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Alliance Manchester Business School PhD Scholarship
Just Work: Challenges to Developing and Sustaining Decent
Work
EWERC and FairWRC Research Centres
Alliance Manchester Business School, Faculty of Humanities
University of Manchester
COMMENCING SEPTEMBER 2016
Two full-time PhD research scholarships, including stipend and tuition fee costs, are available for
September 2016. The scholarships are one part of a wider research programme on ‘Just Work’,
funded by the Alliance MBS Strategic Investment Fund over three years. The two positions are
available to UK and EU students with a relevant Masters qualification and who have outstanding
potential as a researcher in the field of employment studies.
Just Work project brief:
The project aims to produce theoretically compelling and insightful empirical analyses of the
challenges facing the development and sustaining of ‘just work’ in the UK and more specifically in
the Greater Manchester area. The concern is that the changes to employment relations may prove
incompatible with the long-term capacities of UK-based organisations to develop productive,
dignified and sustainable work. Drawing on a wide range of interdisciplinary research, the project
will engage with a diverse set of employing organisations located in the Greater Manchester area to
explore their varying responses to changing regulatory, economic, political and technological
conditions and the implications of these developments for the future of just work.
Four key themes will be investigated: i) the impact of changing technologies and economic
conditions on the restructuring of work (e.g. new work practices, project-based working, creative
industries, self-employment); ii) the prospects for more inclusive labour markets in light of
employer responses to an increasingly diverse workforce (e.g. reflecting varied life courses, care
responsibilities, careers and employability); iii) the capacity of existing regulatory mechanisms to
cope with challenges arising from the global business environment (e.g. regulating the use of
precarious employment contracts, ZHCs, bogus self-employed); and iv) the roles of managers,
unions and workers in constructing and addressing questions of dignity and fairness in the
workplace in a context of change (e.g. issues of employee engagement, anti-harassment measures,
living wages and work-life balance). All four themes will draw on an integrated qualitative dataset
consisting of rich organisational case studies in the North West region of England, along with
interviews with those on the margins of formal employment, secondary data analysis and, where
relevant, comparative analysis.
PhD research design:
The two successful candidates will be given a degree of autonomy to develop their research,
although it will need to link with and feed into the wider Just Work research project. Each candidate
should therefore prepare a PhD proposal at application stage that elaborates on one or more of the
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four key themes described above. It is very likely the proposal will draw on relevant international
literature in one or more of the fields of human resource management, industrial relations,
comparative employment systems and work psychology.
We believe these two Just Work PhD scholarships offer an excellent opportunity for a candidate of
exceptional promise to join a successful team of academics and to contribute to a stimulating
research environment. The successful candidate would become a research member of the two
research centres, EWERC and FairWRC, as well as a member of the MBS division, People,
Management and Organisation. Each candidate will have a first and second supervisor, selected
from the wider team of academic staff associated with the Just Work research project according to
relevance of specialist research expertise.
For a more detailed description of the two research centres please
http://www.research.mbs.ac.uk/ewerc/ and http://www.mbsresearch.mbs.ac.uk/fairwrc/
visit
For any questions please contact Damian Grimshaw (damian.grimshaw@mbs.ac.uk), Helge Hoel
(helge.hoel@mbs.ac.uk), Miguel Martinez Lucio (miguel.martinezlucio@mbs.ac.uk) or Jill Rubery
(jill.rubery@mbs.ac.uk).
Applications:
The successful candidate will be expected to satisfy the requirements of the MBS PhD programme
(academic qualifications and English language proficiency).
To apply for the studentship, please submit an online application for the full-time PhD Business &
Management programme via http://www.mbs.ac.uk/programmes/phd/. The application deadline is
10th February 2016. Interviews will be conducted in the week commencing 4th March 2016. You
should indicate (in your application form) that you are applying for the PhD Scholarship on Just
Work: Challenges to Developing and Sustaining Decent Work.
***
Further details of research centres and the Just Work project
The successful PhD applicants would work under the umbrella of EWERC and FairWRC, two
leading research centres with strong reputations among academic peers, policy bodies (UK and
international) and practitioners in the areas of work, employment and organisation. Both centres
make major contributions to the University of Manchester’s research and social responsibility
agendas. Moreover, in forthcoming years both centres seek to expand their contributions to new
inter-disciplinary understandings of the changing organisational, technological and employment
contexts, to develop improved measures (qualitative and quantitative) of decent work, and to initiate
the formation of a leading research, capacity-building and policy-focused institute of employment
research.
The Just Work research project is an ambitious three-year programme of innovative, interdisciplinary research that seeks to investigate the challenges to developing and sustaining decent
work. It aims to produce theoretically compelling and insightful empirical analyses of the
challenges facing the development and sustaining of ‘just work’ in the UK and more specifically in
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the Greater Manchester area. Extant social science research highlights five major challenges: labour
market reforms that are reducing the security of employment relations and increasing employer
prerogative (Appelbaum 2012); the polarising effects of new technologies -from labour substitution
and deskilling to ‘winner-takes all’ labour markets (Acemoglu et al. 2012; Lazonick & Mazzacato
2013); the uncertain gender, sexuality, disability and age-related effects of a radical reshaping of the
UK’s social model, including welfare, citizenship and pension rights (Vaughan-Whitehead 2015);
multiple new forms of conflict, harassment, discrimination and unfair practices in the workplace,
especially towards vulnerable workers (Anderson and Ruhs 2012); and new insecurities and
inequalities caused by the fragile positioning of many UK businesses in global value chains (Gereffi
et al. 2005; Newsome et al. 2015).
