IER News & blogs

IER is part of the Warwick partner of the newly announced ESRC-funded Productivity Institute.

The Institute’s goal is to make long-term policy recommendations to improve the UK’s productivity. One key task is to help solve the UK’s longstanding ‘productivity puzzle’. Another is to improve productivity and living standards as the economy recovers from COVID-19.

Warwick’s involvement is led by Professor Nigel Driffield of Warwick Business School (WBS). Warwick is one of eight partner institutions involved in the research project. Its Managing Director is Professor Bart van Ark of the University of Manchester.

In launching the Institute, UK Government Minister for Science Amanda Solloway said: ‘Improving productivity is central to driving forward our long-term economic recovery and ensuring that we level up wages and living standards across every part of the UK,’ continuing that the new funding ‘will bring together the very best of our researchers, boosting our understanding of the different drivers of productivity’.

The other partner institutions are the University of Cambridge, the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, University of Glasgow, University of Sheffield, King's College London, Queen's University Belfast and Cardiff University.

First details of the Productivity Institute can be found here.

Director of IER, Chris Warhurst, gave a keynote talk in August on the need for governments to develop a balanced economic recovery and growth policy that

The talk – ‘Keeping the faith: Covid, job quality and workplace management practices’ – was delivered to the Cedefop, Eurofound and IZA Conference on Workplace and Management Practices on 21 August 2020 promotes both job creation and job quality in the face of the looming jobs crisis post-Covid.

As part of the ESRC Global Challenges Research Funded project ‘Inequalities and skills acquisition in young people’, the IER research team has designed and delivered research methods training to students working towards a Post Graduate Diploma in (Rural) Management at the Xavier Institute of Social Service (XISS) in Ranchi, India.

The three online workshops took place on 17-18th August with more than 50 students participating.

As a follow-up to the training sessions students are invited to enrol on a University of Warwick Moodle, where they can access relevant resources and work on a group assignment to practise what they have learnt in the workshops.

Working Futures 2017-2027 projections for the Economic Regions of Wales are now available. Read the report, published by the Welsh government, here and access the Excel workbooks from the sub-regional projections link here.

Please note that these projections were created when it was expected there would be a negotiated Brexit and before the Covid-19 pandemic, which may result in considerable disruption to the UK and world economic system.

A new book on aesthetic labour by IER’s Chris Warhurst and his co-author Dennis Nickson of Strathclyde University has now been published by Sage.

Drawing on research by the authors, the book examines the hiring and management of workers based on their looks and the consequence for workers who fail companies’ looks policies.