MSCA Fellowship

Congratulations to Department of Social Policy PhD alumnus Tom Stephens who has been awarded €329,241 of funding by the EU Commission under its Horizon Europe programme, for a 2.5-year Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship. The evaluation score was 99.6/100.

The 'Work and Wellbeing in Europe' (WaWiE) project will be with Professor Janine Leschke, Professor in Political Economy of Labour Markets at Copenhagen Business School, and will involve 2 years in Copenhagen Business School, followed by a 6-month placement in Brussels, with research stays also with the German Institute of Economic Research (DIW) in Berlin and the Institute for Employment Research (IAB) in Nuremberg.

Work and Wellbeing in Europe [WaWiE]: What Policies Best Support Workers in the Context of Technology-Driven Labour Market Change?

Abstract:
"This project will undertake the first large-scale analysis of the effect job quality has on a comprehensive and objective set of measures of workers’ wellbeing. Using household survey survey data from the UK (Understanding Society) and Germany (Socio-Economic Panel), the project will build a cross-country longitudinal dataset tracking three aspects of peoples’ quality of life, drawing from inter-disciplinary literature. First, workers’ Quality of Work (QoW), based on the characteristics of the paid jobs they are doing; second, their wider family, household and personal circumstances (Conversion Factors); and third, their overall wellbeing, conceptualised as their choices over alternative opportunities inside and outside the labour market (their Capability Set) using measures of workers’ economic, social and cultural capital. This goes beyond the state-of-the-art because job quality indices only capture the first of these three - failing to measure the wider circumstances under which people access work; and relying predominantly on subjective measures of worker wellbeing such as job- or life- satisfaction. Using this innovative dataset, the project will then answer crucial questions about what policy measures in EU member states best enhance workers’ wellbeing in the context of rapid technological change. It will establish which job characteristics are associated with lower/higher objective wellbeing [RQ1; WP1]; identify how workers’ QoW and wellbeing differ for workers with similar characteristics in the UK and Germany, with a particular focus on workers’ exposed to technology-driven change [RQ2; WP2]; find out which policies best foster workers’ wellbeing, by exploiting differences in the labour market and policy context in the two countries [RQ3; WP3]; and finally, working with an inter-sectoral panel and in a Non-Academic Placement with the European Trade Union Institute, explore the practical policy and political economy implications of these findings [RQ4; WP4]."