Mapping the Quality of Working Life in Britain: An Occupational Approach

While employment in Britain is at record levels, there is widespread concern many jobs are not of sufficient quality to maintain a healthy and thriving society. Growing public concern culminated in the government commissioning the 'Good work: The Taylor Review of Modern Working Practices' in 2017. A key recommendation of the Taylor Review was that the government should adopt a multidimensional definition of 'good work', among other recommendations. Building upon decades of academic research demonstrating their relationship with job-related wellbeing, the Taylor Review identified six dimensions as central to 'good work' (DBEIS 2017: 12) (wages, employment quality, education and training, working conditions, work-life balance, and consultative participation/collective representation).

The overall objective of this SDAI project is to explore an occupational approach to mapping, understanding, and improving the quality of working life by applying insights from sociological theories of stratification which suggest that the capacity to achieve high job-related wellbeing is to a large extent determined by occupation-field of work. However, this issue has been scarcely researched. The extent to which job quality and job-related wellbeing are structured across the occupational structure are critical issues to understanding and developing pathways to improving the quality of working life, for instance, through occupational mobility or workplace practices that might moderate the effect of occupational environment.

We propose creating a new Classification of Occupational Quality (COQ) for this purpose. This is because existing occupational classifications (such as the NS-SEC occupational class schema used by the ONS) were not intended to map job quality defined in a multidimensional way, and as such tended to focus on only a single job quality dimension. A more appropriate tool for the current academic and policy context is necessary. Moreover, the sparse existing research findings suggest that dimensions of job quality and measures of job-related wellbeing do not neatly map onto occupational classes in any case.

The specific research questions motivating this proposal are:
1. What is the structure of 'occupational quality'?
2. How does occupational quality influence individuals' subjective wellbeing over the life course?
3. Is mobility across occupational quality structure an effective means of improving the quality of working life?
4. To what extent does the workplace moderate the effect of occupational quality on job quality and wellbeing?

Using existing ESRC data, we will answer these questions through writing-up and submitting the results to four world-class academic journals. Emerging findings will be shared at, and feedback will be gathered from a range of national and international conferences, as well as specialist workshops with targeted academic experts to ensure maximum academic impact.

A distinctive part of our SDAI project is its impact strategy beyond academia. With the support of the Dept BEIS (the department responsible for implementing the government's job quality strategy) and the CIPD (the professional body of the HR profession who have been a leading voice in the job quality debate), we will channel our findings to policy and practitioner audiences (see Letter of Support). This includes a series of policy and practitioner workshops, as well as plain English briefings of our research outputs, to be hosted on the project website (www.qualityofworkinglife.org). We will also enlist a design agency to prepare searchable and graphical presentations of occupational quality data we will produce from ESRC data. The project website will also host short video factuals which we will produce, summarising each paper. Collectively, these strategies will ensure maximum impact at a time when the issue of job quality has never been so pressing as well as maximising return on existing ESRC investments.

Governmental and policy groups:
The Labour Market Directorate within DBEIS is the main Civil Service department responsible for devising and implementing the government's job quality strategy following the Taylor Review and will eventually feed policy recommendations directly to Ministers for discussion in Parliament. Paula Lovitt (Head, Labour Market Directorate) and Cara Maguire (Economic Advisor, Labour Market Directorate) both of the Department of Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy (DBEIS) are very supportive of our proposal and agreed to be a key part of our impact strategy, including participation at workshops and introducing us to relevant government departments involved in industrial strategy more broadly (see Letters of Support). Our impact strategy will involve forwarding one-page briefs throughout the project on both the proposed research and emergent key findings and inviting key individuals in government to our stakeholder meetings. In the longer-term, by deepening our networks within the government, we would hope the project's findings would form part of future discussions and evidence base to government's job quality strategy.

Practitioner and interest groups:
In the practitioner sphere, the main audience will be professional bodies and special interest groups concerned with the quality of work. The main one is the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIDP), the professional body of human resource professionals. As well as regulating learning requirements in the profession, the CIPD is a leading voice championing better working lives, playing a key advisory role in the Taylor Review. Jonny Gifford, Senior Advisor in Research at the CIPD is very supportive of our proposal and will offer advice from a practitioner perspective and will help channel findings to government (see Letter of Support). Additionally, the CIPD regularly circulates key research findings to its 140,000 members in professional publications (that we have previously written for). One-page briefs will also be channelled to relevant labour organisations and relevant think-tanks.

Wider public:
Throughout the project, we will maintain close contact with the Press Office at University of Surrey, and benefit from their input on generating a series of accessible press releases to coincide with article releases to maximise impact. These will lead to a high-level of exposure of the project and its findings. We also own the www.qualityofworkinglife.org domain, which will serve as the project's online hub. An innovative aspect of our impact strategy is to create an online and interactive version of the Database of Occupational Quality. The project website will also host the one-page briefs, press-cuttings, a blog, full papers, code, and links to the underlying data held by the Data Archive. Finally, we will also enlist the Marketing Team at Surrey to create a series of video factuals to be included in all promotion of the research, distributed across a range of sites as well as on the project's website.

Ensuring longer-term impact:
Mindful of the need to evidence impact, we will devise ways to quantify and demonstrate impact at the beginning of the project, reassessing these as the project develops such as citations, webpage views, media interest, and online surveys following stakeholder meetings. Additionally, we will maintain on-going dialogue throughout the project with the different communities and unite them in workshops culminating in a one-day conference at the project's conclusion. In the medium-term, the networks established during the conference will be maintained to aid more direct interaction between groups that is often an obstacle to developing high impact research. The project's website will aim, in the long-term, to continue as a hub for the maintenance (and expansion) of connections between academic and non-academic communities interested in understanding and improving job quality.