Category Archives: Blog

WiSET/WFRC Campbell Lecture: So who was Ishbel Campbell?

One month today, WiSET will be hosting the annual Campbell Lecture, in celebration of women in STEM subjects. This year’s double bill is co-sponsored by the WFRC, but it’s surprisingly hard to find information on who Ishbel Campbell was, and why we have a lecture named after her. WFRC coordinator Jo Corsi decided to find out more.

Ishbel Grace MacNaughton Campbell was the 9^th child of Reverend John Campbell and Elizabeth Balfour Renwick, of Newtonmore, Scotland. [1] She was a pioneering chemist, who spent much of her academic life at the University of Southampton, and can be considered to be a fantastic influence on young chemistry students (particularly female students) during her time here.

Ish, as she was known, was a science student at the University of St Andrews from 1923 – 1927, and graduated with First Class Honours. Following this she was able to take up a place as a research student, with the support of a Carnegie Fellowship. Her PhD was awarded in 1931, although she did not attend graduation as she was at that time working at Cornell University, funded by a Commonwealth Fellowship [2] (one of the first awarded to a woman,[3] now known as a Harkness Fellowship [4]).

After a brief period at Bedford College, which was the first higher education college for women in Britain, Ish joined the Chemistry department at Southampton in 1938. [3] Whilst at Southampton she was responsible for teaching organic chemistry, [5] as well as undertaking her own research. She is most well-known for her work on organic compounds of the Group V elements, [6] in days before modern spectroscopic techniques were available. Former PhD student, Martin Hocking recalls: “Ish was experimentally well known for her ability to coax more-or-less pure crystals of a new substance from tiny amounts of solution of an unlikely looking, gluey reaction product. It was rumoured that her success was the beneficiary of traces of her cigarette ash that provided nuclei in the crystallization test tube to help initiate the crystallization process aided by temperature changes and by scratching the side of the tube with a glass rod.” [3]

Ish was popular with her students, who remember a caring and supportive lecturer. Brain Halton, Emeritus Professor of Chemistry at the Victoria University of Wellington recalls: “Ishbel Campbell waited with us outside the examination hall checking that we were all there and wishing us the best. If one of a class failed to appear, she would promptly rush away to bring the errant being in”. [5]

Ish was physically active, and is known to have enjoyed long walks in the hills around Southampton. She also played tennis into her 80s, [3] in addition to representing the University of St Andrews as an undergraduate. [2] She was a regular sight at the University well after her retirement, with Hocking recalling that she never really retired: “Long after her official retirement Ish enthusiastically gave us a tour of the new medical faculty at Southampton and where she had volunteered to teach courses in chemistry to new medical students. ‘It keeps me young’ she said, and it certainly worked!”. [3]

After her arrival at the University of Southampton, Ish lived in Highfield for the remainder of her life, first in Glebe Court, [7] and later in Orchards way. Ish was elected Fellow of the Chemical Society in 1940, [7] and was later promoted to Reader. [6] Ish passed away at a residential home in Blenheim Avenue, Southampton in October 1997, at 91 years of age. [8]

Today, there are few reminders on campus of a woman who spent well over 50 years at the University of Southampton. The undergraduate teaching facilities on level 5 of the Chemistry building are named the Campbell Laboratory, and are situated where her own research would have taken place. [4] On March 19th, we will celebrate diversity with the annual Campbell lecture, hosted by WiSET, with speakers Curt Rice and Athene Donald. I hope a few people will take a minute to think of the “slight, but physically tough and proud Scottish spinster” [3] in whose name we are gathering.

Tickets to the lecture are available (for free) through Eventbrite.

References:

Family Search Community Trees, accessed 10/02/2014
The McNaughtons and the University of St Andrews, Alasdair McNaughton, accessed 10/02/2014
Rayner-Canham, M. and G., (2008) Chemistry Was Their Life: Pioneering British Women Chemists, 1880-1949, London: Imperial College Press
Records of Harkness Fellowships of the Commonwealth Fund: Australian Division, accessed 10/02/204
From Coronation Street to Consummate Chemist, Brian Halton, accessed 10/02/2014
Chem. Brit., April 1998, 34, 72
Proc. Chem. Soc., 1940, 10
The London Gazette, 23^rd February 1998, accessed 10/02/2014

With thanks to Geoff and Marelene Rayner-Canham for sharing their notes.

