Developing interdisciplinary research across the University
A. Exploring Variety in Urban Knowledge Leadership
The College of Social Sciences Advanced Social Science Collaborative (ASSC) initiative has awarded seed-corn funding to John Gibney and Dan Hart (one of our PhD students) in the Department of Management for a small collaborative leadership R&D project developed with colleagues at the Business School, University of Middlesex. The project aims to explain the variety of new forms of knowledge leadership in UK cities looking to promote growth, ‘new economy’ employment and wealth, through so-called ‘smart’ collaborative approaches to urban development. Leadership plays a central role in influencing territorial knowledge processes, but the research team argues that we know little about the way that such leadership plays out in modern urban development settings; which actors are key; or how leadership creates the conditions for creating, sharing and exploiting knowledge. The research will explore the dynamics of leadership in Smart Cities – a ‘new’ form of public-private urban development governance.
The team aims to develop, critique and disseminate a set of distinctive theoretical and practice insights around the emerging theme of urban knowledge leadership.
B. Work, Wealth and Well-being
Fiona Carmichael has received funding from the Institute of Advanced Studies with Beth Grunfeld from Psychology to open a cross-disciplinary dialogue on the policy and research literatures on the relationships between work, wealth and well-being. Research from the medical and health fields has demonstrated the importance of wellbeing and its link to physical and mental health outcomes. Research from the field of economics and the sociology of work has shown how health affects transitions in and out of work and into different kinds of work. Work status is also the major source of income and wealth. The workshop on 9th September 2013 will be structured around three themes: (1) the impact of changing demographics on employment (ageing, migration, generational shifts, health/illness, disability); (2) identifying, utilising and valuing different forms of human capital, standard and non-standard and; (3) life-course approaches to workplace decision-making (careers, maternity/paternity issues, caring responsibilities, retirement). The aim is to identify at least one project from each stream that could be further developed following the workshop.