Decent Work and Productivity Seminar Series

This presentation presents some of the emergent findings from the Good Employment Learning Lab (GELL), a project funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESCRC).

Inspired by Engaged Scholarship (Van de Ven, 1997), GELL has worked with partners across both Greater Manchester and Adult Social care to develop workplace trials that seek to develop line manager’s people management practice through a range of learning interventions (masterclasses, coaching and/or peer learning).

The focus of the presentation is to provide insight into the development of the evaluation methodology that the project draws upon. This has been developed using a realist evaluation framework developed by Pawson and Tiley (1997) that seeks to go beyond asking ‘what works’ in social programmes to consider the context-sensitive question ‘what works, when, where, for whom and why’.

Speaker - Katie Willocks

Katie is currently working as a Research Associate on an ESRC funded project called the Good Employment Learning Lab. GELL is a project that is looking to enhance line manager’s people management capabilities across a range of current management challenges. See:

https://www.mmu.ac.uk/business-school/research/tgell/

Katie has a PhD in organisational change and learning in the NHS. Her thesis drew on ethnographic methods and Cultural Historical Activity Theory to explore messy and turbulent organisational practices in health care work. Since then, Katie has carried out research into leadership development and leadership learning in health and social care contexts