Klara Rydström

About

I defended my PhD dissertation in 2024, titled Unpacking Online Retailing: the Organization of Warehouse Work and Inequality, based on an ethnographic study of five different online retail warehouses in Sweden. The dissertation demonstrates that inequality is reproduced as an effect of how work is organized in relation to the "on-demand" logic characteristic of online retailing. In addition to inequality expressed through gendered and racialized class relations between managers and warehouse workers, the dissertation also highlights inequality produced by class and shaped by gender and race/ethnicity among groups of warehouse workers. The fact that work was organized in partly different ways across the five warehouses led to variations in the shape and degree of inequality.

In my role as a postdoctoral researcher, I have shifted my empirical focus from online retail warehousing to the mining industry, where I investigate the ongoing “green transition” and its relation to work from a gender perspective. The study is based on interviews with senior managers and leaders at mining companies operating in Sweden.

I have also participated in a research project focusing on gender and equality in the metal industry.

Research interests

• The organization of work, working conditions
• Gender, racialization and inequality
• Retailing, service, industry
  
• Ethnography, participant observations, interviews

Pedagogical merits

I'm teaching in several courses, often focusing on issues of equality, gender and ethnicity. For example:

• S0058A. Perspektiv på arbetsliv och arbetsmarknad
• S0069A. Social stratifiering: Klass, kön och etnicitet
• G0010N. Industriell ekonomi med ett hållbarhetsperspektiv
• G0011A. Kunskapsbaserade jämställdhetsinsatser i organisationer och samhälle

I'm the co-supervisor to Wilhelm Tosser Franklin.

Prizes and awards

• "Prize for Best Dissertation 2024 in the field of Work-Life and Work Environment" awarded by FALF – Forum för arbetslivsforskning