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 Page 1 of 5 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 Page 2 of 5 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: Page 3 of 5 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? Page 4 of 5 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? Page 5 of 5