Chris Warhurst
Biographic Data
| ID | 249711 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Chris Warhurst |
| GIVEN NAMES | Chris |
| FAMILY NAME | Warhurst |
| SIGNATURE | WARHURST C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Strathclyde |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1432-1262 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 52 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 447 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 43 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 9 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Developing a Standard Measure of Job Quality
The UK government is concerned about job quality. However the lack of scientific consensus about measuring job quality hampers policy efforts to improve the quality of jobs. To address this problem, a standard measure was developed and adopted to report job quality by the UK's Office for National Statistics. This article outlines a replication study using a new dataset to assess the reliability and validity of this standard measure. The dataset c…
Jon Cruddas, The Dignity of Labour, and Matthew Taylor, Do We Have To Work? Delivering Good Work for All
The Oxford Handbook of Job Quality
This Handbook offers an interdisciplinary and international benchmark text for anyone wanting to understand job quality. Job quality matters and has long done so. Debate about the future of work today centres on the impact of the new digital technologies, compounding existing concerns about the restructuring of employment and, importantly, proliferation of poor-quality jobs, often within the context of neo-liberal hegemony since the 1980s and the…
Humanizing work in the digital age: Lessons from socio-technical systems and quality of working life initiatives
New and residual challenges related to digital technology, COVID-19, precarious employment and scientific management are a reminder of research published in the early years of Human Relations that laid the foundation for socio-technical systems theory and its later conceptual offspring, the quality of working life. Analysing the evolution, challenges, legacy and lessons of socio-technical systems and quality of working life, we develop guiding pr…
Manifesto for a new Quality of Working Life
Poor quality jobs and their negative consequences for worker wellbeing are frequently associated with Taylorised work and rising non-standard, often precarious, employment. Our manifesto offers a new approach to Quality of Working Life to improve worker wellbeing. In doing so, it outlines the need for a new measure of job quality that pays due attention to employment as well as work problems, and a new approach to practical reform that involves s…
Oxford Handbook of Job Quality
Building better futures: Decent work, inclusion and careers support services in the UK
The concepts of decent work, inclusion and supporting individuals to find pathways to learning and work opportunities present new opportunities and real challenges. Job security, roles and labour markets are changing rapidly. We focus on how the UK careers support landscape in each of the four home nations is changing in response to the pandemic. We argue that the quasi-market, experimental approach to careers provision in England has significant…
Decent work, inclusion and sustainability: A new era lies ahead
Over the last year, millions of people's lives have been disrupted as a result of the pandemic. The Covid-19 outbreak, first reported in Wuhan in China, has resulted in more than 105 m cases of con
Carré, F., & Tilly, C. (2017). Where Bad Jobs Are Better: Retail Jobs Across Countries and Companies
Aesthetic Labour
Occupations, the Missing Link? A New Theoretical and Methodological Approach to Product Markets, Skill and Pay
Drawing on research of Australian cafes, this article examines the link between product market strategies, skill and pay. Addressing the methodological problems within existing research, the findings not only suggest a new methodology for future research examining these linkages but also a new theoretical proposition about the linkages based on occupation rather than firm, industry or sector
Professional Skills
This chapter addresses the under-researched area of professional skills formation in a comparative perspective. The first part reviews the main disciplinary frameworks for analyzing the education and training of professionals. The second part develops a comparative political economy typology for categorizing varieties of professional skill formation systems. This section identifies national institutions of relevance for professional skills, which…
Pre-Employment Skill Formation in Australia and Germany
This chapter provides a critical analysis of the role that vocational education and training plays in preparing young people for the labour market in two contrasting systems – Australia and Germany. In Germany, this occurs mainly within the structure of the “dual system”. In Australia, it occurs within a system of comprehensive high schools, where vocational studies are located within the senior secondary certificates. In Australia, it also occur…
International Skill Flows and Migration
Migrants are increasingly skilled. Historically British emigration was disproportionately skilled and new comparative OECD data shows the continuing brain drain from Europe to the USA. However skilled migration is best understood as skilled mobility not migration: permanent settlement in a destination country is a limiting case within a multiplicity of movements exemplified by the international commuting of the financial services elite. Immigrati…
