Conference reports The Future of Work from a Macro-Regional Perspective Paper prepared for the InGRID-2 Winter School

This paper takes the 2018 InGRID input note as the point of departure for an elaboration on an additional layer of governance less known among some domain-specific scholarly circles but no less relevant for their overall exploratory work of the diversity of steering and consultation mechanisms put in place by the European Union (EU) to promote integrationist dynamics and certain goals enshrined in the EU policies.

Published on balticworlds.com on January 20, 2025

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Introduction

In 2018 Lenaerts and Smits offered a concise yet at the same time a comprehensive overview of various concepts and measurement approaches on job quality indicators and concluded it by highlighting the need for a standard on job quality indicators (Lenaerts & Smits, 2018). Their analysis was a valuable contribution for a further discussion on how to ensure a more tightly knit collaboration between research and policy circles to deliver tangible solutions to the real-world problems. This paper takes the 2018 InGRID input note as the point of departure for an elaboration on an additional layer of governance less known among some domain-specific scholarly circles but no less relevant for their overall exploratory work of the diversity of steering and consultation mechanisms put in place by the European Union (EU) to promote integrationist dynamics and certain goals enshrined in the EU policies. Hopefully, it will contribute to the overall aspirations to bring science and policy domains closer with a joint awareness on the role played by macro-regional strategies in addressing job quality-related matters.

The multi-level governance grid is taken as the point of departure for introducing the reader to the macro-regional governance level which encompasses four geographically fuzzy areas of Europe where actors are assembled in tailored constellations under the helm of four EU macro-regional strategies. The first part of this paper gives a concise introduction to the macro-regional governance and its thematic strands which are of immediate relevance to the overall debates revolving around the „Future of Work‟.

The second part introduces to the Baltic Science Network – a forum for higher education, science and research cooperation in the Baltic Sea Region. The choice of elaborating on the thinking taking place in the European higher education and research domains can be explained by the observation that the senior management of these sectors has long ago aspired to tailor tertiary education not only for the “immediate needs of society and the labour market but” also found important to “prepare graduates also for possible, even yet unknown, demands of tomorrow and the days to come” (Jařab, 2008, p. 88). Moreover, Baltic Science Network is an interesting case study for exploring what is the contemporary Baltic Sea Region thinking on the requirements of a competitive knowledge economy roughly a decade after the launch of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) (Carter, Fazey, Geraldo, & Trevitt, 2010, p. 247). The third part examines the value-added delivered by the exchange of higher education students and staff of higher education institutions with a special focus on how these experiences develop a certain skill-set valued in the contemporary thinking on the Future of Work.

The whole report is to be found in the upper corner “article as pdf”.

  • by Zane Šime

    Zane Šime is a Visiting Research Fellow at the United Nations University Institute on Comparative Regional Integration Studies (UNU-CRIS). She is also an Academic Assistant at the EU International Relations and Diplomacy Studies Department on the Bruges campus of the College of Europe.

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