EUROPAISCHES FORUM FUER MIGRATIONSSTUDIEN EV

Their core work

EFMS (European Forum for Migration Studies) is a Bamberg-based research institute specialising in the sociology and policy dimensions of international labour migration and workforce mobility. Their core work examines how employees move across borders for work, how that mobility shapes careers, and what it means for innovation capacity within organisations and economies. In GLOMO they contributed expertise on expatriation, career capital, and the labour market outcomes of internationally mobile workers. Their participation in CultureLabs signals a secondary line of work in culture-based social innovation, applying migration-related social research to broader community cohesion challenges.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

Both H2020 projects started in 2018, so a genuine temporal evolution cannot be established from this dataset — there is no before-and-after to analyse. The early-period keywords are drawn entirely from GLOMO and centre on labour mobility, expatriation, and career capital; CultureLabs contributes no keywords to the dataset, leaving its thematic contribution opaque. The most that can be said is that EFMS entered H2020 simultaneously through two distinct channels — a Marie Curie training network (MSCA-ITN) and a Research and Innovation Action — suggesting they were already positioned across both academic training and applied social research tracks from the outset.

With both projects launched in 2018 and no subsequent H2020 activity visible in this dataset, there is no reliable trend signal; their profile suggests a specialist niche institute rather than a growing research network.

How they like to work

EFMS has never held the coordinator role in H2020 — entering both projects as partner or third party, which is consistent with a specialist institute that provides domain expertise rather than project management. Despite only two projects, they engaged with 26 distinct partners across 9 countries, indicating participation in genuinely large multi-partner consortia rather than small bilateral arrangements. This suggests they are comfortable operating as one expert node within complex European networks, contributing migration and mobility knowledge without driving the overall project agenda.

EFMS has worked with 26 unique partners across 9 countries from just two projects, reflecting the large consortium structure typical of MSCA-ITN networks. Their geographic reach spans multiple EU member states, though no single country dominates the partnership record available here.

What sets them apart

EFMS occupies a specific niche at the intersection of migration sociology and European labour market policy — a combination rarely found in engineering or natural-science-oriented consortia, but valuable whenever a project touches workforce mobility, expatriate management, or migrant integration. As one of Germany's dedicated migration research forums, they bring both empirical research methods and policy-facing credibility that general social science departments typically lack. For consortia in HR technology, talent mobility platforms, or social cohesion programmes, EFMS can provide the sociological grounding and migration-specific knowledge that makes research findings credible to policymakers and industry alike.

Highlights from their portfolio

• GLOMO
  Directly aligned with EFMS's core institutional mandate on global employee mobility, and the source of all their substantive H2020 keywords — this is their most representative project in this dataset.
• CultureLabs
  Demonstrates thematic breadth beyond migration into social innovation, and is their only project with recorded EC funding, suggesting a more formal participant role with deliverable obligations.