Projecting the Impact of Information Technology on Work and Skills in the 2030s
The research literature in computer science provides a way of understanding the growing capabilities of information technology (IT) and anticipating their future effect on work and skills. This chapter reviews a set of recent computer science articles to identify the IT capabilities that have been demonstrated in research settings. These capabilities are compared to information on occupational ability requirements to identify occupations that are…
The Oxford Handbook of Skills and Training
Skills and workforce development are at the heart of much research on work, employment and management. Equally policy makers and managers throughout the world often cling to skill, believing that better development of them is the answer to a seemingly expanding range of practical and policy challenges. But are they so important? To what extent can they make a difference for individuals, organisations and nations? How are the supply and - more imp…
Opportunity Knocks? The Possibilities and Levers for Improving Job Quality
This article focuses on demands and interventions to improve or maintain job quality. There is a need for better understanding of what can be done, by whom, and with what impacts. The article provides a framework for reflection focused on interventions within and outwith the workplace. Drawing on secondary data, it outlines the renewed policy and academic interest in job quality, examines the multilevel reasons for intervention and the factors th…
Oxford Handbook of Skills and Training
Skills and workforce development are at the heart of much research on work, employment and management. Policy makers and managers often consider the better development of skills to be the answer to a range of practical and policy challenges. This handbook sheds new light on all the major issues concerning skills and training today.
Higher education, graduate skills and the skills of graduates: The case of graduates as residential sales estate agents
The UK labour market is subject to significant graduatisation. Yet in the context of an over‐supply of graduates, little is known about the demand for and deployment of graduate skills in previously non‐graduate jobs. Moreover, there is little examination of where these skills are developed , save an assumption in higher education. Using interviews and questionnaire data from a study of British residential sales estate agents, this article explor…
Brexit: Understanding the socio-economic origins and consequencesThe Fault lines unveiled by BrexitMultiple economies: before and after BrexitAccidental tourists: Brexit and its toxic employment under…
The unprecedented geopolitical shift resulting from Brexit reflects deep socio-economic fault lines within and beyond the UK. In many ways foreshadowing the US presidential election of Donald Trump, Brexit brought to the surface and gave a public voice to socio-economic divisions that were deeply embedded, sometimes illogical, but until now had either been ignored or hushed out of ‘respectable’ public debate. This Discussion Forum emanates from a…
Role stretch’: Assessing the blurring of teaching and non‐teaching in the classroom assistant role in Scotland
With the increasing number of teaching and classroom assistants across the UK there is now much debate about what their role should be. In particular concerns have arisen about the extent to which they overstep the boundary from supporting teaching and learning into teaching pupils. This study assesses this issue within Scotland. It draws on a national survey of 2000 head teachers, teachers and classroom assistants and interviews with directors o…
The promised land? Why social inequalities are systemic in the creative industries
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to develop a more comprehensive understanding of why social inequalities and discrimination remain in the creative industries. Design/methodology/approach The paper synthesizes existing academic and industry research and data, with a particular focus on the creative media industries. Findings The paper reveals that existing understanding of the lack of diversity in the creative industries’ workforce is concept…
Knowledge Workers
Labor, Aesthetic
The challenge of job quality
Job quality is a timely issue because of its potential impact on individual, firm and national well-being. This renewed interest underscores the need for robust conceptualization of job quality. This article provides background to the renewed interest in job quality and, drawing on the contributions to the Special Issue, starts to map the dimensions of job quality, the factors that influence job quality, and the outcomes or impacts of job quality…
Employee experience of aesthetic labour in retail and hospitality
Interactive service job growth in the UK is significant.Analysis of labour within these services has tended to focus on employee attitudes, framed through emotional labour. Such analysis is not incorrect, just partial. Some employers also demand aesthetic labour, or employees with particular embodied capacities and attributes that appeal to the senses of customers. Reporting survey and focus group data, this article explores aesthetic labour as i…
Who's Got the Look?’ Emotional, Aesthetic and Sexualized Labour in Interactive Services