Work Futures for Older Workers

This edition of the Work Thought Blog was contributed by WFRC chair Susan Halford.

As the 21^st century unfolds, it is rapidly becoming clear that most of us – in the West at least – will have to stretch our working lives far further into old age than the recently retiring generations. The steps taken by governments, employers and financial institutions to deal with the ongoing pensions’ crisis means that most of us will simply not be able to afford to retire in our early or mid-60s. Meanwhile, and in any case, the ageing demography of Western nations will demand that older workers stay in the labour market longer to fuel the emergent recovery and beyond.

Nowhere are the demands for older workers going to be more keenly felt than in the healthcare sector, where the conditions described above are greatly exacerbated by the needs of an ageing population for services and care. In short there’s a double whammy: an ageing workforce must meet the demands of an ageing population. To make matters worse, the healthcare sector currently has one of the worst records for long-term sickness and highest rates of early retirement of any sector in the labour market. It’s a triple whammy.

More generally, one thing is clear: we cannot continue to provide healthcare services in the way we have been doing. Whilst the precise solutions vary, there is widespread recognition that the balance between primary and community care must shift, so that fewer people are treated in expensive hospital beds, and that the traditional boundaries between professions and organizations must be breached to enable more flexible, joined up services. And new technologies are being introduced to underpin these changes, promising improved information, that can be used to manage complex patient trajectories, across multiple boundaries and provide detailed management information from which further lessons can be learnt and efficiency improvements made. But here’s the paradox: research across a range of disciplines suggests that the prevalence of early retirements rises in those organizations with the highest levels of change, particularly change linked to technical innovation. To put it bluntly: we have a looming workforce crisis in public healthcare, that will lead to major social crisis if we can’t resolve it, and current changes designed to secure the future of the health care system may only make things worse!

So it is rather important that we begin to unpick the dynamics of this. What is the relationship between organizational change and early retirements? Is this inevitable? And are there ways that we might intervene? The answer depends on how we understand age and ageing. If, as some research has suggested, older workers are simply more conservative and resistant to learning or change then we have a problem and, in healthcare especially, one that may be exaggerated by the physical demands of clinical work. However, recent research by WFRC in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Tromsø suggests a rather different explanation. This three year project with doctors and nurses over 50 years old, including some in retirement, at two large University hospitals in Norway concluded that it is not age per se that leads to early retirement but rather the conditions of work and organization of the workplace that leads to staff feeling under-valued, out-of step and incapable. It is not age that makes these workers resistant to change; its change – and the way it is (mis)managed – that makes these workers feel old. Feeling old, often for the first time, leads to thoughts of retirement. In particular, changes to the organization of work may make certain skills redundant, whilst staff are sometimes expected to just pick up new skills with very little training (especially related to the use of digital systems). Furthermore, the continued organization of working hours around the standard shift pattern can make the work too much for those with physical limitations, as well as those with domestic responsibilities (ageing parents can be as much of a conflicting demand for time and energy as children, but few employers are willing to recognise this). These points are underscored by the many cases that were found in the research where older workers were happily staying in healthcare work. These were the niches where older workers skills were still valued, where training and support was given, and where line managers made special arrangements to enable appropriate working hours and responsibilities (albeit ‘below the radar’ of senior managers). Notably, the research found that working conditions for nurses were far more likely to produce age than those for doctors reflecting – perhaps – the greater autonomy and higher status of the medical profession and the associated capacity to achieve concessions e.g. reduced hours. Note too the gendering of these professions.

Overall then the challenges of an ageing workforce are not primarily about age, in and of itself, they are about how we design work, how we structure our workplaces and what we expect of our staff. Whilst these points may be very familiar in relation to previous debates about gender at work, to date we have barely scratched the surface in thinking about them in relation to age and ageing. Now is the time to so, to support those of us who must continue working into later years and to ensure that we retain a skilled and committed workforce to care for all of us into the future.

Out with the old…?

This month’s Work Thought blog post is provided by WFRC Chair Professor Pauline Leonard.

As we leave the trappings of seasonal celebrations behind us and tip headlong into another ‘new’ year, I find myself pausing to think: just what was achieved last year in terms of improving issues of gender equality at work? In many ways I feel it can be viewed as really quite a productive time: the period immediately after our publicpolicy@southampton event on ‘Gender Equality at Work: How far have we come and how far have we got to go?’ held at the House of Commons on the eve of International Women’s Day 2013 saw the publication of several high profile policy reviews, well covered in the national media, which pushed gender workplace equality thoroughly into the public eye. So far so good-but did the reports contain any hope of positive change?

