Publications

Innovation is traditionally viewed as an activity which involves a small band of highly skilled workers. By examining the results of a British survey of employees, this article breaks with this approach. It makes two distinctive contributions. First, it provides new insights into the extent to which employees of all kinds come up with ideas…

This article presents new British evidence that suggests that cutting working hours at short notice is twice as prevalent as zero-hours contracts and triple the number of employees are very anxious about unexpected changes to their hours of work. The pay of these employees tends to be lower, work intensity higher, line management support weaker…

The government has accepted the Taylor Review‘s recommendation that it should report annually on job quality in the UK. This article argues that three principles need to be followed in choosing the right measures and shows how these principles have been used to create a short job quality quiz (www.howgoodismyjob.com).

Insecurity at work can take several forms – the risk of job loss, the difficulty of securing a replacement job with an equally good one, anxieties about the job being downgraded, worries about being treated badly at work, and sudden and unexpected changes to hours of work. This report examines the scale and distribution of…

Participation at work is an important determinant of personal well-being and is considered to be a key factor for enhancing motivation and productivity in technologically advanced economies. The report examines trends in different types of participation among British workers, some of the factors that were associated with them and the implications of participation for worker…

This report shows how the intensity with which people work while doing their jobs has changed in recent years.

Employees’ views about fairness at work are of central policy concern for their implications for personal well-being and for the desire to raise worker motivation to achieve higher productivity. This report examines beliefs about fairness among British workers and some of the factors that were important in affecting these beliefs.

Skilled jobs benefit workers and the economy alike. This report examines the evolution of job skills, the changing importance of post-graduate qualifications and gender gaps in job skills over the last 20 years in Britain. Skills trends are contrasted with faltering technical and organisational change.

Almost a decade after the financial crisis began, productivity growth has failed to recover to its pre-recession level. This report examines productivity growth from the workers’ perspective.

Job quality, or the promotion of good work, is a ‘hot topic’.  It has featured as a prominent element in three separate government reports published in the space of eight months.  This began with the publication of the Taylor Review of Modern Working Practices in July 2017.  One of its recommendations was that ‘more effort…