ESRC Funded Research Studentships at CRIC

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The ESRC has awarded CRIC a studentship to fund postgraduate research on a specific topic. This topic is:

The Changing Spatial Division of Labour in UK Services (to be supervised by Professor Jeremy Howells and Dr. Bruce Tether)
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Further details from the project proposal are provided below.

Applicants with backgrounds in management studies or any social science are invited to apply, but experience in / aptitude for quantitative and statistical methods will be required. To be considered, applicants should meet the ESRC’s requirements for both academic qualifications and residential eligibility. See the ‘Guidance Notes for Applicants’ available at: http://www.esrc.ac.uk/esrccontent/postgradfunding/studentships2002.asp. The studentship will start in early October 2002 or in January 2003.

Applicants should send a letter, CV and details of two referees to: Sharon Hammond, CRIC, The University of Manchester, Harold Hankins Building, Booth Street West, Manchester M13 9PL. Telephone 0161 275 7368; fax 0161 275 7361. Please send applications as soon as possible.

The Changing Spatial Division of Labour in the UK in the 1990s, with Particular Reference to Services

Research Questions

This project will examine the spatial division of work in the UK, and how this has changed between 1991 and 2001. In so doing, it will pay particular attention to work in the service sectors and in service occupations. This concentration on services is justified for two reasons. Firstly, services have recieved little attention relative to manufacturing, and secondly, services are the major source of employment creation, in contrast to manufacturing. This is unlikely to change in the near future. The project will also consider the role of information communication technologies and organisational change in bringing about this evolving spatial division of labour.

Research Methodology

The forthcoming publication of the 2001 Census provides the opportunity to map the spatial patterns of work in the UK. These patterns can then be compared with those found in the 1991 Census to show how the spatial division of labour has changed over time. Thus, the first stage of the project would be a mapping exersise, over time and space, of work in the UK, involving mapping work by occupation, industry (including services) and geographical location in the 1991 and 2001 Censuses. A simple mapping exercise is possible using the whole Census, but the opportunity for deeper analyses is provided by examining the Samples of Anonymised Records (SARs). The 1991 Census SARs includes a 2% sample of the UK population (i.e., records of 1,116,181 individuals) and this is available for academic studies. It is understood that a similar (and probably larger) SAR from the 2001 Census will be made available shortly.

These datasets provide highly detailed data on occupation (81 categories), sector of employment (60 divisions), and geography of employment (e.g., 278 local authority areas), alongside a host of other socio-economic variables, such as age, gender, ethnicity, qualifications, etc. This data will be used to examine, though multivariate techniques such as regression, (ordered) logistic regression, and cluster analysis, questions such as the spatial variation in occupational opportunities, particularly in services, and how this has changed over time (1991 - 2001). For instance, the impact of spatial location on the probability that a person is employed in a certain type of job can be estimated using logistic regressions whilst controlling for other factors, such as age, gender, ethnicity and qualifications. Comparisions between the two Censuses will show how this has developed over time.

It is hypothesised that the availability of different types of occupations will vary significantly over space, and the growth of these opportunities will also vary over space. Of partiucular interest here is knowledge-intensive and information based service work. This includes a broad spectrum of work, but it is expected that the most routine information processing service work, which is amenable to codification and delivery over the telephone network, will be increasingly dispersed to the northern and western regions of the UK (including the northern industrial cities), and away from London and the south east. By contrast, it is hypothesised that the most 'knowledge intensive' work, that that involves much face-to-face contact and tacit knowledge, will be (increasingly) concentrated in London and the south east. As the UK seeks to develop a 'knowledge based' economy, evidence of a (growing) spatial division of labour has important implications for the competitiveness of the UK as a whole and its constitutent regions.

Technological and organisational change: The changes that are identified by the above described mapping of employment in the 1991 and 2001 Censuses reflect technological and organisational changes (as well as wider economic changes). In services, information technologies are likely to be particularly important in facilitating many of these changes, which are also closely associated with new organisational forms. For example, the UK retail insurance industry has been transformed from a shop-based business to a telephone and internet based business following the introduction of Direct Line in the late 1980s. This transformation has also been associated with the emergence of telephone call centres, an organisational innovation, as the dominant organisational form in this industry. Similar transformations are now taking place in other information processing based industries, such as travel agencies.

The Census data does not, however, tell us about the use at work of Information Technologies (IT) or organisational changes. Other data sources will be used to provide information on these issues. These sources include the 1997 Skills in Britain survey and the Workplace and Industrial Relations Surveys (and successors). Using these surveys, the project will investigate (though multivariate techniques that allow us to control for factors such as industry, occupation and geographic location) questions such as: a) the extent to which different types of workers use information technologies in their work; and b) the extent of organisational change. These analyses would then help us understand the extent to which the changing spatial division of labour identified by the analysis of Census data can be explained by technological and organisational innovations.

The final stage of the project would be to consider how the discovered patterns might develop in the future. For instance, the extent to which the routine information processing work which is currently undertaken within call centres may be automated and/or relocated to lower cost locations than the north and west of the UK, such as India and eastern Europe. This has clear implications for the competitiveness of UK regions and the economy as a whole.

Outcomes and Dissemination

The primary outcome of the project will be the successful completion of a PhD and the more general training of the student. We also expect that that project will give rise to several conference papers (aimed at academic and policy maker audiences) and academic journal articles. In the early phases of the project especially, these will papers be jointly authored by the student and the project supervisors (Professor Howells and Dr Tether). However, we consider that it is vital that a PhD student in the social sciences also develops his/her own research interests and independent research capabilities, and so we will encourage the student to develop independent lines of inquiry within the broader framework of the project. The project will use standard multivariate statistical techniques, but will generate new insights into the whole process of technological and organisational change, particularly within services, and will consider how this influences the spatial distribution of labour within the UK economy. This is clearly important, and would provide the student with a valuable starting point for a successful academic career (or alternatively one in evidence based policy making). Aside from the above mentioned papers, it is envisaged that a workshop will be held at CRIC on this theme towards the end of the studentship, where academics and practitioners (for example, from ONS and private sector firms associated with using geographical information systems (GIS)) will be invited to attend. This will also provide the student with an opportunity to present his/her independent work.

Further Note

The proposed project would be undertaken within the ESRC Centre for Research on Innovation and Competition (CRIC), within which the study of services and their innovation activities is a major priority. Moreover, the project would contribute directly to one of CRIC's main research projects, that on 'mapping and measuring the knowledge economy' (Project 6). As such, the student would be part of a leading and dynamic group of researchers with strong interests in these issues, and with experience of undertaking analyses of large-scale datasets. This group includes Professor Jeremy Howells, Professor Ian Miles, Dr Bruce Tether and Dr Mark Tomlinson. Jeremy Howells and Bruce Tether would be directly responsible for supervising the student.