The Fawcett Society’s excellent report ‘The Changing Labour Market: delivering for women, delivering for growth’ openly questioned the current Government’s plans for growth. In short, it argued, this is leaving women behind: 60% of ‘new’ private sector jobs have gone to men, whilst almost 3 times as many women as men have become long term unemployed in the last couple of years. Even more worrying is their warning that the worst is yet to come: although women have already borne the brunt of cuts to the public sector workforce, some 75% of these are still to emerge.

No good news there then! Then, there was the House of Commons’ own report produced by the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee on ‘Women in the Workplace’. This noted the fundamental right of all of us to reach our full potential at work, and acknowledged the sheer waste in individual, social and economic terms if this does not happen. The use of ‘if’ here is of course somewhat whimsical: ‘that’ would be a more accurate conjunction. For of course, as the report goes on to confirm, after 40 years of legislation, equality of pay has not been achieved, as the gendered stereotypes governing jobs, childcare, opaque pay agreements and domination of men at senior levels continue to describe the UK’s labour market.

So, same old, same old! The Institute of Public Policy Research exploration of the promises of gender equality in their report ‘Great Expectations’ argued for a rather different approach. The chapter on women in work-entitled ‘False Promises’- intelligently suggested that the usual measurements of equality-employment rates, average pay and advancement to senior positions-are misleading. Rather, what needs to be tackled are the underlying causes of women’s disadvantage, particularly the poor quality of work at the bottom of the labour market and the impact of women’s primary responsibility for care on their employment prospects.

These are only three reports of many which appeared last year: the Centre for Women’s Democracy produced another eye-popping expose of ‘Sex and Power’ and the ways that the UK is run by men; the European Institute for Gender Equality produced an Index which revealed how work operates to the detriment of women across the labour markets of Europe, and the Women’s Resource Centre raised serious questions about the Government’s commitment to women’s equality here in the UK. Further, the relentless findings of the year’s many reports were joined by a continuous stream of evidence about discrimination produced across the media, both mass and social.

On reflection then, it was certainly a noisy year! And from this I draw some glimmers of hope for 2014. My new year’s resolution? Keep the pressure on! The Work Futures Research Centre will be contributing to this with their sponsorship of Professor Curt Rice as one of two high profile speakers at the prestigious Campbell Lecture on March 19th 2014. Curt Rice is a Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study. From 2009–2013, he served as the elected Vice Rector for Research and Development (prorektor for forskning og utvikling) at the University of Tromsø, where he is a professor of linguistics. He tells us that his talk will argue that the core challenge to improving gender balance is finding ways to overcome implicit bias. We can’t wait to hear more…

You can book your place at the Campbell Lecture here.

Holiday balancing acts: misogyny, work and leadership

This month’s post is a review of Anne Summers’ TheMisogyny Factor by WFRC director Professor Catherine Pope

The directors of the Work Futures Research Centre like the idea of work-life balance even if the demands of our working lives sometimes seem to get in the way. One of the ways I try to inject some ‘balance’ into my life is through taking holidays when I spend time reading things that are not directly related to my research work – often fiction, but not always. If I venture abroad I try to pick up a book connected to the place I am visiting and this has been a great way of discovering new things – ranging from poetry to ancient history.

This year I was lucky enough to follow an academic visit to see colleagues at University of New South Wales involved in a project about organisational performance and accreditation with a trip to Australia. I was there just ahead of the general election so the news was full of electioneering and amongst this lots of discussion about Kevin Rudd the then Labour prime minister and his predecessor Julia Gillard.

The YouTube video of Julia Gillard’s misogyny speech of 2012 had already gone viral at this point, and this was followed by some UK media notably a self-penned piece after the election (in which Labor lost) in the Guardian on ‘power, purpose and Labor’s future’. Sydney Opera House hosted a discussion between feminist writer Anne Summers and Gillard which had picked up on some of the themes of sexism and leadership that Gillard had debated in speeches and writing – and these are revisited in Summer’s book ‘The Misogyny Factor (2013) which I bought for my holiday reading.

