The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) and the Institute of Human Resource Management (IHRM) represent the major professional institutes of human resource practice in the UK and Hong Kong respectively. Between 2008 and 2010 both bodies were involved in major restructuring of their qualifications, membership standards and continuous personnel development credentials with a view to increasing the perceived value and influence of the HRM profession. In the UK, following a strategic review leading to a vision of the future role of HR, the CIPD launched a new map of the profession built around ten professional areas of competence, eight behavioural areas of practice and four bands of professional transition, from entry-level to director. Likewise, in Hong Kong, the IHRM launched its new membership scheme which is built around the practicing standards of knowledge, experience and capability. Like the CIPD's professional map, the IHRM's professional standards model provides a framework to help navigate HR practitioners' career paths and map their development needs. In the case of the CIPD the latest move seems to symbolise the latest development in a long period of reforming the identity of the discipline away from a reactive transactional support activity into a proactive strategic function. The IHRM's motives are similar. Moreover, in scanning IHRM events and publications over the past two years strongly suggests an agenda inspired by the 'Next Generation HR' narrative: indeed, there is a strong and growing cross-collaboration between the IHRM and the CIPD in both professional events and collaborative projects. However, little is known about how the normative content of the new agenda will have to the stated abilities and workplace experiences of their targeted client base across all levels. In raising the aspired status of the HR practitioner, will those transactional functions be marginalised? In addition, will the new professional standards contribute to the establishment of a greater consensus as to what constitutes a universal best practice HRM? For HRM in general, the professionalization of HR practice has been a somewhat controversial project since it involves the granting of normative institutional legitimacy to what is essentially a 'captured' management function that could, by implication, have important career-changing implications for its own membership base and also for other organisational colleagues whose future development depends on the influence that the HR function is able to yield within organisations. Therefore, in seeking to provide a detailed insight into what it means to be a qualified HR practitioner in Hong Kong and the UK and the role that the respective professional institutes are exerting in developing and maintaining these ideals this study compares the normative content, institutional impact and workplace credibility of the two sets of professional standards arising. Not only will the data provide a timely independent overview of the current status of HR practice in both national contexts but, by comparing the evidence, it will also be possible to gauge a detailed sense of whether HR is achieving international homogeneity which overrides a range of historical, cultural, institutional and economic factors. Working collaboratively the UK and Hong Kong teams will deploy a mixed methodological approach comprising analysis of core documentation, elite interviews with senior members of the two professional institutes, survey of existing practitioners' attitudes and experiences and follow-up interviews designed to explore more deeply the explanations behind participants' experiences and expectations of HR practice. From this extensive range of empirical data the research team will be able to consider the workplace relevance of the normative content of the two professional institutes and from within a variety of industry settings and at different levels of membership.

Boosting productivity is the greatest economic challenge facing the UK. There is now a strong consensus on the potential for synergy between (1) agile and high performing businesses/organisations; (2) high quality, inclusive and engaging work and (3) effective, efficient and prosperous societies. The key domain in which to drive engagement and productivity is the workplace - where managers and employees create economic value. The ESRC has correctly prioritised research on management practice and employee engagement (MP-EE) within this context. This proposal, to establish the PROPEL Hub (Productivity Outcomes of workplace Practice, Engagement and Learning), seeks to bring together all recently funded ESRC MP-EE projects through a process of co-production and co-creation, connect with other major ESRC investments and engage with world class scholarship on engagement and productivity, to maximise the synergies and impacts of ESRC-funded work in this space. The PROPEL Hub's Primary Investigator will be based at the University of Strathclyde, but all other ESRC MP-EE teams are active partners in this proposal. The approach agreed among and beyond MP-EE teams therefore represents excellent value for money for ESRC - combining limited resources to deliver additional value from existing investments, rather than imposing from the top-down an external hub co-ordinator unconnected to our projects. Our proposal is further strengthened by collaboration with Cardiff and Ulster Universities (so that the PROPEL Hub will impact, and learn from, practice in all nations of the UK) and by an active role for a major national workplace partner, the CIPD. The PROPEL Hub has five distinguishing features: 1. The Hub will be co-created by the five ESRC MP-EE projects and key partners. 2. The model adopted will be a spoke and hub model (as opposed to being a hub and spoke model), locating the research projects at the core of insight, engagement and impact. 3. The Hub will contain a major national partner (CIPD) with links to management, employees and workplaces across the UK. 4. The Hub will deliver genuinely UK-wide engagement and impact through the five ESRC project teams spanning Glasgow to London, along with two additional academic partners from Cardiff/Wales and Ulster/Northern Ireland). 5. The Hub is led by a team with extensive experience of, and expertise in, working in an impactful manner with employers, employees, entrepreneurs and policy stakeholders. Resources are sought to support the work of co-investigators at ESRC MP-EE institutions, Hub management support and knowledge exchange (KE) staff to help to maximise opportunities for collaboration and impact. The PROPEL Hub will drive new activity to bring together ESRC MP-EE teams to share learning, add value and facilitate opportunities for them to engage with other relevant groups and organisations, most crucially policy and business communities. Specific activities will include: MP-EE Masterclasses, bringing together ESRC MP-EE teams, international research leaders, and targeting an audience of business and policy leaders; MP-EE International Research Seminars, focusing on making connections between, or 'learning from difference' across the conceptual, methodological and empirical work of the ESRC MP-EE projects, and again engaging with other world leading researchers; Knowledge into Practice events and Engagement Hacks, where PROPEL Hub KE staff will engage directly with businesses and key stakeholders to share practical insights and solutions around engagement and productivity; and extensive online KE activity to extend the reach of our collaboration and establish a peer learning network. Formative, process and summative evaluation activities will capture the impact of the PROPEL Hub's engagement with academic, business and policy communities, and report on inter-disciplinary and/or international research collaborations or shared learning emanating from our activities.

