Our current projects include:

• Financial markets and HR: Achim Krausert, with Clint Chadwick at the University of Kansas as well as researchers from the CIPD, started a project examining whether, to what extent and how investors take into account HR-related information in evaluating companies – which has implications for companies’ incentives to make longer term investments in people.
• HRM and Legal consultancy: Deborah Dean, with Trevor Colling, of King’s College London, is working on a project which explores the nature of the increasing provision of HR services/advice by legal firms. A range of solicitors, barristers and HR professionals have been interviewed to date and the next phase of the project, which forms the basis of a funding bid, will interview in client and potential client organisations.
• HR and leveraged buyouts: Kim Hoque, with Nick Bacon, Cass, and Mike Wright, Imperial, has conducted research involving matching Centre for Management Buyout Research data into WERS 2011 to explore the impact of leveraged buyouts on job security, training, communication and consultation and broader industrial relations outcomes.
• Representation strategies of precarious workers: a British Academy-funded project, led by Guglielmo Meardi and involving Duncan Adam at Warwick, Melanie Simms at Leicester as well as research partners abroad, compared the representation patterns of the groups that suffered most during the economic crisis of 2008-09 in the UK, Germany and Italy. Despite the different industrial relations structures and economic conditions, in all three countries, trade union forms of representation emerged as more popular than new organisations or social movements.