IER News & blogs

IER Doctoral Researcher Joanna Octavia was awarded third place at the 2021 CERIC Doctoral Conference at the Leeds University Business School on Friday, 21 May 2021. Joanna presented the preliminary findings of her PhD fieldwork, which focuses on the internet organising and mobilising efforts on platform-based motorcycle taxi drivers in Jakarta, Indonesia.

Held at Leeds' Centre for Employment Relations, Innovation and Change (CERIC), the theme for this year's doctoral conference was 'The Future of Work in a Post-Covid World'. A total of 28 papers presented at the conference covered a broad spectrum of disciplines related to: the impact of digitalisation on work and employment; inequalities in race, gender, class, (dis)ability in a post-Covid world; and the role of human resources management in a changing environment.

IER Director Chris Warhurst will be speaking at a webinar on Decent Work, Inclusion and Sustainability, organised by Dr Deirdre Hughes, OBE, Director DMH Associates. For more information on the webinar, held on Thursday, 28^th May, 14.00 – 15.00 hours, and registration details read here.

A webinar is being held on June 18th to showcase the findings of three new research projects.

In the first of these projects, Clare Lyonette from IER has been working with Professor Tracey Warren at the University of Nottingham and the Women's Budget Group to examine the specific impact of Covid-19 on working class women, funded by the ESRC.

As well as presentations from the three projects, the webinar will host a panel of academic and policy-focused discussants, including Mandu Reid from the Women's Equality Party and Nikki Pound from the TUC.

For more details about the event and registration read here.

IER and Coventry University undertook research into the contribution of creative freelancers to the economic and place-based impacts of the creative industries. The aim of the research was to develop new understandings of the role, contribution and challenges of creative freelance work – examining the experiences and different business models of creative freelancers. With the onset of the pandemic, the research also focused on the impact of COVID-19 on the work and lives of creative freelancers.

The findings from the research have been presented in a discussion paper published by Nesta's Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre (PEC). The discussion paper identifies how creative freelancers generate value in their immediate place and places, and presents different types of creative business models, encapsulating the diverse experiences of freelancers and their contribution to economy and society. It also identifies the policy implications of the analysis. The discussion paper is available here.

Along with Rand Europe colleague Christian von Stolk, IER Director Chris Warhurst gave a talk this year’s Cambridge Festival.

Promoting the drive to improve the healthiness of jobs, their talk – ‘Why work needs to shape up: redesigning jobs for better employee wellbeing’ – is part of their joint advocacy of improving the physical and mental healthiness of jobs.