All in a day's work

It’s an undeniable truth that getting work right is as good for people as it is for the nation. Good work results in a healthy, fulfilled, safe and fairly paid workforce. It contributes to increasing productivity, better living standards and economic growth.

It's also true that discussions of ‘work’ in politics and the media have often been highly charged.

This is certainly the case today. Technological change, gender relations, Brexit and new models of working such as the gig economy are all factors that are shaping and re-shaping the world of work. In a University as large and diverse as Cambridge there is inevitably no single view on these issues and no unique approach to researching them.

While academics have been coming under increasing pressure for several decades now to disseminate their findings to policy makers and even to consider ways of monetising them for the benefit of companies, the first task of any researcher is how to frame a project in a way that will create new knowledge or understanding. Methodological innovation is the key to making an impact, initially in the academy, and then more widely.

If there is a common theme uniting the different stands of Cambridge-based research on ‘work’, this is it.

Researchers do not initiate projects simply to overturn conventional wisdom, but this is often what they end up doing, simply because few of the ideas or practices which are ‘taken for granted’ in everyday discourse can safely withstand this type of scrutiny.

One such idea is that governments can help promote economic growth by encouraging self-employment.

Rates of self-employment ebb and flow over the decades. In the EU, rates have been hovering around 10–15% of the workforce in most countries in the past few decades. But, in some of the least developed nations, up to 70% of the labour market consists of self-employed people.

Analysis based on face to face interviewing across a number of developed and developing countries suggests that the success of self-employment often depends on family ties, a factor neglected by policy makers. 

The research also shows that self-employed people are either as satisfied or, in many parts of the world (including the UK), even more satisfied with working life than their formally employed counterparts.    

Another piece of contemporary conventional wisdom is the claim that companies should invest in the emotional wellbeing of their employees to improve morale and performance.

Using of one of the largest datasets of its kind, researchers suggest that chill-out zones and free yoga classes are less helpful in this regard than decentralising managerial decision making and organising work in such a way that employees build enduring relationships with colleague and customers.

Another issue of pressing policy concern is Brexit. Research council funding has supported a major scheme of work, the UK in a Changing Europe programme, aimed at understanding the myriad different aspects of Brexit and its implications for British society and the economy.

Cambridge-based researchers have played a central role in this programme and in disseminating its findings. On this topic, which has so sharply divided the nation, the contribution that social science can make to an informed debate is needed more than ever, but is more than ever in question.

Research has shown that beliefs about migrant workers exploiting the benefits system have little basis in reality, whereas there is evidence for migration causing undercutting of wages and pressure on public services in some regions of the country; these are findings that demand a wider public hearing.

When the issue of Brexit is finally resolved, we will still be left with the dilemmas posed by technological change, which are at least as old as the industrial revolution that transformed Britain at the start of the modern age.