Project acronym WorkOD
Project Work on Demand: Contracting for Work in a Changing Economy
Researcher (PI) Ruth Dukes
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH2, ERC-2017-STG
Summary Labour law as a scholarly discipline is widely believed to be in crisis. Since the time of its birth, both the nature of working relationships and the context within which they are formed and regulated have changed significantly. The difficulty for scholars is that old concepts don’t perform the function anymore of making sense of the field. Old arguments about the need to protect workers’ interests are met with counterarguments, informed by neoclassical economics, that protective measures inhibit economic growth and increase unemployment.
The WorkOD project aspires to nothing less than a fundamental transformation of the discipline of labour law across the whole of Europe and beyond. Understanding the crisis to have at its heart a crisis of methodology, it aims to develop a new methodology for the study of the key legal concept of the contract for work. It aims to explain trends in the field of work organisation and working relationships and to assess the significance of particular labour market institutions to the achievement of policy goals in a way that is useful to scholars and policy-makers. And it aims to pave the way for future contributions by scholars to policy debates, so that they may influence in positive ways the identification of new economically and socially sustainable solutions to the problem of the division of responsibilities and risks between workers and those for whom they work.
In a marked departure from the state of the art, the project defines contracting for work as an instance of economic, social and legal behaviour, influenced in a variety of ways by the institutional context within which it proceeds. Rejecting the reframing of labour law according to a full blown market paradigm, it argues instead for the utility of sociological methods. Its development of a new methodology begins from a combination of micro and macro perspectives, and a synthesis of approaches drawn from economic sociology, political economy and the sociology of law.
Summary
Labour law as a scholarly discipline is widely believed to be in crisis. Since the time of its birth, both the nature of working relationships and the context within which they are formed and regulated have changed significantly. The difficulty for scholars is that old concepts don’t perform the function anymore of making sense of the field. Old arguments about the need to protect workers’ interests are met with counterarguments, informed by neoclassical economics, that protective measures inhibit economic growth and increase unemployment.
The WorkOD project aspires to nothing less than a fundamental transformation of the discipline of labour law across the whole of Europe and beyond. Understanding the crisis to have at its heart a crisis of methodology, it aims to develop a new methodology for the study of the key legal concept of the contract for work. It aims to explain trends in the field of work organisation and working relationships and to assess the significance of particular labour market institutions to the achievement of policy goals in a way that is useful to scholars and policy-makers. And it aims to pave the way for future contributions by scholars to policy debates, so that they may influence in positive ways the identification of new economically and socially sustainable solutions to the problem of the division of responsibilities and risks between workers and those for whom they work.
In a marked departure from the state of the art, the project defines contracting for work as an instance of economic, social and legal behaviour, influenced in a variety of ways by the institutional context within which it proceeds. Rejecting the reframing of labour law according to a full blown market paradigm, it argues instead for the utility of sociological methods. Its development of a new methodology begins from a combination of micro and macro perspectives, and a synthesis of approaches drawn from economic sociology, political economy and the sociology of law.
Max ERC Funding
1 422 818 €
Duration
Start date: 2018-01-01, End date: 2022-12-31
Project acronym YMPACT
Project The Yamnaya Impact on Prehistoric Europe
Researcher (PI) Volker HEYD
Host Institution (HI) HELSINGIN YLIOPISTO
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), SH6, ERC-2017-ADG
Summary Dramatic migrations in the third millennium BC re-shaped Europe, modifying its economy, society, ethnicity and ideological structure for ever. The best incentive proxy are populations that moved from the steppes of Russia, spreading as far west as Hungary, implanting a pastoral economy with widespread innovations. These dynamic people covered thousands of kilometres within a few centuries, and organised direct physical relations over the steppes for the first time. This synchronism is promoted by a society organised to fit to this lifestyle, with new herding techniques, likely use of wagons and domesticated horses, and a protein-rich diet, whose adaptive advantages are evident from the physical record in human skeletons and territorial extensions. This is the Yamnaya complex, whose impact remains visible today in the European gene pool and apparently the propagation of Indo-European languages. This international and interdisciplinary project examines the data from 320 excavated burial mounds and c.1350 burials to calibrate these changes, also against a control sample of supposedly local and neighbouring populations. The archaeological, biological and environmental information allows large, new datasets to be built, whose systematic interrogation and modelling should reveal the formative processes behind these changes. Assessing funeral archaeology, material culture, and exchange pattern defines their culture and impact. Scientific analyses of skeletons expose relations of origin, degrees of consanguinity, diet, and histories of individual mobility over single lifetimes with new precision and replicability. They should also act as proxy datasets for environmental changes using further analytical techniques in a context of landscape evolution. Diachronic patterns within these sets should link with aspects of the internal social dynamics, such as the creation of new status positions, visible later in the Pan-European Corded Ware and Bell Beaker groups.
Summary
Dramatic migrations in the third millennium BC re-shaped Europe, modifying its economy, society, ethnicity and ideological structure for ever. The best incentive proxy are populations that moved from the steppes of Russia, spreading as far west as Hungary, implanting a pastoral economy with widespread innovations. These dynamic people covered thousands of kilometres within a few centuries, and organised direct physical relations over the steppes for the first time. This synchronism is promoted by a society organised to fit to this lifestyle, with new herding techniques, likely use of wagons and domesticated horses, and a protein-rich diet, whose adaptive advantages are evident from the physical record in human skeletons and territorial extensions. This is the Yamnaya complex, whose impact remains visible today in the European gene pool and apparently the propagation of Indo-European languages. This international and interdisciplinary project examines the data from 320 excavated burial mounds and c.1350 burials to calibrate these changes, also against a control sample of supposedly local and neighbouring populations. The archaeological, biological and environmental information allows large, new datasets to be built, whose systematic interrogation and modelling should reveal the formative processes behind these changes. Assessing funeral archaeology, material culture, and exchange pattern defines their culture and impact. Scientific analyses of skeletons expose relations of origin, degrees of consanguinity, diet, and histories of individual mobility over single lifetimes with new precision and replicability. They should also act as proxy datasets for environmental changes using further analytical techniques in a context of landscape evolution. Diachronic patterns within these sets should link with aspects of the internal social dynamics, such as the creation of new status positions, visible later in the Pan-European Corded Ware and Bell Beaker groups.
Max ERC Funding
2 494 209 €
Duration
Start date: 2019-01-01, End date: 2023-12-31
