Topic description and stories

Getting ‘work’ right is good for people and the nation. It contributes to increasing productivity, better living standards and economic growth.

One day of paid work a week is all we need to get mental health benefits of employment

19 June 2019

Latest research finds up to eight hours of paid work a week significantly boosts mental health and life satisfaction. However, researchers found little evidence that any more hours – including a full five-day week – provide further increases in wellbeing. 

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Coalbrookdale, Shropshire, by Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg in 1801

A real piece of work

16 Jun 2015

In 2003, researchers embarked on a project to piece together a picture of changes in British working life over the course of 600 years. The emerging...

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Creative Company Conference 2011

Acting ‘out of character’ in the workplace

20 Feb 2015

Look around your workplace – and ask yourself which colleagues you’d describe as extravert and which as introvert. Perhaps your most talkative...

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Can free movement of workers be stopped?

07 Nov 2014

'How can the government stem the tide of migrant workers coming to the UK?' This question has been asked with increasing vigour by those who perceive...

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Chinese migrant workers in Japan: behind the headlines

26 Aug 2014

Chinese migrant workers in Japan are more than passive victims of difficult work conditions and are able to use their own networks and provide mutual...

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I’ve been working like a dog: revisiting a 1960s study of the working class

10 Jul 2014

The Beatles' song A Hard Day’s Night was released 50 years ago today. Its runaway success in the charts overlapped with a major sociological study of...

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The consumer society is happy (for a while)

Zero-hours contracts are ‘tip of the iceberg’ of damaging shift work, say researchers

18 Apr 2014

New report shows that zero-hours contracts are only one of a wide number of flexible employment practices that are abused by managers - leading to...

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Rarely Seen in the US of A

When gender roles are reversed: equality and intimacy at home and in the workplace

07 Apr 2014

In a paper prepared for the workshop “Gender, Equality and Intimacy: (Un)comfortable Bedfellows?” at the Institute of Education today – Cambridge...

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When slacker is safer

17 Mar 2014

Professor Stefan Scholtes warns that exceeding the ‘tipping point’ can have serious consequences

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Yard of a tenement New York, c 1900

What 19th-century women really did

08 Mar 2014

In a talk on Monday (10 March, 2014) Sophie McGeevor (Faculty of History) will explain how her research into a collection of autobiographies by...

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Roppongi Stn, 5:40 AM

We ask the experts: are we working too hard?

06 Sep 2013

With rising competition for jobs, and increasing pressure to excel in the workplace, a healthy work-life balance is hard to achieve. The technology...

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"Centipede". The study investigated the experiences of Chinese women aged 26 to 34 who are scorned as “leftovers” because they are high-achievers who have failed to get married.

China's "leftovers" are rejects in a man's world

28 Feb 2013

In China, hysteria is growing about a rising number of so-called “leftover women”, who are highly successful but remain unmarried. A new study...

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Women on a bench

Tick, tick, tick: the demographic time bomb

03 Nov 2012

By 2032 a quarter of the British population will be over the age of 65. On November 3, a panel of economists, businessmen and social scientists will...

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