The IOH Framework explains how workers’ positions within intersecting labor-market hierarchies shape the psychosocial conditions they encounter. It shifts attention from individual stress alone to the social organization of demands, resources, recognition, and vulnerability.
Psychosocial risk is not simply distributed. It is allocated, and the pattern is never random.
How the framework reads work
- Social position. Workers enter work from intersecting social and labor-market positions (sex, migration status, occupational class), not as neutral individuals.
- Working conditions. Those positions shape how work is organized and experienced: demands, resources, recognition, autonomy, and institutional protection.
- Vulnerability. The result is not a single universal work experience, but differentiated exposure to harm and unequal possibilities for health and safety.
The guiding question: whose work becomes riskier, under which conditions, and through which social structures?
Three structural axes
The axes do not simply add up. They intersect.
Sex. The gendered organization of labor: who performs which work, how work is valued, and who carries the burden of care and emotional regulation.
Migration status. How displacement, citizenship, recognition of credentials, and access to institutional protection shape exposure and vulnerability.
Occupational class. Unequal positions of autonomy, recognition, material resources, job security, and exposure to demands.
Using it in research
The framework is a conceptual guide for occupational health research. It helps structure questions, organize variables, and interpret unequal psychosocial conditions without reducing them to individual accidents. Analytically, it is operationalized through intersectional multilevel analysis (I-MAIHDA).
- Locate position across sex, migration status, and occupational class.
- Map conditions: how demands, resources, recognition, and protection are patterned.
- Interpret vulnerability: how unequal conditions shape exposure to harm and health outcomes.