This article examines sexualized work and, more particularly, how and why, at the organizational level in interactive services, employees become sexualized labour. In doing so it assesses the thin line between selling a service and selling sexuality. The analysis revisits existing literature on emotional labour, organizational aesthetics and workplace sexuality, noting the common concern in this literature with employee's appearance or looks. The…
The challenge of job quality
Job quality is a timely issue because of its potential impact on individual, firm and national well-being. This renewed interest underscores the need for robust conceptualization of job quality. This article provides background to the renewed interest in job quality and, drawing on the contributions to the Special Issue, starts to map the dimensions of job quality, the factors that influence job quality, and the outcomes or impacts of job quality…
A new labour aristocracy? Aesthetic labour and routine interactive service
A re-conceptualization of the work and employment of interactive service and the workers who inhabit these jobs is required, not least because routine interactive services will provide most job growth in the UK for the foreseeable future (Wilson et al., 2004). This article initiates that task, arguing that it can be understood by reference to aesthetic labour, which is creating a potential new labour aristocracy and a reconfiguration of the servi…
On the front line
Work, Employment and Society is inviting contributions to a new section of the journal entitled 'On the Front Line'. Submissions should ordinarily consist of first person narratives to a maximum of 4000 words and include a short explanation that situates the narrative in its most appropriate contexts, whether organizational, sectoral or geographical, and briefly indicates how it engages with relevant sociological debates or developments. Submissi…
Mapping knowledge in work: Proxies or Practices
Governments and firms are exhorted, on pain of relegation to the lower divisions of (un)competitiveness, to embrace the idea of a knowledge economy (DTI, 1998; EC, 2004; Hamel and Prahalad, 1996; Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995; OECD, 2001a; Reich, 1993; World Bank, 2002). However, this mainstream academic and policy debate tends to be prescriptive and insensitive to real developments in the economy and workplace. It also fails to provide the necessary…
Opportunity Knocks? The Possibilities and Levers for Improving Job Quality
This article focuses on demands and interventions to improve or maintain job quality. There is a need for better understanding of what can be done, by whom, and with what impacts. The article provides a framework for reflection focused on interventions within and outwith the workplace. Drawing on secondary data, it outlines the renewed policy and academic interest in job quality, examines the multilevel reasons for intervention and the factors th…
Brexit: Understanding the socio-economic origins and consequencesThe Fault lines unveiled by BrexitMultiple economies: before and after BrexitAccidental tourists: Brexit and its toxic employment under…
The unprecedented geopolitical shift resulting from Brexit reflects deep socio-economic fault lines within and beyond the UK. In many ways foreshadowing the US presidential election of Donald Trump, Brexit brought to the surface and gave a public voice to socio-economic divisions that were deeply embedded, sometimes illogical, but until now had either been ignored or hushed out of ‘respectable’ public debate. This Discussion Forum emanates from a…
Manifesto for a new Quality of Working Life
Poor quality jobs and their negative consequences for worker wellbeing are frequently associated with Taylorised work and rising non-standard, often precarious, employment. Our manifesto offers a new approach to Quality of Working Life to improve worker wellbeing. In doing so, it outlines the need for a new measure of job quality that pays due attention to employment as well as work problems, and a new approach to practical reform that involves s…
What we know and what we need to know about graduate skills
The expansion of higher education has led to more graduates in the UK labour market. Despite government expectations, this expansion has not boosted national economic competitiveness. This article argues that current understanding of the impact of graduates' skills is limited by methodological and conceptual narrowness in current research and that a broader research agenda is required. This agenda needs to cover not just the supply but also the d…
From conception to consumption: Creativity and the missing managerial link
The paper argues that two sets of claims can be identified across the literatures—the first that creative work is the driving force of a ‘new economy’ (creative intensity). Second, that cultural industries have a special kind of creativity at its core—the aesthetic attributes of product and process (creative distinctiveness). After examining the literatures and evidence we conclude that little explanatory power resides in expanded conceptions of …
The National Minimum Wage, Low Pay and the UK Hotel Industry: The Case of Room Attendants
This article examines low pay and the national minimum wage in the UK hotel industry, focusing on the lowest remunerated workers in the industry - room attendants - who have hitherto been overlooked in studies of the industry. It draws on qualitative research from eight case studies and relates this material to other secondary data. By including employees' experience, it reveals the management and employment practices that have limited the effect…
