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School of Business and Management

Professor Mark Williams

Mark

Professor of Human Resource Management

Email: mark.williams@qmul.ac.uk
Telephone: +44 (0)20 7882 2194
Room Number: Room 4.21a, Francis Bancroft Building, Mile End Campus

Profile

Roles:

Biography:

Mark Williams is a Professor of Human Resource Management in the School of Business and Management.

Mark is a quantitative social scientist researching inequalities in working conditions in the United Kingdom.

Much of his work has been on charting disparities within and between occupations and social classes, with recent research also covering socio-economic background, ethnicity, and sex. His research has spanned disparities in pay, payment systems, zero-hours contracts, autonomy, as well as overall job quality and job attitudes, with recent research exploring the role of regulatory institutions on these themes.

Mark joined QMUL in 2019. Prior to QMUL, he held posts at the University of Surrey and the London School of Economics. He undertook his undergraduate, postgraduate, and doctoral training at the London School of Economics and the University of Oxford.

Teaching

Undergraduate

BUS320: Employment Relations

Research

Research Interests:

  • Social stratification
  • Pay
  • Job quality
  • Measurement of socio-economic background, social class, occupations, and working conditions

Centre and Group Membership:

Grants, Contracts and Awards

I have been Principal Investigator or Co-Investigator on research grants and contracts gratefully received from numerous organisations including the UKRI/ESRC, Norwegian Research Council, Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, Department for Business and Trade, Department of Health and Social Care, British Academy, and trade union, amounting to several millions in total.

Publications

Supervision

Areas of Supervision Expertise:

I am interested in hearing from potential doctoral researchers who would like to carry out quantitative research in the broad area of the quality of employment (e.g., pay, hours, job insecurity, job control, wellbeing, etc.).

I am especially interested in hearing about projects making use of nationally representative survey or administrative data to explore disparities in this area (e.g., by socio-economic background, occupation, class, ethnicity, age, or sex, etc.).

My expertise is on the United Kingdom and China, but I am happy to consider proposals concerning Anglophone or European countries, and potentially, countries in East/South-East Asia too.

Note the University offers a variety of scholarships for doctoral study.

Please get in touch with me directly if you would like to discuss an idea or a proposal.

Please note I will not consider proposals (as first supervisor) that are removed from my main substantive and geographical areas of interest, or are majority qualitative.

Current Doctoral Students:

1st Supervisor

  • Rebecca Florisson, 'Path dependence in career mobility: The effect of precarious early work experience on career trajectories over the life course'
  • Lan Lu, The impact of China's increasing work overtime problem on Chinese employees.

2nd Supervisor

  • Ying Cui, Social Returns to Education: Evidence from China.

Public Engagement

I have acted as an Advisor or presented research to various government departments in the UK (e.g., Social Mobility Commission, ONS, DB&T, Cabinet Office, DH&SC, and the ONS) and internationally (e.g., European Commission). My research has been cited by most national newspapers/broadcasters, in various policy documents, and I have even been personally named by Members of Parliament in House of Commons debates on a few of occasions in reference to my research.

My chief contributions have been (i) mapping disparities in the quality of jobs across occupations and classes; and (ii) related measurement, classification, and data collection issues (e.g., socio-economic background, occupational classifications, NS-SEC, working conditions scales, etc.).

A recent project, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, explored some of these themes, and is summarised in Mapping Good Work.

Outside of QMUL, I am an Associate Editor at the British Journal of Industrial Relations, a member of the ESRC Peer Review College, Affiliated Member of the Future of Work Research Centre at the University of Surrey, an external examiner at LSE, and an Academic Member of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. I previously served terms on the Associate Editorial and Editorial Boards at Work, Employment and Society and on the Editorial Board at Human Relations.

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