SKOPE

Dr Niaz Asadullah is a Lecturer in Economics at the University of Reading and a Research Fellow at Institute for the Study of Labor, Bonn, Germany (IZA). He received his masters and doctoral degrees in Economics from Oxford University. His research focuses on the economics of education, skills, and development in South Asia. Recent published work includes analyses on economic returns to education in the labour market and agricultural production, intergenerational economic and schooling mobility, inequality of educational opportunity, the rise of Islamic schools and the quality of secondary schools and madrasas in Bangladesh. He has provided consultancy services abroad in the field of education and development to organisations such as the World Bank. Further details can be found in http://users.ox.ac.uk/~sant0883/

barbara.banda@ashridge.org.uk

Jane Bryson is a Senior Lecturer in the Management School at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Jane is an organisational psychologist, and her research interests focus on the investigation of HRM, organisational and individual capability; and on professionals, managers and occupational change. She is one of two objective leaders in an externally funded research project “Developing human capability: employment institutions, organisations, and individuals” which explores a range of influences on the development of human capability in, and for, New Zealand workplaces. Currently she is working with Ewart Keep & Susan James examining the impact of recruitment & selection practices on skills; and she is also exploring the notion of capability at work as a property right or a human right. Jane can be contacted by email at: jane.bryson@vuw.ac.nz or by phone on: + NZ 64 4 4635707.

Helen's current work draws together her research interests - in the responses of universities to funding changes for the sector and its students and the policy implications of their resulting actions - with her previous professional experience in university communications and then undergraduate admissions.  She is conducting research for Prof Roger Brown towards his next book, which looks at the marketisation of higher education in the UK over the past 30 years, and acts as a consultant to individual institutions, in areas of student recruitment, marketing and the costing and pricing of degrees.

Sally Dibb is Professor of Marketing and Head of the Marketing and Strategy Research Unit at the Open University Business School. Her research interests focus on marketing practice in the areas of marketing strategy and target marketing and she chairs the Academy of Marketing’s Special Interest Group in Market Segmentation.  Current research projects include examining the relationship between marketing knowledge, marketing practice and business performance.  She has a particularly keen interest in studying the theory-practice divide in these areas and in understanding the extent to which it can be bridged.

Sally can be contacted by email at: S.Dibb@open.ac.uk or by phone on: 01908 652787.

Independent Consultant

Professor Alan Felstead is Research Professor at Cardiff School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University.  His research focuses on: training, skills and learning; non-standard forms of employment; and the spaces and places of work.  He has completed over 30 funded research projects (including seven funded by the ESRC), produced six books, and written over 150 journal articles, book chapters and research reports.  His books include Improving Working as Learning (with Fuller, A, Jewson, N and Unwin, L), London: Routledge, 2009; and Changing Places of Work (with Jewson, N and Walters, S), London: Routledge, 2005.  In addition, he is regularly called upon to give labour market advice to a range of policy-makers, including the UK Commission for Employment and Skills, the devolved UK administrations, the European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training (CEDEFOP), the Japanese Institute of Labor and a number of Regional Development Agencies.  He has also acted as an advisor to the Work Foundation and Samsung.

Professor Felstead can be contacted by email on alanfelstead@cf.ac.uk or by phone on 029 2087 9050.  For more information, go to: http://www.cf.ac.uk/people/alanfelstead/

Francis Green

Francis Green is Professor of Economics at the University of Kent, England. After graduating in Physics at Oxford University, he studied Economics at the LSE, before writing his PhD thesis at Birkbeck College. His research focuses on labour economics, with special interests in skills, training, work quality and employment relations. He led the research team that developed the UK’s Skills Survey in 1997, and the repeated surveys in 2001 and 2006. These surveys developed the job requirements approach for measuring the use of skills at work in social surveys for research purposes. He has published nine books and many papers in journals and in book collections. He regularly provides consultancy advice for government departments, the European Commission and the OECD. His most recent book, "Demanding Work. The Paradox of Job Quality in the Affluent Economy", was published in 2006 by Princeton University Press.

Francis can be contacted by email at: g.f.green@kent.ac.uk or by phone on: 01227 827305.

For further information, see:

http://www.kent.ac.uk/economics/staff/profiles/francis-green.html

http://www.soz.uni-heidelberg.de/Dr_Michael_Hoelscher/820,633,0,0,1.html

http://www.education.ox.ac.uk/about-us/directory/dr-michael-hoelscher/

Prue Huddleston is Professorial Fellow and Director of the Centre for Education and Industry, University of Warwick; she has a particular interest in the 14-19 curriculum, focusing on vocational qualifications and work-related learning, including the use of alternative approaches to the schooling of those identified as under-achieving.  Before joining the University of Warwick, she worked for many years within the FE sector and on community and outreach programmes.  Her current and recent research and evaluation work includes: Evaluation of the Enterprise Education Pathfinder Programme (DfES); Evaluation of the ‘Getting Connected’ programme (National Youth Agency); Evaluation of Changemakers Social Enterprise Pathfinder Programme.  She is currently involved in work for QCA on the development of the new Specialised Diplomas.  She was recently appointed as a special adviser to the House of Commons Select Committee on Education and Skills (Further Education).