If we in the UK are disheartened about lack of progress on workplace equality agendas then this book suggests that our sisters in Australia have even more to complain about. Summers describes how, despite pioneering workplace reforms (Australia was the first to introduce the 8 hour day) and human rights (one of the first places to grant women the vote was South Australia in 1894), Australia lags behind in supporting working women. Australian women have lower participation in work than many other OECD countries and the gap between lifetime earnings of men and women is a shocking AUS $1 million. The Misogyny Factor is not a lighthearted read – Summers documents the political and legislative history of the struggle for gender equality in and outside work, and devotes a chapter to a fairly harrowing account of the way that Julia Gillard was taunted, attacked and vilified because of her gender in politics’ ‘top job’. Thankfully the book concludes with a chapter called ‘Destroying the Joint’. The title comes from a phrase which entered the Twitter lexicon when another feminist writer, Jane Caro, decided to take on the misogynists when radio presenter Alan Jones said ”Women are destroying the joint – Christine Nixon in Melbourne, Clover Moore here. Honestly.” Caro responded with her now famous tweet, “Got time on my hands tonight so thought I’d spend it coming up with new ways of ”destroying the joint” being a woman & all. Ideas welcome.” This ignited a social media debate about misogyny – in Australian politics, in the workplace and in the street which alongside other projects like #everydaysexism has become a global conversation about gender inequality. We are hoping to add to this conversation with our Policy Briefing on ‘Gender Equality at Work : where are we now and how far have we still to go?’ which will be out soon.

Guest blog by Su White: Athena SWAN and Southampton

Su White is part of the Web and Internet Science research group in ECS. Her research interests include research-led learning, the effects of technology on education and learning, and web science.

The need and value for balanced and diverse teams and equality of treatment of all staff are two principles which might seem rather challenged in academia when the representation of female academics as a proportion of the whole is considered.nd web science.

This year has seen a widespread and continued series of small celebrations for prestigious Athena SWAN Awards around the University achieved by a range of academic areas. Six academic areas and the university as a whole have all gained bronze awards. There are three more applications in the pipeline, and two more areas are exploring the possibility of making applications.

A_SWAN_LOGO_ALL

Athena SWAN is an initiative designed to advance the representation of women in science, engineering and technology, mathematics and medicine.

Currently there are no STEMM subjects at Southampton that have equal proportions of male to female academic staff. Furthermore the numbers of female staff at higher pay grades are significantly reduced at.

The figures for the rounded percentage of female staff in STEMM is as follows: overall 41%; 49% Grade 4; 47% Grade 5; 31% Grade 6; 21% Grade 7.

This looks quite respectable, however, when you discount colleagues from medicine, health sciences and psychology the picture is less rosy. Overall 33% are female. The breakdown is 41% Grade 4; 37% Grade 5; 23% Grade 6; 17% Grade 7.

In a desire to secure recognition of good practice there has been a massive effort on campus over recent months to look at the university workplace alongside the student experience, to think about the way we balance the gender scales; and how we could do it better.

The university successfully renewed its charter this summer, and the self assessment team chaired by Professor Iain Cameron Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, have declared the ambition to achieve a silver award in 2015. There has been concerted effort by academic teams in all the academic areas involved, the work assisted by the University’s diversity and equality officer Alexander Melhuish alongside others in HR.

Despite reward and recognition of successful female academics in the University, like the rest of the sector we seem to be experiencing a ‘leaky pipeline’ where the proportion of females diminishes as we progress along the career ladder. Systematically ensuring that our processes are fair and equal for all staff and students are important activities for which the prospect of an Athena SWAN award can provide a constructive focus and motivation. Furthermore, there are some areas of academic study where the percentage representation of female students at all levels appears to be surprisingly unbalanced. Effective actions which can improve the experience of staff and students include monitoring current practice, investigating the possible causes of imbalance and remedying problem areas.

Observations that there appear to be differences between the expected progression of staff, or the recruitment of students when analysed by gender need to be made objective so that effective interventions can be identified and implemented.

This in turn may require an increase in the budget for professional development or broad brush developmental and awareness activities which are the necessary pre-cursors to organisational change.

The work of local interest groups such as WiSET (Women in Science Engineering and Technology) can be invaluable in identifying issues which need remedy. Such groups can lobby for change or raise awareness of unexpected issues.

The Bigger Picture

Equality of treatment and experience for all staff and students is essential and backed up by equality legislation, however evidence from national and international surveys suggests that there is room for improvement.

Women in the UK account for around 38% of science researchers, according to the UNESCO institute for Statistics’ 2012 report.

