Research projects

Overview Given recent societal and policy changes, the UK faces an increased need to know how the world of work has changed.  The overarching aim of the Skills and Employment Survey 2023 (SES2023) is to collect robust survey data on the skills and employment experiences of people aged 20-65 working in Britain in 2023. SES2023…

New Emerging Citizenship Regimes explores five citizenship ideal types (Pandemic, Algorithmic, Liquid, Metropolitan, and Stateless) stemming from critical/radical social innovation perspective by employing fieldwork action research in six specific city-regional cases. COVID-19 has hit European citizens dramatically, not only creating a general risk-driven environment encompassing a wide array of economic vulnerabilities but also exposing them…

Commencing in January 2020, WISERD is part of an ESRC funded collaboration called the Productivity Outcomes of Workplace Practice, Engagement and Learning (PrOPEL) Hub. Led by Strathclyde University, PrOPEL Hub brings together five recently funded ESRC investments working in the area of productivity.  The aim of PrOPEL Hub is to help boost productivity and wellbeing…

This is a project that is being undertaken by colleagues in Cardiff Business School and WISERD in collaboration with the Clean Clothes Campaign (CCC). It built on an earlier ESRC IAA Award which was completed in March 2019. The focus of our work is to improve and develop the database used by CCC to record and…

This is an international research project funded by the ESRC under the remit of the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF). It is a collaboration between researchers at Cardiff Business School and WISERD and our partners at Cividep-India. The research is distinctive in being a longitudinal, workplace-centred study of access to remedy at the grass roots…

The research investigates workplace the grievances of garment workers employed in factories in the city of Bangalore, south India. Specifically it examines access to remedy at the workplace, and seeks to illuminate local conditions against the backdrop of national and international forms of regulation.

WISERD researchers, Melanie Jones and Esgi Kaya have evaluated the size of the gender pay gap within UK public sector occupations such as teaching and nursing after they successfully secured a research grant from the Office of Manpower Economics (OME). The research has informed the work of the independent public sector pay review bodies. They used large…

Overview The Skills and Employment Survey (2017) collects data on what people do at work, what skills they use and how they work. The 2017 survey is the seventh in a series of studies which began in 1986. A total of 3,306 workers took part in the latest survey. These cross-sectional surveys provide the means…

Overview This project builds on previous WISERD research into geographical variations in trade union membership in Wales. (Beynon, Davies and Davies, 2012). The research programme derives from this analysis, which suggested that in South Wales collective understandings, rooted in an earlier period of unionisation, are spilling over into the contemporary period. This work was supported…

This project utilised a range of econometric approaches to analyse entrepreneurial activity, the growth in Social enterprise and the changing role of the third sector. Research focused on the early stages of entrepreneurial activity and also on the survival and performance of small businesses in Wales (and beyond) as a means to contribute to economic growth…

The overall aim of the project was to provide an analytical review of the research literature on graduate employability and skills, with due attention to the diversity of the approaches that have been adopted. In particular, the review was designed to draw out the implications of the general literature for the specific circumstances of Wales. It also…

In 2010 the UK coalition Government committed itself to an active policy of fiscal consolidation designed to ‘eliminate’ the structural deficit by the end of the current parliament (HM Budget, March 2011). As part of their consolidation plans the Government announced its intention to promote a rebalancing of the UK economy, away from public sector…

The UK gender Pay gap 1998-2013: What is the role of the public sector? The Quarterly Labour Force Survey was used to compare gender wage gap in the public and private sectors between 1998 and 2013 and to identify the contribution of the sectoral employment allocation to the overall gender pay gap. The study covered…

Pay determination and outcomes in the public sector Data from the Labour Force Survey was used to investigate public sector wage differential in the UK 1994 to 2012. In the first of a set of analyses, three separate sub-periods are considered in detail, each characterise broadly different government policy stances towards the public sector and different…

The project aimed to highlight the potential value of an important but currently underutilised dataset, the Welsh Local Labour Force Survey (WLLFS). The main aim was to provide new evidence relating to labour market transitions in Wales. In terms of the analysis we propose two separate pieces of research that both use the WLLFS to examine ‘at…

Overview In partnership with Old Bell 3 Ltd and IFF Research, WISERD undertook a survey of ERDF assisted businesses under the Convergence and Competitiveness Programmes for WEFO. The survey findings supplement existing Programme monitoring data to assess the effectiveness of the ERDF Enterprise, Business Finance, and R&D and Innovation Priorities. The survey also provided useful information to WEFO…

The Skills and Employment Survey (2012) collects data on what people do at work, what skills they use and how they work. It is the sixth in a series of representative sample surveys of workers in Britain stretching back over 30 years. These cross-sectional surveys provide the means to chart and explain the changing pattern of…

Overview This project was concerned with the impact on workers, their families and neighbourhoods of the closure of the Anglesey Aluminium (AA) smelter in September 2009, formerly one of the major employers in the Holyhead area. Previous studies of the impact of factory closure on local communities have focused on the individual impacts of redundancy as…

Overview The existence of a ‘brain drain’ of graduate labour from Wales has long been a focus of debate (for example, Drinkwater and Blackaby, 2004, c.f. Fevre, 2004). Welsh and English higher education and labour markets are interconnected (for example, Rees and Taylor, 2006) and Wales is a ‘loser’ region generating more undergraduates than it…