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.

The retail sector is a crucial part of the UK economy accounting for 11% of UK economic output and nearly 16% of GB employment in 2014 (Rhodes, 2014). The UK government recognises the importance of the sector and its potential to contribute to economic growth and published 'A Strategy for Future Retail: Industry and Government Delivering in Partnership' in 2013. A UKCES report (Vokes and Boehnke, 2014) highlights key themes for the sector including attracting talent, image of the sector (as employers), employee retention and progression and employee issues relating to technological innovation/change. A great deal has been written about diversity and inclusion, and prior to that equality and equal opportunities, in the business, academic and public policy domains. Yet much of this literature focuses on the negative effects of inequality or lack of diversity or on making the business and moral case for adopting diversity policies and relating diversity to organisational performance. While this has been a worthy focus, what is lacking is a clear understanding of the processes involved in bringing about a major programme of organisational change in a large company or public sector organisation and understanding what it is that makes diversity policies actually work and achieve the desired results. The research focus on a major British retail company who are collaborative partners with the University of Leeds provides a unique opportunity to access a large organisation during a period of strategic change. The proposal has been user-led with the research objectives and topics being discussed and agreed with the company and emerging from an initial exploratory study commissioned by them with members of the research team. Using a case study approach focusing on the company, the team will investigate diversity and inclusion in relation to a number of Human Resource (HR) issues: retention and inclusivity, career success, progression and development and the intersectionality of protected characteristics under UK legislation (The Equality Act, 2010). The research objectives cover these topics. The research design uses mixed methodologies including face to face interviews with employees, HR staff, directors and senior managers. There will be a shadowing/observation study with regional teams in the company. Survey data will be collected at two intervals. The research team will analyse the data on an ongoing basis throughout the longitudinal study, with themes emerging and building as the data grows. This organic process will mean that the company will be provided with interim reports on the findings at various stages along the way. DELIVERABLES SUMMARY 1) Direct benefits for the employees, senior management and Directors of the company. Research findings to be shared in a business-friendly manner with regular presentations and full involvement of the company in the process 2) Generalizable findings to be disseminated through academic channels: research conferences and seminars, journal articles and business channels: business conference presentations and seminars, business networks, institutions (e.g. 30% Club, 2% Club, Women in Business), Executive Education and teaching 3) Policy engagement including a parliamentary briefing and an event targeted specifically at policymakers. Proactive use of the key findings to stimulate progress in all sectors

Internal communication does more than transfer information, it infuses organizations with meaning. This 3-year research programme traces the history of internal communication in the UK. As a specialized activity internal comms originates from company magazines in the late 19th century. Since then magazines have morphed into complex systems of intranets, emails, internal social media, company newsletters, road shows, briefing groups, huddles, blogs and roadshows. It is estimated that around 45k professionals are currently engaged in internal communication. The history of internal communication will be studied through the archives of 14 prominent organisations, where research access has been secured: BBC; Boots; British Airways; British Army; British Rail; Cadbury; GlaxoSmithKline; HSBC; John Lewis; National Coal Board; Prudential Insurance; Royal Mail; Shell; and Unilever. In addition the archives for 5 professional bodies and a leading consultancy will be used: AB Communications, which provides internal comms for prominent global and UK organisations; Chartered Institute of Marketing; Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development; Chartered Institute of Public Relations; Institute of Internal Communication; and the Industrial Society. The British Library, which has extensive historical holdings of internal comms, has also agreed to assist with disseminating findings from the research. The changing form and content of internal comms will be mapped, tracing the transformation of the magazine format into the contemporary system of internal comms that aims at enhancing employee engagement, voice, and corporate identity. Discussions about the role of communication will be examined in documents such as minutes from board meetings and reports. Internal comms practitioners and company archivists theorise their own practices. The discourses of practitioners and their relation to actual practices will be examined through communications produced by professional bodies and consultants. Historians accept that nations have been imagined as communities through national newspapers and television channels. Corporations can also be seen as communities that have been imagined through internal comms. Three discourses of imagined communities have legitimated both organisations and the role of internal comms: esprit de corps, where the corporation is imagined as an extended family or military unit; brand community, where employees are imagined as part of community with consumers; and democratic polity, where the employees are imagined as citizens with internal comms as a free press holding government to account. The discourse of brand communities is now predominant, but the interplay between these discourses will be examined throughout the 20th century. Management scholars refer to the instrumental use of the past by corporations as "rhetorical history", which is usually studied in relation to uses of the past in the present for external marketing communication with customers. But references to the past featured in company magazines almost from the outset. The research will produce an account of how rhetorical history has been used in the past both to legitimate organisations to their employees, and to legitimate the role of internal comms. This research program will produce a theoretically informed history of internal comms as a reference point for contemporary debates, such as the response of organisations to the coronavirus pandemic. Company archivists will be interested in how their work informs internal comms, and how internal comms constitutes archives. The internal comms profession will be enhanced by historical debate, and organisations will be interested in finding out what made for effective internal comms in the past. As the wider public consists of many current and former members of large organisations, there will be general interest in remembering how these bodies communicated with their members in the past.