Director of IER, Chris Warhurst, chaired a panel in Brussels on 28 March to discuss the future of work. The panel was part of the end of project conference for Beyond 4.0.

The discussion focused on the limitations of Industry 4.0 and the opportunities for promoting Industry 5.0.

IER staff and PhD students participated virtually in Beyond 4.0’s second summer school, held again in San Sebastian in Spain. Beyond 4.0 is a Horizon 2020 funded project that examines the future of work and welfare in the digital age.

The summer school offered a mixture of themes: careers guidance for PhD students, plus research on the digital transformation of workplaces; regional responses to digitalisation; historical analysis of industrial transformations; and social policy contexts.

Among the 22 speakers, Professor Chris Warhurst and Dr Sally-Anne Barnes presented sessions during the Summer School. Two of IER’s PhD students Wafaa Elmezraoui and Gianni Anelli Lopez were among the 21 PhD students who participated in the event. Congratulations to Wafaa. Having ‘pitched’ her PhD topic in a poster session during the event she was awarded first prize.

Watch a short explanation of the summer school in this video.

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.

In March, IER Director Chris Warhurst was invited to give a talk to the ACAS East Midlands Conference on the role of good work in the future of work in the UK.

The focus was on the role of good work in post Covid economic recovery and renewal.

The Beyond 4.0 research project examining the future of work and welfare has just published a new policy brief on platform work. It is co-authored by Chris Mathieu of Lund University and Chris Warhurst of IER. It maps out key issues with the operation of the platform economy and offers recommendations for future policy development to better govern it. It arrives just as the European Parliament looks set to initiate new deliberation on this subject. Read more here.