There are some major external drivers to make sure we get things right. Around two years ago institutions were told not to expect to be shortlisted for biomedical research grants unless they could demonstrate evidence of actively supporting women’s career progression.

And it was widely reported earlier in the month that the universities and science minister David Willets said he expected those bidding for government cash to offer evidence of ‘commitment to equality and diversity’.

In mid October the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee held its first evidence hearing for its enquiry into “Women in STEM’ careers. The panel will hear personal views and experiences from witnesses who have worked or are working in academia.

Gender equality is only one aspect of equality, but an awareness of current practice can impact on all facets of equality. From an institutional and societal perspective, we are denying ourselves the opportunity to benefit from the best if we do not ensure all possible participants are recruited and developed. The strengths and value to an organisation of diverse teams is widely recognised, depriving ourselves of the potential for fully balanced teams seems to be shooting ourselves in the foot – never mind the possible consequence from loss of research funding.

Sex Work Futures?

Sex work futures?

It’s the start of the new term for Universities and Colleges throughout the world. Choices and compromises have led new students to embark on courses that are likely to profoundly influence their future careers – because of the knowledge and skills they acquire, because of the networks of contacts they build and because of the previously unthought-of of possibilities that they are awakened to. Of course, universities can also influence future career choices in other ways and student clubs and societies can also play a role in developing people’s future career choices and opportunities.

So far this sounds like a dull homage to the benefits of a university education and the role of extracurricular activities in preparing for the future. Not really the stuff of a blog on work futures and, let’s be frank, potentially disappointing given the title of the blog. Not so.

Here is the thing. Last week, the annual University of Southampton Fresher’s week ‘RAG’ showcased the work of many student societies, including the University Pole Dancing Club. Now I must confess that encountering a pole dancing demonstration outside a University Students Union was, for me, rather unexpected. I was equally surprised that the display was not the subject of any protest by members of the student body, but perhaps my view on these things has been skewed by being a the University of Sussex in the 1980’s where (I am fairly certain) such things would not have been tolerated.

I know that pole dancing is now being pushed as ‘exercise’, but let’s be very clear about this. It is a form of exercise that is based on a form of sex work. This got me thinking. Am I simply a dinosaur stuck in the past? Perhaps sex work is just one more career opportunity and if some members of the University Pole Dancing club find their way into the sex industry because their horizons are broadened while at university, so be it. Certainly evidence from recent surveys suggests that sex work does have a role, potential of actual as a means of supplementing students’ income while at University in the UK. The ‘mainstreaming’ of sex work seems widespread in other developed economies.

Is sex work just another job?

So can we regard sex work as ‘just another job’? Is it simply a choice that some (mostly women, although by no means exclusively) choose to make, as free and legitimate as any other? Perhaps for some it is, I really don’t know. But what I do know is that sex work operates in a context that is associated with human trafficking and forms of slavery. Sex work operates in a context that relies on the objectification of other human beings in a way that is often predicated on treating them as less than fully human.

You might protest not in this country (are you sure?), not our University Club (of course not!), not pole dancing (…maybe?). Perhaps, but in my view, until the sex industry operates in a world where women are universally given equal opportunities the association between sex work and exploitation is too close for me to ever feel comfortable with pole dancing being treated as just another recreational activity or a fully informed career choice. Of course, exploitation is not confined to the sex industry and when we consider the future of work we should consider the many forms of exploitation that remain hidden to a greater or lesser extent – cheap labour in sweat shops comes to mind. Perhaps next year the Fresher’s fair could include a sponsored sweatshop in which students have to produce garments at high speed in order to get enough money for tomorrow’s food? Or would that be seen as distasteful? It certainly would not be seen as opening up a career opportunity

Some might find it reassuring, others depressing (perhaps it is both) that the club raised a grand total of £2.10 for charity at the Fresher’s fair – the lowest of any of the clubs or societies listed on the University web site.

WFRC welcomes Professor Peter Griffiths as co-director

Peter Griffiths

We are delighted to announce that we have recruited a new co-directorto the Work Futures Research Centre.

Peter Griffiths is currently Professor of Health Sciences Research in the Faculty of Health Sciences.

Peter studied Social Psychology at the University of Sussex in the 1980s, a decision that he says was influenced by an ‘anarchist egg attack’ on David Owen in 1981. Following a subsequent career in nursing, Peter undertook a PhD in nursing research at Kings’ College London.

