Professor Chris Warhurst

chris.warhurst@strath.ac.uk

• Professor of Labour Studies at the University of Strathclyde
• Co-Director of the Scottish Centre for Employment Research (SCER)
• Associate Research Fellow of the ESRC Centre for Skills, Knowledge and Organisational Performance (SKOPE)

As director and co-director of the Scottish Centre for Employment Research he has undertaken a large number of research projects for government, employers and trade unions in the private, public and voluntary sectors, including evaluations of the Scottish Union Learning Fund, Scottish student finances, the pay and work of Scottish classroom assistants, workplace barriers to learning in retail, and the gender pay gap in UK financial services. He also worked with SKOPE on the Russell Sage Foundation project on hotel room assistant job quality in the UK, US and mainland Europe. He has sat on a number of advisory groups for the Scottish Executive, Scottish Enterprise and the Joseph Rowntree Trust and contributed to the HM Treasury’s Leitch Review of skills.

His research interests focus on labour process and labour market developments and issues. More specifically he is interested in skill formation and skill development, supply, demand and deployment. Outwith SCER, his own current research focuses on aesthetic labour, creative work, human resource pedagogy and practice, ‘third place’ workplaces, the disconnection between labour process and labour market supply and demand, and making bad jobs better.

Chris has sole, co-authored and co-edited around a dozen books, including Work Less, Live More? (2008), Work and Employee Representation (2006), The Skills That Matter (2004), Emerging Human Resource Practices (2003), Anatomy of the New Scotland (2002), Tomorrow’s Scotland (2002) Looking Good, Sounding Right (2001) and Workplaces of the Future (1998) and published in academic journals in the UK and internationally, including in Administrative Science Quarterly; Economic and Industrial Democracy; Gender, Work and Organisation; Journal of Industrial Relations; Journal of Management Studies; Journal of Organizational Behavior; Non-Profit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly; Political Quarterly; Sociologia Del Lavora; Sociology; Work, Employment and Society. He was commissioning editor of the New Horizons public interest reports and was a co-founder of the Scottish think-tank Big Thinking. He is currently the co-editor of the BSA journal Work, Employment and Society and also the co-editor of the Palgrave book series ‘Critical Perspectives on Work and Employment’. He is currently co-editing briefing papers on skills and training in Scotland for Skills Development Scotland.