To date, there is no systematic analysis of how these complex and inter-related challenges
influence management practices and worker experiences that together shape prospects for
enhancing ‘just work’ in Britain. What is needed is a new narrative that addresses the way
organisations can sustain more ethical employment strategies in the face of a fragile and fastchanging environment (e.g. see Guest 2000, Cascio 2002). EWERC and FairWRC researchers have
been working with a range of organisations, including the ILO, TUC, European Commission and
UK government departments, in their efforts to identify routes to more decent work and to generate
greater security for the most vulnerable. Our alliance with the ILO, in particular, will enable us to
extend new methodological approaches to the monitoring and analyses of decent work and ensure a
global reach for our findings. The thesis of this research programme is that against a backdrop of
changing regulatory, economic, political and technological conditions, managers are devising new
social contracts in the workplace, which are potentially enabling and hindering the long-term
capacities of UK organisations to develop productive, dignified and sustainable work -captured in
this research programme by the phrase ‘just work’.
The overarching methodology will be to develop a set of common research resources which will be
explored and developed by multidisciplinary teams investigating four linked but distinctive research
questions. The common data base will include:
i) A qualitative data-set of organisational case studies to investigate a range of challenges for
equality, fairness and sustainability in the workplace. It will be designed as the first stage of
an innovative longitudinal series (with subsequent stages funded externally). The sample of
organisations will focus on the North West economy (in a global context) and feed into
research on ‘the northern powerhouse’;
ii) A set of qualitative interviews with civil society organisations/ public agencies and
individuals excluded or on the margins of formal employment, identified through Job Clubs,
agencies or community groups (e.g. migrants, disabled, youth);
iii) Secondary data analysis, including longitudinal panel analysis and statistical modelling to
understand employment trends (e.g. careers, pay, working-time, non-standard employment,
unemployment, gender and age composition). Datasets include the Workplace Employment
Relations Survey, Labour Force Survey, Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings;
iv) International comparative analysis (policy framework evaluations and secondary data
analysis) to disentangle the systemic and societal conditions shaping the capacities of the
UK to sustain just work.
The data collection and analysis will be guided by four specific research questions linked to the
common data base. Each question responds to the challenges described above and builds on
EWERC and FairWRC expertise, as well as other linked-in UoM and external colleagues:
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Q1: How are organisations in the North West restructuring their activities and work/employment
practices in the context of changing technologies and changed economic conditions?
Key problems:
 How do varying levels of investment in technology and diverse skill sets in the workplace
influence management efforts to enhance productivity?
 What types of new technologies in the manufacturing and business services sectors support
and/or constrain work practices and how and why do these vary by occupational status?
 How successful is the North West as a region for creative and IT industries, and to what
extent does this rely on small-scale operations with a predominance of self-employed and
project-based work as opposed to directly employed staff with permanent contracts?
Q2: How are employers responding to the increasingly diverse workforce (reflecting varied life
courses, care responsibilities, careers, skills and employability)? What are the prospects for the
development and promotion of inclusive labour markets?
Key problems:
 How is the extended working life to meet the demographic challenge to be achieved? How
can age discrimination by employers be challenged?
 What accommodation is being made for the growing and more complex care responsibilities
among the workforce, due to more diversity in families and changing gender division of
labour?
 To what extent is more flexible and insecure employment creating higher risks of
unemployment/ career re-orientation?
 How are the diverse needs of those under greater pressure to work (e.g. disabled, single
parents) being accommodated at the point of recruitment and career development?
 Is there an increasing problem of matching skills/ education of the workforce to available
jobs?
Q3: What new institutions are needed to enforce fair rights and responsibilities at work given the
changing global business environment and regulatory capacity of the state?
Key problems:
 How do global business strategies (especially offshoring and positioning in global
production networks) impact on the character of the employment relationship and firms’
productive and innovative capabilities?
 What new enforcement institutions are required (local, national, pan-national) in a context
where employers are able and willing to escape and defy labour standards by drawing on a
wider range of employment types (zero hours, bogus self-employed, informal contracts)?
 How are social actors (especially the state, employers and workers) responding to new
challenges to manage the consequences of rising inequality and precarity in the labour
market?
Q4: How are questions of dignity and fairness understood by different actors (managers, unions,
workers) in the workplace and how do these connect (or not) with wider societal norms?
Key problems:
 How do management and workers engage with and comprehend the changing context of
work, and what are the implications of their different interpretations and priorities for their
organisations?
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

What are the connections (and disconnections) between narratives of restructuring and
change during austerity on the one hand and, on the other, new approaches towards ethical
employment practices (such as living wages, employee engagement, work-life balance)?
What are the new options and foci for worker participation and what role can it play in
developing alternative routes to organisational change?
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