Peter’s research interests include the relationship between healthcare management structures and the outcomes for staff and patients. His early research involved nursing-led care delivered to post-acute patients, where he set up and evaluated pioneering nursing-led units.

More recently, Peter has been involved in the EU-funded RN4CAST study, which examines human resources management of nursing staff in 13 countries across Europe, Asia, Africa and the USA, and the impact of nurse deployment on patient safety. Peter also collaborates with the Health Quality Council of Saskatchewan in Canada where he is helping to evaluate the Productive Ward programme, and the Health Quality Improvement Programme in England where he assessed the feasibility of a national audit of nutritional care in hospitals and care homes.

Before arriving at Southampton, Peter was director of England’s National Nursing Research Unit from 2006 to 2010, and retains a visiting professorship there. He is also Executive Editor of the International Journal of Nursing Studies.

Peter’s strong background in multidisciplinary research means that he is an excellent addition to the WFRC, and we are looking forward to incorporating his ideas into our programme. Incidentally, this is not the first time Peter has been involved with the WFRC, he gave a seminar on his research back in 2011.

Peter will take the place of Alison Fuller at the WFRC, which was made available following her appointment as Chair in Vocational Education and Work at the Institute of Education. We wish Alison the very best in her new adventure and welcome Peter to the team.

Peter will be making his debut on the Work Thought Blog later this week, make sure you look out for it!

‘The Internship’ : Precarious Work Futures #2

The smiling faces of Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson currently decorating the sides of many local buses are advertising a new film called ‘The Internship’. Their cheerful demeanor informs us that the film is a comedy-but the rising number of internships appearing in the UK and European youth labour markets is far from a laughing matter.

The fact is that internships – short periods of often unpaid work- are rapidly becoming a structural feature of the transition into work for young people. How much this development has been driven by the recessionary economic climate is unclear, but internships are now being offered by an ever increasing number and range of employers. And as the number of paid opportunities for young people shrinks, these forms of employment are highly sought after, being seen as an important route onto the career ladder. An auction held recently at Westminster School of elite internships revealed how anxious parents are even prepared to pay high sums of money in order to secure this sort of occupational advantage for their children.

Yet the evidence also suggests that internships are highly diverse in terms of the experiences and benefits they offer to young people. Recruitment practices vary, as do employment conditions, benefits and rewards, occupational progressions and payment expectations. As such, Ross Perlin, author of Intern Nation, describes internship as ‘a many-headed monster’. Whilst some organisations have been documented as providing highly-desirable and structured schemes with clear training and career benefits for young people, at least a fifth of internships are unpaid, with smaller organisations the least likely to provide wages.

In addition, it appears that access to internships is unequal, strongly affected by education, social class, ethnicity, personal/family wealth. The most sought-after internships are often accessed through privileged contacts and a recent Cabinet Office (2009) report likened internship recruitment to an ‘informal economy’, where privileged access routes and non/low payment, render take-up unsustainable for young people without the necessary social networks and/or financial support. In a development of Paul Willis’s findings on how working class kids end up with working class jobs, internships may have become a key mechanism for middle class kids to get middle class jobs, potentially also reproducing divisions of ethnicity, gender and place.

It would thus appear that there is somewhat of a paradox here: on the one hand internships can make a valuable contribution to (some) young men and women, the organisations they spend time in as well as the national economy which is of course benefiting hugely from all their hard work. On the other hand, internships can be highly discriminating, offering much needed work experience to the privileged few, or may be exploitative for the young people within them, with an absence of support and protection.

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that our knowledge of internships is scanty and unsystematic. With youth employment high on the policy agenda, now is the time for the issue to be investigated and questioned thoroughly.

Latest Insights: Digital technology, learner identities and school-to-work transition project

Latest Insights into the Digital technology, learner identities and school-to-work transition project by Michaela Brockmann.

We are an interdisciplinary working group at the Work Futures Research Centre at Southampton University. Funded through SIRDF (Strategic Interdisciplinary Research Development Fund), our aim is to explore the role of digital technology in the formation of learner identities and in school-to-work transitions. The project runs from February to December 2013.

In the context of rapid technological innovation, it is understood that digital skills are of increasing significance in education and employment and, in turn, for national economic performance (e.g. BIS 2009).