IT jobs: Opportunities for all
This paper examines the opportunities for the unemployed to access information technology jobs. Based on original research, it indicates that, despite initial expectations about an expanding sector of high skill, high wage jobs, recent developments indicate a tight labour market, which has created barriers to these jobs for the unemployed
The weakest link? Product market strategies, skill and pay in the hotel industry
There is a widely held assumption that product market strategies, skill and pay are linked. Supportive evidence is typically drawn from manufacturing and using quantitative analyses. Emergent research of the link in services is ambivalent and has methodological limitations. This article addresses this weakness. It compares the skills and pay of room attendants in upper and mid-market hotels using qualitative research. It finds that the link is we…
Assumptions, Assertions and the Need for Evidence: Debugging Debates about Knowledge Workers
Despite growing interest in the knowledge economy, the work practice of its key workers has remained neglected. This article reviews the key sociological and managerial debates about ascendant knowledge workers. The authors argue that both debates assume, rather than empirically examine, changing work practices and through a leap of faith move on to discuss the enhanced class position of knowledge workers and the managerial challenges that they p…
Humanizing work in the digital age: Lessons from socio-technical systems and quality of working life initiatives
New and residual challenges related to digital technology, COVID-19, precarious employment and scientific management are a reminder of research published in the early years of Human Relations that laid the foundation for socio-technical systems theory and its later conceptual offspring, the quality of working life. Analysing the evolution, challenges, legacy and lessons of socio-technical systems and quality of working life, we develop guiding pr…
The knowledge economy, skills and government labour market intervention
The development of the knowledge economy is common policy across all levels of government across the advanced economies. This article recognises the weaknesses inherent in this policy but, based on a critical analysis of the skill needs and skill formation of this economy, it outlines how, if such a policy is to be pursued, it might be better achieved. It first argues that government policy has become centred on an orthodoxy featuring a particula…
Higher education, graduate skills and the skills of graduates: The case of graduates as residential sales estate agents
The UK labour market is subject to significant graduatisation. Yet in the context of an over‐supply of graduates, little is known about the demand for and deployment of graduate skills in previously non‐graduate jobs. Moreover, there is little examination of where these skills are developed , save an assumption in higher education. Using interviews and questionnaire data from a study of British residential sales estate agents, this article explor…
New Scotland? Policy, Parties and Institutions
Analyses the extent to which the establishment of the Scottish parliament means distinctively new Scottish policies, government and institutions
Developing a Standard Measure of Job Quality
The UK government is concerned about job quality. However the lack of scientific consensus about measuring job quality hampers policy efforts to improve the quality of jobs. To address this problem, a standard measure was developed and adopted to report job quality by the UK's Office for National Statistics. This article outlines a replication study using a new dataset to assess the reliability and validity of this standard measure. The dataset c…
High Society in a Workers' Society: Work, Community and Kibbutz
The recent attention paid to corporate culture by managerial gurus has revived interest in the relationship between occupation and community, particularly the influence of social organisation upon work experience. Examination of kibbutz industry supplements these contemporary debates by extending the analysis into a form of work organisation formally devoid of managerial control, instead determined by those informal social relations identified by…
Catherine Hakim, Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital
High Society in a Workers' Society: Work, Community and Kibbutz
The recent attention paid to corporate culture by managerial gurus has revived interest in the relationship between occupation and community, particularly the influence of social organisation upon work experience. Examination of kibbutz industry supplements these contemporary debates by extending the analysis into a form of work organisation formally devoid of managerial control, instead determined by those informal social relations identified by…
Workplaces of the Future
Workplaces of the Future examines change in workplace structures and relations and considers what the contemporary workplace looks like. The book contains a wide range of issues and examples from factory and office, manual and non-manual work, public and private sector that illustrate the nature of the future of work. Contributions are drawn from the key names in this field and include international material.
