“Great work from Bristol University Press: Futures of Work is a really exciting new online magazine. THIS is how you do digital engagement as a publisher, building platforms which amplify and consolidate existing research networks. Other publishers should take note.” Mark Carrigan, University of Cambridge
Futures of Work is a blog offering radical and critical thinking on ongoing and emerging issues associated with work and employment.
Powered by Bristol University Press in collaboration with an editorial team at the University of Bristol.
Hosting long-form opinion pieces, debates and thought-provoking podcasts, this blog is a space for wide ranging debate on the multiple possible futures of work.
All of our articles, unless otherwise noted, can be republished for free, online or in print, under the CC BY-NC 4.0 licence.
Editorial Team
Vanessa Beck -Vanessa is Professor in Employment Studies at the University of Bristol. She is interested in individuals and groups at the margins of the labour market, including those who are unemployed or underemployed, and who experience multiple and complex barriers to (decent) employment. Her work centres on the interrelationship between individual experiences and social or structural contexts, with a particular focus on gender and age. She is currently working on an ESRC-funded project entitled: “A sociological investigation of underemployment and the lived experiences of underemployed workers”. In the past, she has undertaken extensive research into unemployment and redundancy, as well as the management of older workers, in particular in relation to menopause transitions in workplaces. Her research has been funded by the European Commission, the UK Government’s Equality Office, ACAS, the Independent Social Research Foundation and the ESRC. She publishes in journals such as Work, Employment and Society, Human Resource Management Journal, Organization, Education + Training, and the Journal of Education and Work.
Blandine Emilien
Blandine is a lecturer in Human Resource Management and the Future of Work at the University of Bristol Business School. Her academic interests lie with social actors’ experimentation with the creation, questioning and improvement of human resource management (HRM) practices across an array of industries. So far, her research has focused on work and employment conditions of business process outsourcing workers in the global south (Mauritius), HRM and employment relations in the aerospace industries of Canada and Mexico, and the rethinking of HRM practices pertaining to staffing, skill development and equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) in non-profit organisations such as trade unions in Canada and Spain. Over time, Blandine has also developed an ontological interest in less privileged workers, and this has led her to delve into the case of temporary migrant workers in Canada both as a researcher and an activist. Also multilingual, Blandine has developed much awareness to socio-cultural idiosyncrasies and differences in the various geographical contexts in which she has lived and worked. Blandine has published in English (for instance, in Work, Employment and Society), French (Relations Industrielles/Industrial Relations (RIIR) -Canada) and Spanish. Her concomitant interest in methodological innovation has led her towards film-based sociology, fiction writing and action-research with which she was brought to engage in an academic context in Montreal, Canada, before joining the University of Bristol business school.
Giorgos Gouzoulis – Giorgos is an Associate Professor in Human Resource Management in the Department of People in the School of Business and Management at Queen Mary University of London. Giorgos’ research focuses on industrial relations and issues around employee compensation, wage inequality, underemployment, union membership, and strike activity. His work has been published in leading academic journals like the British Journal of Industrial Relations, the Industrial Relations Journal, Economic and Industrial Democracy, the Socio-Economic Review, the Cambridge Journal of Economics, and Sociology of Health & Illness, among others. Giorgos is the treasurer of the British Universities Industrial Relations Association, Co-Editor in Chief of Work in the Global Economy and a member of the editorial board of the journal Work, Employment and Society.
Chris Pesterfield – Chris is a Lecturer in Management at the University of Bristol. His primary research interest is labour exploitation. There are two key aspects to this. The first relates to how labour exploitation can be understood as a set of practices within capitalist economies. The second interrogates attempts to respond to the presence of labour exploitation, for example through legislation or company actions. His work has been published in journals such as Capital & Class and the Journal of Business Ethics.