the fight against labor crime
In this master’s thesis we study the interorganizational collaboration (IoC) between Norwegian public entities in the fight against labor crime, or arbeidslivskriminalitet in Norwegian, further referred to as a-krim.
The collaboration was established in 2015 as a result of The Government Strategy Against A-krim, and the strategy was revised and further strengthen in 2017, as the collaboration turned out to be value-adding and successful. The IoC mainly consist of Politiet, Skatteetaten, NAV and Arbeidstilsynet, whom all are affected by a-krim in some way, and these are the entities we studied. We conducted 12 semi-structured interviews with participants from national, regional and local level in the collaboration, all from the four mentioned entities.
Our general proposition was that characteristics of the individual entities were entrenched in the IoC, meaning the entities also used the collaboration as a tool to realize own priorities. We verified our general proposition; the entities’ characteristics affect the collaboration. Further, we find strategic anchorization of a-krim to be essential for the IoC’s efforts. Based on our empirical analysis we have seven overarching findings. We found: 1) Equivocal governance flow to be apparent, 2) Compounded complexity in the IoC, 3) Politiet holds a superior role while in a predicament, 4) Effects and efficiency of the IoC questionable, 5) Skatteetaten and Arbeidstilsynet as dominators and influencers, 6) The IoC’s time aspects as misaligned to fight a-krim, and 7) A collaboration that lacks (common) communication. This has meaning for practitioners since IoC is becoming more and more relevant due to social complex problems that we face in the 21st century.