In this article, I suggest that transnational labour markets are characterized by their multi‐layered embeddedness, not only in national but also in transnational institutional settings. Hence, the national institutional factors formerly at the centre of sociological labour market theories insufficiently explain the newly emerging transnational labour markets. To account for the full complexity and institutional context of the latter, I propose an inductive theoretical approach to transnational labour markets and develop a research heuristic to instruct empirical studies about particular transnational labour markets and inductive theory building. This heuristic draws on analytical categories as developed by the new economic sociology of markets. The empirical example of the transnational labour market that matches eastern European workers to jobs in the German meat industry serves to illustrate how one can use this heuristic, which reveals some preliminary features of transnational labour markets compared with national ones, as well as some research gaps to be addressed by future studies.

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跨国劳动力市场理论化：基于新经济社会学的研究启发法

在本文中，我建议跨国劳动力市场的特点是其多层嵌入，不仅在国家内部，而且在跨国机构环境中也是如此。因此，以前处于社会学劳动力市场理论中心的国家制度因素不足以解释新兴的跨国劳动力市场。为了解决后者的全部复杂性和制度背景，我提出了一种针对跨国劳动力市场的归纳理论方法，并开发了一种研究启发法，以指导有关特定跨国劳动力市场和归纳理论构建的实证研究。这种启发式方法借鉴了新的市场经济社会学开发的分析类别。