25 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9LN

Tel/Fax (0131) 667 9609

e-mail: Hume.Institute@ed.ac.uk Internet: http://www.ed.ac.uk/~hume/

Professor Brian Main, Director of The David Hume Institute said: "The aim of this series is to provide a forum for discussion for some of the recent research projects undertaken by the Economic & Social Research Council. Few subjects could be judged more vital to current policy and academic debates than the prospects for work and employment. In 1998 the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded a series of separate research projects under the ‘Future of Work’ programme to get a more realistic picture of the complexities of contemporary working life. This Programme is providing the evidence-based research for a better understanding of the changing world of work in a period of rapid social, technological and economic change and sure to provoke widespread interest. We are grateful to the ESRC (Economic & Social Research Council) for their sponsorship of this series".

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Professor Chris Baldry said: "The last twenty years have witnessed many transformations within the workplace, through the rapid diffusion of information technologies, changes to patterns of working time, changes to work organisation brought about through team working, lean working, and the emphasis on quality and flexibility, and the emergence of the Human Resource Management agenda with its emphasis on raising employee commitment. By the end of the twentieth century the ‘new workplace’ was being characterised through competing stereotypes of, on the one had, one staffed by empowered knowledge workers liberated from the dull, dreary and degrading jobs that stifled working lives in the past and, on the other, by the ‘electronic sweatshop’, with intensified work, growing insecurity and widening social divisions. However, both scenarios remained ungrounded in any systematic theory or evidence, and a pervasive weakness was the absence in such accounts of an adequate historical perspective.

This seminar will cover the research undertaken for The "Future of Work" Programme which is the most systematic and rigorous enquiry of its kind and has a direct bearing on this important area of public policy".

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Prof Chris Baldry is currently Head of Management & Organisation Department and Director of the Centre for Human Resource Management at Stirling University.

His research interests have covered European employment systems to sick building syndrome and office work, and have always reflected a strong interest in technological change in the workplace. During the first wave of the IT revolution he wrote Computers, Jobs and Skills and he is editor of the journal New Technology, Work and Employment.

He is currently part of the joint research team from Stirling, Strathclyde and Aberdeen Universities under the ESRC’s national ‘Future of Work’ programme. Previous work on employee safety in the rail industry led him to give evidence as an expert witness to the Cullen Inquiry on the Ladbroke Grove disaster.

The views that will be expressed by the speaker are his own and do not commit the Trustees or Officers of the Institute in any way.

The David Hume Institute, 25 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9LN

Catriona Laing Tel/Fax (0131) 667 9609

e-mail: Hume.Institute@ed.ac.uk