Workplaces of the Future
Workplaces of the Future examines change in workplace structures and relations and considers what the contemporary workplace looks like. The book contains a wide range of issues and examples from fact
Aesthetic Labour in Interactive Service Work: Some Case Study Evidence from the ‘New’ Glasgow
This article discusses the aesthetic labour in interactive service work: some case study evidence from the 'new' Glasgow.
New Scotland? Policy, Parties and Institutions
Analyses the extent to which the establishment of the Scottish parliament means distinctively new Scottish policies, government and institutions
Bringing in the Excluded? Aesthetic labour, skills and training in the 'new' economy
Debates about the nature of work, employment and skill formation in the 'new' economy have, to date, neglected the norton of 'aesthetic labour'. Identification by us of this 'new' form of labour provides the basis to review some of the implications in relation to skill acquisition and usage, current training provision and social exclusion as it effects an area of the economy that is predicted to have massive jobs growth. Thus, the article briefly…
The Labour of Aesthetics and the Aesthetics of Organization
This article develops the conceptualization and analysis of aesthetic labour in two parts. The first part focuses on conceptualizing aesthetic labour. We critically revisit the emotional labour literature, arguing that the analysis of interactive service work is impeded by the way in which its corporeal aspects are retired and that, by shifting the focus from emotional to aesthetic labour, we are able to recuperate the embodied character of servi…
Lone Parents, the New Deal and the Opportunities and Barriers to Retail Employment
The number of lone parents has increased considerably in recent years and the UK Labour Government has reacted by encouraging them to move from welfare and into work. This group face multi-dimensional and complex barriers to employment that the government has attempted to rectify through the introduction of various initiatives such as the National Childcare Strategy, the Working Families Tax Credit and the New Deal. The availability of appropriat…
IT jobs: Opportunities for all
This paper examines the opportunities for the unemployed to access information technology jobs. Based on original research, it indicates that, despite initial expectations about an expanding sector of high skill, high wage jobs, recent developments indicate a tight labour market, which has created barriers to these jobs for the unemployed
Mapping knowledge in work: Proxies or Practices
Governments and firms are exhorted, on pain of relegation to the lower divisions of (un)competitiveness, to embrace the idea of a knowledge economy (DTI, 1998; EC, 2004; Hamel and Prahalad, 1996; Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995; OECD, 2001a; Reich, 1993; World Bank, 2002). However, this mainstream academic and policy debate tends to be prescriptive and insensitive to real developments in the economy and workplace. It also fails to provide the necessary…
From conception to consumption: Creativity and the missing managerial link
The paper argues that two sets of claims can be identified across the literatures—the first that creative work is the driving force of a ‘new economy’ (creative intensity). Second, that cultural industries have a special kind of creativity at its core—the aesthetic attributes of product and process (creative distinctiveness). After examining the literatures and evidence we conclude that little explanatory power resides in expanded conceptions of …
A new labour aristocracy? Aesthetic labour and routine interactive service
A re-conceptualization of the work and employment of interactive service and the workers who inhabit these jobs is required, not least because routine interactive services will provide most job growth in the UK for the foreseeable future (Wilson et al., 2004). This article initiates that task, arguing that it can be understood by reference to aesthetic labour, which is creating a potential new labour aristocracy and a reconfiguration of the servi…
Employee experience of aesthetic labour in retail and hospitality
Interactive service job growth in the UK is significant.Analysis of labour within these services has tended to focus on employee attitudes, framed through emotional labour. Such analysis is not incorrect, just partial. Some employers also demand aesthetic labour, or employees with particular embodied capacities and attributes that appeal to the senses of customers. Reporting survey and focus group data, this article explores aesthetic labour as i…
