2. Methodology

In this chapter we describe the concepts and definitions we use in our research on barriers to employment. Specifically we develop four categories of barriers to employment, which are used as a basis for describing the barriers and for further categorisation of the identified barriers to employment.

In this chapter, we first describe how we understand barriers to employment and how these can be grouped into different categories. Specifically, inspired by OECD (2016), we develop four categories of barriers to employment, which are used as a framework in the Nordic literature reviews. Second, we describe how the literature review has been conducted. Lastly, we explain how we systematically processed the literature reviews provided by our Nordic experts into an overarching framework over employment barriers for vulnerable groups in the Nordic countries, which among other things allows us to draw conclusions across the Nordic countries.

Working-age individuals may face various barriers to employment that prevent them from fully participating in labour market activities. These barriers can be categorised in several ways. We draw on the categorisation developed in the OECD project Faces of Joblessness and to some degree adopt their categorisation.

See https://www.oecd.org/social/faces-of-joblessness.htm. OECD mainly focuses on the first three of these barriers, but they still mention (in passing) the fourth in their 2016 report. “Frictions in the labour market (e.g., due to poorly functioning public employment services) can have similar effects” (Fernandez et al. 2016, p. 27). We choose to treat poorly functioning public employment services as a separate category of barrier.

Therefore, we use the following four categories of barriers: barriers related to individual characteristics (BIC), barriers related to economic incentives and motivation (BIM), barriers related to the employer and labour market structures (BEL), and barriers related to public services (BPS). The four categories of barriers are further described in Box 1.

Barriers related to individual characteristics (BIC) comprise a broad range of different factors that may limit the individual’s capacity for performing specific tasks. Examples are lack of working experience, education, and skills. Further, it involves barriers such as care responsibilities or health conditions that limit the individual in daily activities.

Barriers related to economic incentives and motivation (BIM) refer to obstacles that prevent individuals from entering the workforce due to factors such as generous welfare benefits, which is a common feature of the Nordic welfare systems. Further, this category contains barriers related to the motivation of the individual.

Barriers related to the employer and labour market structures (BEL) refer to a small number of vacancies in the relevant labour market segment or discrimination in the workplace or in the hiring proces. It also refers to information asymmetries that may arise due to lack of mutual information between the employer and the employee.

 Barriers related to public services (BPS) refer to various barriers related to the service provision of the public authorities, especially public employment services. For example, limited resources in the public employment services may result in ‘cream skimming’ (i.e., services prioritising clients with the best employment prospects) or ‘parking’ (i.e., clients with the worst employment prospects being left behind with no actual support in finding a job).

The literature reviews (see Chapter 4 and Appendix A) focus on the four traditional target groups (young people, immigrants, seniors, and persons with disabilities) and the four categories of barriers. The aim of the literature reviews is to find references relating to all the 16 potential combinations of these target groups and barriers. For example, we have looked for literature relating to young people and individual barriers, literature on young people and barriers related to economic incentives and motivation, etc. We have relied on this approach in an attempt to cover the entire spectrum of barriers for the traditional target groups. Therefore, the literature reviews should be seen as targeted rather than systematic. In an ideal world, this approach results in literature covering all 16 combinations of target groups and employment barriers. However, as expected, it has not been possible for our national experts to find literature covering all 16 combinations in all five Nordic countries (see Chapter 4 and Appendix A). Further, it should be mentioned that some barriers are better described and examined in the academic literature than others, which naturally will bias our literature review towards the barriers that have attracted most attention and hence are better described in Nordic scientific literature and other reports.

Our panel of national experts have conducted the literature reviews. They all possess detailed, extensive, and wide-ranging knowledge regarding the traditional target groups and the barriers they face. To standardise the inputs generated by the literature reviews as much as possible, we have developed a template that contains items such as specific reference, target group, data source and empirical methods, country, and specific barrier(s). In the instructions for completing the template, we emphasised that the national experts focus on newer studies of high quality and with a high validity for the target group. Where available, quantitative studies based on population data or other types of administrative data would be preferable, but good qualitative studies that identify important barriers (especially if no quantitative studies focus on the same topic) were also relevant. Further, we asked our national experts to provide us with a short summary regarding their findings for each traditional target group that we present in chapter 4 focussing across the Nordic countries on each target group and the different types of identified barriers specific to this group.

We recognize that our approach has some limitations. First, the literature reviews rely on the knowledge of the national experts and not on a systematic literature search. Thus, we cannot rule out the possibility that we have overlooked relevant barriers to the participation of the vulnerable groups in the labour market. Second, since we have asked the national experts to focus on newer studies, we may have overlooked relevant barriers only described in older studies. However, we are confident that the national experts would have detected if a central barrier is missing. They have all reviewed the total list of barriers resulting from their collective endeavours and been able to comment on this list.

In the five literature reviews – i.e., from Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Iceland – our panel of national experts have identified more than 100 concrete examples of employment barriers. Many of these are, however, examples of (almost/largely) the same barriers. In other words, multiple studies identify many of the same types of barriers. Therefore, we have developed a framework to categorise the different examples of barriers into 24 specific and unique types of barriers, which we subsume under one of the four main categories of barriers (i.e., barriers relating to either individual characteristics (BIC), economic incentives and motivation (BIM), the employer and labour market structures (BEL), or public services (BPS)). The next section presents this framework.