This area of advanced study combines the classical research and teaching areas of structural analysis with research on work and organisation. The focus centers on the meaning of organisations and their internal structures and decision processes for the allocation of social positions, the distribution of social goods, changes in norms and values, as well as for questions of how social relations and life courses are shaped. This requires taking a critical look at the theoretical models and empirical research on industrial and organisational sociology as well as structural analysis, especially labor market research, the sociology of the life course, the sociology of education and social inequality research. Observing processes of change towards a New World of Work from the analytical level of organisations can best succeed if institutional arrangements and their transformation through the functional dynamics of organisations are approached from an internationally comparative and historical perspective. Thus, the comparison of different social contexts and the processes of change within them first enables, for example, the identification of tendencies like the increasing importance of the meso-social level.