Work Less, Live More: Critical Analysis of the Work-Life Boundary
Work Less, Live More? refocuses the debate from how we balance life and work to the increasingly ambiguous point where they meet. Leading scholars present international research to demonstrate the effects of this shift. Case studies include, amongst others, call centre workers, hairstylists and even professional athletes. Authoritative yet accessible, Work Less, Live More? investigates dramatic changes at the heart of Human Resource Management, S…
The knowledge economy, skills and government labour market intervention
The development of the knowledge economy is common policy across all levels of government across the advanced economies. This article recognises the weaknesses inherent in this policy but, based on a critical analysis of the skill needs and skill formation of this economy, it outlines how, if such a policy is to be pursued, it might be better achieved. It first argues that government policy has become centred on an orthodoxy featuring a particula…
The National Minimum Wage, Low Pay and the UK Hotel Industry: The Case of Room Attendants
This article examines low pay and the national minimum wage in the UK hotel industry, focusing on the lowest remunerated workers in the industry - room attendants - who have hitherto been overlooked in studies of the industry. It draws on qualitative research from eight case studies and relates this material to other secondary data. By including employees' experience, it reveals the management and employment practices that have limited the effect…
Assumptions, Assertions and the Need for Evidence: Debugging Debates about Knowledge Workers
Despite growing interest in the knowledge economy, the work practice of its key workers has remained neglected. This article reviews the key sociological and managerial debates about ascendant knowledge workers. The authors argue that both debates assume, rather than empirically examine, changing work practices and through a leap of faith move on to discuss the enhanced class position of knowledge workers and the managerial challenges that they p…
From Conception to Consumption: Creativity and the Missing Managerial Link
Who's Got the Look?’ Emotional, Aesthetic and Sexualized Labour in Interactive Services
This article examines sexualized work and, more particularly, how and why, at the organizational level in interactive services, employees become sexualized labour. In doing so it assesses the thin line between selling a service and selling sexuality. The analysis revisits existing literature on emotional labour, organizational aesthetics and workplace sexuality, noting the common concern in this literature with employee's appearance or looks. The…
On the front line
Work, Employment and Society is inviting contributions to a new section of the journal entitled 'On the Front Line'. Submissions should ordinarily consist of first person narratives to a maximum of 4000 words and include a short explanation that situates the narrative in its most appropriate contexts, whether organizational, sectoral or geographical, and briefly indicates how it engages with relevant sociological debates or developments. Submissi…
E-specials editorial and call for tenders
Human Relations special issue call for papers Understanding job quality
Never Good Enough: Health Care Workers and the False Promise of Job Training
What every worker wants? Evidence about employee demand for learning
In order to boost learning, recent UK governments have invested in trade union‐led workplace learning. Investing in the supply of learning is useful but ignores the demand for learning by workers, about which there is little research. This paper addresses this lacunae by analysing worker demand for learning, which workers want learning, what learning is demanded and why, and what factors might best lever learning. Data come from two surveys of po…
Catherine Hakim, Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital
Political science (31 works) · Sociology (31 works) · Economics (23 works) · Business (21 works) · Employment and Welfare Studies (21 works) · Public relations (19 works) · Computer Science (18 works) · Engineering (18 works) · Psychology (17 works) · Digital Economy and Work Transformation (15 works)