Despite this, there is a debate about how to educate a digitally literate workforce. The British government has announced a thorough overhaul of the secondary school curriculum for IT, whilst there is concern across Europe (and beyond) that school leavers do not have the appropriate skills either for paid work or higher education. Many countries report shortages of highly skilled IT professionals.

Attention to this area has been divided between those who focus on how digital technologies are (or are not) used to deliver education and those concerned with the content of secondary school education for digital skills. There is a gap between our understanding of how students learn with digital technologies and what they learn about these technologies. This project aims to begin a dialogue to overcome this separation.

The project has an international perspective, focussing initially on Germany and the UK. These countries provide an excellent point of comparison, as they face seemingly similar issues but are different in context and structure, particularly regarding vocational education.

Questions include:

How does digital technology (inside and outside school) shape young people’s learning, their learner dispositions and identities?
How does the students’ informal learning of technology feed into the formal school context (is it encouraged or impeded)?
How does digital technology translate into post-compulsory education career choices?

As part of the project, we are hosting a series of seminars, each on a particular theme, with invited scholars and practitioners in order to explore relevant issues and concepts in this area of research. Details on the seminar series can be found here http://blog.soton.ac.uk/wfrc/

The working group is composed of academics from a range of disciplines, including members of the Education School (Dr Michaela Brockmann, Professor Alison Fuller), the School of Social Sciences (Professors Susan Halford and Pauline Leonard), and the School of Health Sciences (Professor Catherine Pope). The members are all part of the Work Futures Research Centre (WFRC), which draws itself on a range of disciplines including Sociology, Psychology and Physical and Applied Sciences and already has a large portfolio of research on the digital economy.

The research focus requires an interdisciplinary approach, concerned as it is with identity formation and learning careers, and the role of class, gender and ethnicity (sociology/sociology of education); with the structure and content of education and further education settings and the teaching and learning within these (education); and, in particular, the role of digital technology in learning.

Precarious work futures?

Amongst all the fuss about the recent Great British Class Survey (GBCS), a collaboration between social scientists Professor Mike Savage and Professor Fiona Devine of LSE and University of Manchester, and the BBC was the interesting observation that the group at the bottom of the social class structure are what the survey’s authors call the “precariat” (or precarious proletariat). This group – the most deprived of the lot – makes up 15% of the population, its members earn just £8,000 after tax, have average savings of £800, and are extremely unlikely to go on to higher education. Elsewhere Guy Standing has argued that what he labelled as the precariat is the “new dangerous class” while some others on the left have argued that “We are all the precariat”.

In the Work Futures Research Centre we were interested in the GBCS and the debate surrounding it because of what it told us about workers, different forms of capital and the enduring relationships between work and class. We were especially intrigued by the concept and delineation of precariat particularly the idea that these workers might be on limited, short term or zero hour contracts, those who experience maximum job insecurity.

Working as researchers in academia we are all too aware of the job insecurity of our own profession (in 2010/11 HESA data showed that 68.9% of research staff were on fixed term contracts, continually chasing new research jobs and experiencing redundancy and disruption). But we are also aware of research and commentary that suggests that a rise in freelancing work and especially the ‘micro-gig’ is a new way of working that is welcomed by employers and some employees.

Are these micro-giggers also the precariat?

On one hand, short term work or freelancing offers freedoms – to manage time and work life balance – on the other these ‘gigs’ often come with lower pay, reduced benefits (no sick or maternity pay or leave entitlement) and produce what look like very precarious working lives.

It is suggested that casual work is no longer the sole occupation for the unskilled (think dockers and agricultural labourers) and is becoming the preferred employment mode for professionals such as laywers and skilled technical workers. Reportedly, gig working is the major shift in working patterns of this century. This new mode of work even has its own nomenclature – this is the ‘Freelance Nation’ and ‘Generation flux’ and has spawned various websites (http://fiverr.com and www.elance.com) devoted to supporting ‘gig’ working. In addition it appears that more of these new freelancers are women which we might expect as women often cluster in part time employment, but some writers suggest that this represents a rebalancing of work – that women have an answer to austerity and the economic ‘mancession’.

What does all this mean for Work Futures? I’m not sure. Clearly we are living in very interesting, changing times. There are issues here – about class, casualization, gender and employment. All things that matter to those of us interested in the future of work.

References

Savage M, Devine F, Cunningham N. et al. A New Model of Social Class? Findings from the BBC’s Great British Class Survey Experiment. Sociology 2013 vol. 47 no. 2:219-250

Standing G. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011

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