Research projects within the Human Resources, Work and Employment research group (HRWE)

A joint project between the College of Arts, Technology and Environment and the College of Business and Law at UWE Bristol, Dr Vanda Papafilippou and Lucy Downes are collaborating with Dr Laura Fogg-Rogers and Dr Marianthi Leon in order to develop a framework to support organisations recruit and retain neurodiverse engineers. In order to do so, they are collaborating with Ambitious About Autism and engineering organisations in the South West (e.g., GKN Aerospace, Babcock).

Professor Hugo Gaggiotti with Professor Carol Jarvis and Dr Selen Kars are currently completing an evaluation on how to improve wellbeing circles and relationships with community partners in the Southeast of England. The project has been commissioned by the Royal Borough of Maidenhead and Windsor.

Sara Fanti is in the final year of her PhD. Her research is an explorative mixed-method study which enquiries on the gender pay gap and LGB parenthood in Italy. Within an intersectional framework, Sara’s research aims to generate the first dataset on Italian LGB parent’s pay and to discover how Italian LGB families organise, and divide paid and unpaid labour among partners and how it can influence or be influenced by insufficient or ineffective equality laws (both family and work legislation) and discrimination in the workplace.

Dr Frances Galt is working with Professor Hazel Conley, Professor Colm O’Cinneide and Sophia Ayada (University College London), and Professor Louise Jackson, Dr Ashlee Christofferson and Tanya Rhodes (University of Edinburgh) on an interdisciplinary – gender studies, history, industrial relations, law, and politics – project examining the use and impact of workplace equality legislation in relation to equal pay, sex discrimination and sexual harassment. This project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. 

Professor Hugo Gaggiotti (with colleagues from a consortia of 15 British, European and Latin American universities) is currently working on a research project investigating how women’s reproductive rights are affected in the context of “austerity” and fertility decline. The study is supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation.

Professor Hugo Gaggiotti (with Isis Carrion, Mexico, Autonomous University of Baja California) is currently completing a research on how organisations in the borderland between California (US) and Baja California (Mexico) could do more to help women experiencing vulnerability in organisational contexts, like entrepreneurship, education, politics and the voluntary sector. The study is supported by the Newton Impact Scheme, the British Council and CONACYT (Mexico).

Based on preliminary fieldwork with two voluntary organisations in Cebu, Philippines, Dr Sarah-Louise Weller is exploring the identities of emergency rescue and response volunteers. The research focuses on how the emergency rescue and response volunteers describe their voluntary roles and experiences, and what represents a challenge or tension in their voluntary work. This study is an extension of previous ethnographic research of UK-based Search and Rescue volunteers. 

Dr Vanda Papafilippou is currently completing (with Dr Stefano Gasparri) a commissioned literature review on gender inequality in the Transport Sector by the International Transport Federation.

Dr Hilary Drew (with Professor Felix Ritchie, UWE Bristol) continue to work on their apprentice low pay project, which began in 2015 and was initially funded by the Low Pay Commission. They are presently in conversation with the National Hairdressing Federation and the TUC to revisit the work post-pandemic.

Dr Vanda Papafilippou is currently completing a consultancy project (led by Professor Carol Jarvis on HR policy evaluation of the NHS Leadership Academy.

Collaborative research between UWE Bristol and Cardiff Metropolitan University continues (Dr Hilary Drew, Damian Whittard and Professor Felix Ritchie, UWE Bristol; Claire Evans and Caroline Ritchie, Cardiff Metropolitan University) on a  study of the  casual employment of Higher Education students in the hospitality industry.

Professor Sue Durbin (with Stella Warren, UWE Bristol, and Jennifer Tomlinson, Leeds Business School) has completed a study on how executives and senior managers navigate reduced hours working, including through the pandemic, and ‘new ways of working’/hybrid working in January 2022. Project partners included, Fair Play South West, Moon Consulting, The Bristol Women in Business Charter CIC, Workwell and Timewise.

Watch the project's online dissemination event

Professor Hugo Gaggiotti (with Dr Vanda Papafilippou, UK, UWE Bristol; Tuomo Peltonen, Finland, Aalto University; and Henriett Primecz, Hungary, Corvinus University) have recently completed a study on how global workers in Dubai, Laos and Bristol constitute permeable communities (bubbles). Results of the study have been discussed in international conferences and are going to be submitted as journal articles to Journal of Global Mobility. The study was supported by Leverhulme and British Academy. 

Professor Sue Durbin (with Stella Warren) completed a study/report on tackling the lack of gender diversity in the commercial pilot/pilot trainer role in March 2022. This was a collaboration between UWE Bristol and the Royal Aeronautical Society/Flight Crew Training Group.

Dr Catherine Mackintosh (with Professor Aoife McDermott, Dr Deborah Hann and Professor Helen Williams, Cardiff Business School) completed (in December 2021) a project examining personalised working arrangements (termed idiosyncratic deals, or i-deals) from the perspectives of multiple relevant stakeholders: employees, line managers, co-workers, and HR representatives. The project was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. 

Emily Hill has recently completed her MSc in Human Resources Management at UWE Bristol and submitted her dissertation project in September 2021, which investigated the lived experiences of both mentees and mentors who were part of an academic female mentoring scheme, namely the Women's Researchers Mentoring Scheme (WRMS) at UWE Bristol. This scheme aims to support the advancement of female researchers' careers at UWE Bristol.  

Dr Stefano Gasparri (with Dr Arianna Marcolin) has recently examined the diffusion of telework and its regulatory implications for workplace relations, reviewing significant legal frameworks and producing a toolkit for practitioners, in particular trade unionists. This was a project commissioned by ITUC-PERC and FES-Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, resulting in a report published in September 2021.

Stella Warren, with Beth Isaac and Professor Richard Bolden, worked on the data analysis element of an evaluation of Bristol's Golden Key project. Golden Key was a partnership between statutory services, commissioners, the voluntary sector and people with lived experience across Bristol which is aimed at supporting fundamental change in the way services are delivered to address the needs of people with multiple and complex needs. Data analysis for an initial evaluation of Golden Key’s Housing First pilot was completed in 2020, and the final stage was a local evaluation of Golden Key client outcomes (April 2021).

Dr Vanda Papafilippou completed a study (July 2019) which explored how female engineers construct their career identity within formal internal and external women's networks as well as the extent to which these networks contribute towards gender equality in Engineering. 

Dr Frances Galt completed her PhD on ‘Women and the Association of Cinematograph, Television and Allied Technicians (ACTT), 1933-89’ in April 2018 as part of a wider Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project on women’s work in the British film and television industries with Professor Melanie Bell (University of Leeds), Dr Vicky Ball (De Montford University) and Sue Bradley (Newcastle University).

Dr Vanda Papafilippou with Dr Christina Efthymiadou developed a series of training material for Babbasa.