A pioneering training network that will prepare the next generation of policy-focused social scientists hosted its first Annual Colloquium and Network School in Paris last month (November 18-25).
Co-ordinated by Strathclyde Business School's department of Human Resource Management, the ChangingEmployment training network hosted the event with a focus on 'Comparative Labour Sociology' - providing researchers with a range of methodological and theoretical tools.
The €4.6 million project is a Marie Curie International Training network that examines the changing nature of employment in Europe in the context of challenges, threats and opportunities for employees and employers.
In addition to the event, the network also exhibited at the International Conference on Central and Eastern Europe: Work, Employment and Society, between transition and change on November 22 at the University of Evry-Val d'Essonne.
Professor Paul Stewart, programme co-ordinator at Strathclyde, said, "This exciting and important development will allow the Marie Curie ChangingEmployment consortium of doctoral and post-doctoral researchers to engage with a multi-disciplinary team of internationally renowned teachers and senior researcher experts in the field of methodology. The seniors come from a range of sectors including universities, labour and trade union and social movements."
Funded by the European Commission's Seventh Research Framework Programme "Marie Curie Actions", this 48-month project will train a new generation of policy-focused social scientists.
The project team comprises a team of eminent senior researchers and academics from nine European universities and they will train fifteen early career researchers (12 doctoral and 3 post-doctoral). The team will also explore the impact on work relations and working lives, while examining the implications for gender, ethnicity and different age groups at work.
The training school consisted of contributions from Network Associate Partners on Applied Training designed to provide early career researchers with transferable skills.
In addition, invited international scholars, Professor Steve Jefferys, Working Lives Research Institute, London Metropolitan University; Dr Nathan Lillie, University of Jyväskylä, Finland; and Maria Gustafsson, International Labour Organisation, spoke about Research Design and Secondary Data Analysis. Michael Husson, Institut de recherches economiques et sociales (IRES) in Paris provided a keynote lecture on work in times of crisis and changing employment relations. See the full programme.
The next network school will be hosted in Leuven, Belgium in June 2014 around the topic of flexibility and security within labour markets in Europe. This training event will be the first which will be open to PhD students external to the network, there will also be an opportunity for interested academics to participate in a roundtable the topic ‘future challenges of employment’.
More information is available at www.changingemployment.eu