Status: ongoing

Researchers involved: Lukas Kikuchi, Will Stronge and Ryan Bellinson of IIPP

Length: 6 – 8 months

IIPP and Autonomy have been awarded funding from UCL Grand Challenges through the Green Recovery from COVID-19 theme to continue working with Greater Manchester as the city-region is Building Back Better from the pandemic.

For GMCA to achieve the ambition set out in its mission and succeed in delivering a green recovery after the impact of COVID-19, new ‘mission-metrics’ are needed that can monitor and evaluate progress. Through this funding award, IIPP will design new evaluation tools that can measure the dynamic efficiency of GMCA’s mission and be used to track progress through a public facing ‘mission dashboard’. GMCA has recognised the need to develop new approaches to assess the progress of their mission that are more robust than the current static, linear key performance indicators but need support with the knowledge and capabilities to do so.

Supported by: UCL Grand Challenges and Environment Domain funding

Status: ongoing

Researchers involved: Phil Jones

Length: –

Details to follow.

Supported by: –

Status: ongoing

Researchers involved: whole team

Length: 1-3 years

A three-year, collaborative research, consultation and policy project to envisage and build towards the achievement of good work and good working lives across the next three decades.

Work as we know it stands at a crossroads, both in the short-term (Covid) and in the longer-term (e.g. ecological collapse). Other trends of automation, labour market polarisation and decline in worker voice are also set to worsen in the absence of significant intervention. Yet, facing these crises also represents an opportunity for significant change and a better future for workers.

Our advanced data research, analysis and policy proposals, combined with a thorough consultation process with a range of actors will provide the foundations for interventions that lead to a better world of work.

Supported by: Alex Ferry Foundation

Status: completed September 2021

Researchers involved: Duncan McCann, Will Stronge, Phil Jones

Length: 3 months

The model of online advertising that dominates the market today is tracking-based advertising, where adverts are placed in front of individuals based on personal data provided by the website and any adtech partners with whom they are working. This can be seen as troubling: from the way it invades personal privacy, to the way it might feed disinformation or damage national security.

This report explores concerns surrounding the practice of tracking-based advertising today and examines in detail the most significant trends in the adtech market: from the rebirth of contextual advertising to new proposals by Google, Microsoft and others. The report concludes by looking into the potential impact of a ban on the use of personal data in online advertising, both on the issues that we raise in Section 3 as well as on some of the key entities that currently rely on the practice for the operations.

Supported by: EU Greens

Status: ongoing

Researchers involved: Common Knowledge and Autonomy team

Length: 12 months

Understanding your workplace is a key step in the journey towards changing it. This toolkit is a collection of approaches, step-by-step guides and historical examples of worker organising. You can use these tools to create knowledge about your own work, power hierarchies, class relations, and capitalism more broadly, all from your own perspective. The goal is not just to describe your working conditions, but ultimately to transform them. 

Supported by: the Amiel Melburn Trust

Status: completed December 2020

Researchers involved: Rob Jump, Will Stronge, Julian Siravo

Length: 12 months

As the discussion around a shorter working week gathers pace amongst social movements, economists and politicians, more robust data and analysis is required to inform the debate – beyond speculation and beyond international and historical comparisons. This project seeks to deploy a hypothetical scenario – a four-day week across industries and regions in the UK – in order to ‘stress test’ working time reductions as policy. With these data, robust sectoral and national policy proposals will be produced – moving the debate on by answering not just why shorting working hours are desirable, but how such a situation could be achieved concretely.

Supported by: the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation