves the way for a more coherent picture of knowledge in the field, both of the problems of sexual harassment at work and of what the effective preventive measures might be. Interdisciplinary approaches can also create synergies between research areas and partners in different sectors. For example, the projects in the research funding initiative show how bringing together organisational perspectives and pedagogical perspectives can build new knowledge about change work and how power perspectives and economic perspectives can create a new understanding of the specific characteristics of vulnerability. 

When there is a need to build knowledge to produce effective preventive strategies and methods, the research will be limited if it solely uses gender as the basis for experiencing sexual harassment and inequality. To gain a picture that is closer to the experience described by victims of sexual harassment, studies also need to be conducted based on additional and intersecting aspects, such as ethnicity, disability, socioeconomic status and age. Different aspects have varying impacts in working life, not least because sectors and workplaces tend to have different ways of organising and structuring their work. The projects in this research funding initiative provide clear examples with age highlighted as a key factor in vulnerability in one project and ethnicity in another. Similarly, geographical location has an impact when looking at people in the Nordic countries, where rural and urban areas both share similarities and display major differences on everything from the composition of the population to educational provision and work opportunities, career paths and working conditions.  

To create change, the research results also need to be disseminated and taken on board in the sectors and workplaces concerned. When researchers in different areas work together with different industries and parts of the labour market, opportunities open up to discuss and embed the design of the project with more collaborative partners. This also makes it easier to pass on the results to more actors.