Presentation
ANNA HEDENUS presented her PhD thesis At the End of the Rainbow – Post-winning life among Swedish lottery winners in March 2011. The thesis primarily discusses how sudden windfall affects people’s work commitment and attitudes towards jobs. It also considers the importance of the lottery winning for the winners’ sense of self, consumption habits and conceptions of money.
Specialist Fields
Anna Hedenus’ research concerns questions about self-selection and selection on the labour market; job satisfaction and attitudes towards work; and the centrality and meanings of work in people’s lives. Hedenus current research also deals with issues regarding surveillance and privacy in relation to job recruitments and the use of social media. Alongside her current research, Anna Hedenus has a special interest in issues concerning gender and sexuality.
Current research
Anna Hedenus is currently working in a project entitled Employers' use of information seeking on the Internet in the recruitment process. Over the past years it has become increasingly more common for employers to check up job-seekers online, using a search engine, specific databases or social media. In this way employers may add information about specific parts of the job-seeker’s past, such as criminal records, or try to capture the job-seeker’s “data double”. Previous research on online behaviour in general and social media in particular, has focused on the data subjects’ online action, how privacy settings are used and if online behaviour is modified due to potential data gathering by outsiders. In this project we turn our attention to the ones who gather this type of data and use it as access control for employment. Our aim is to examine how employers interpret the data they find and to what extent it influences the recruitment process and the decision to hire or not hire a candidate.
Teaching and tutoring
Teaches on undergraduate courses in sociology and in courses on the teacher educationprogrammes. Supervises theses concerning work sociology, or sexuality and gender.