Prue can be contacted by e-mail at: p.j.huddleston@warwick.ac.uk or by phone on: 02476 523909.  

Geraint Johnes is Professor of Economics at Lancaster University. He is a labour economist with particular interests in the economics of education. He has published widely on a variety of issues including: costs in higher education; funding formulae; performance indicators; wage determination; discrimination and occupational segregation; and forecasting models. In recent years, Geraint has advised the DfES, DTI, Office for National Statistics, British Council, HEFCE, HEFCW, European Union, OECD and the World Bank on issues concerning education economics and finance.

Geraint can be contacted by email at G.Johnes@lancaster.ac.uk or by phone on 01524 594215.

A recent publication that might be of particular interest in the SKOPE context was published recently in the Economics Bulletin and may be found at http://www.accessecon.com/Pubs/EB/2009/Volume29/EB-09-V29-I1-P38.pdf.

Natalie’s research interests are in the development of expertise in practices and higher education transitions. Her recently-completed doctoral thesis focuses on the experiences of students navigating learning environments in the transition from university to the workplace, via summer internships at an investment bank. She is a staff writer for Universum Quarterly, an international employment branding journal, and is currently collaborating on a chapter for the textbook ‘Pedagogy in Higher Education’.

Christophe J. Nordman is a Senior Research Fellow in IRD, the French Institute of Research for Development, and is based at DIAL in Paris, a research unit of IRD in development economics. His research interests include: development economics, labour and education economics, especially the formation of income and human capital, gender discrimination, and migration. His main statistical tool is the econometrics of linked employer-employee and household survey data. As a former research officer in SKOPE, Christophe has been interested in the process of skill formation that takes place in the workplace. More recently, his work has focused on the earnings determination processes in developing countries and also on whether there exist compensating mechanisms for adverse working conditions in the UK (with Rosa Fernández). Within DIAL, he is involved in various international projects including research on the functioning of urban labour markets in North and West Africa, the formation of social networks in West Africa, and the consequences of migration in the origin and receiving countries’ labour markets.

William Scott-Jackson is a Visiting Professor at Oxford Brookes University where he directs the Centre for Applied HR Research which carries out practical strategic HR research in association with the Middle East and UK public and private sectors. William’s areas of interest/expertise include: Strategic Talent Management; Human Resource Strategy; Human Capital Metrics and Reporting; HR outsourcing; Resourcing; Recruitment and Retention; The psychology of individual change competence and growth stages in small companies. William is also a successful entrepreneur and is now a Chairman of TdeltaS and a non-executive director on several ISIS spin-outs as well as his own companies: BHR Solutions and Oxford Strategic Consulting.

Cathy Stasz is a Senior Scientist at RAND Corporation and a Research Associate at the Department of Education, University of Oxford. Her research interests are in education policy, especially VET, the impact of changes in work on education and training systems, and the measurement of skills.  Her most recent research includes a policy analysis of VET systems in the U.K., a study of the relationship between economic skill demands and post-secondary education and training opportunities in the State of Qatar, and an evaluation of the Open Society Institute’s Step-by-Step early childhood education program. With colleagues at Oxford, Cathy has recently completed a review of the Diploma Development Partnerships.  She currently serves on the Advisory Board for the Nuffield Review of 14-19 Education and is a member of the Professional Development and Training Committee of the American Educational Research Association.

Cathy can be contacted by email at: cathy@rand.org or by phone on: 01865 883 547.

atouloumakou@bca.edu.gr

Chris Warhurst is Professor of Work & Organisational Studies at the University of Sydney in Australia. His research interests focus on labour process and labour market developments and issues. More specifically he is interested in skill development, supply, demand and development. Current research includes aesthetic labour in services; skill utilisation; job quality. With members of SKOPE (and others) he is also working on an ESRC-funded project examining graduate skills (with Susan James), is co-editing the Handbook on Skills and Training for the Oxford University Press (with Ken Mayhew), and is co-organiser of an ESRC-funded seminar series on making bad jobs better (with Caroline Lloyd and Ewart Keep). He has recently completed research on gender and pay in financial services, higher education student financing, and the skills and pay of classroom assistants. He has worked in an advisory capacity for HM Treasury, the Scottish Executive/Government, Scottish Enterprise, Skills Australia and the OECD.

Chris can be contacted by email at: chris.warhurst@sydney.edu.aumailto:chris.warhurst@sydney.edu.au

Richard Whittington is Professor of Strategic Management at the Saïd Business School and Millman Fellow at New College, University of Oxford. His current research interests are senior managers’ skills and strategy-as-practice. He has authored or co-authored eight books, the most recent being (with Johnson, Langley and Melin) Strategy-as-Practice: Research Directions and Resources (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). He is on the editorial review board of eight journals, including the Academy of Management Review and Organization Science, and is a Senior Editor of Organization Studies. He has published in a wide range of journals, including Organization Science and the Strategic Management Journal. He currently holds the visiting Chaire d’Excellence at the University of Toulouse.