Professor of Work and Skills, Leeds University Business School

Irena Grugulis is Professor of Work and Skills at Leeds University Business School, having held the position for the last decade. Previously, she was Professor of Employment Studies at Durham University for two years and prior to that she was Professor of Work and Skills at Bradford University (2003-2010). Her principal research interests lie in the (broadly constituted) area of skills, she is interested in how organisations attempt to shape their employees and the impact and implications of this for the employees themselves. She explores the notion that there is a partial coincidence of interest between employer and employee that she considers is central to much industrial relations writing but has been largely neglected in the more prescriptive human resource development literature and aims to remedy this omission.

Funded by the ESRC, EPSRC and the EU, Grugulis's recent research projects include an ethnographic study of work and skills in the computer games industry, a study of freelancers and small independent companies in UK film and TV production and research into work and skills in supermarkets. She has also recently worked on skills with the Fire and Rescue Services.

Irena is co-chair of ReWAGE (the Renewing Work Advisory Group of Experts) an ESRC funded expert group that provides advice on work and employment to policymakers. ReWAGE was set up during the Covid pandemic https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/ier/rewage/. She has published extensively including articles in Organization Studies, Journal of Management Studies, British Journal of Industrial Relations and Work, Employment and Society.

Irena is an ESRC/AIM Services Fellow and an Associate Fellow of SKOPE (an ESRC research centre based at Oxford). She has been a member of the UKCESs Academic Advisory Panel and has done government advisory work on skills, contributing to both the Leitch Review and the National Skills Task Force as well as advising the Singaporean government.

Grugulis served as both Editor and Joint Editor in Chief of Work, Employment and Society. She has organised six major international conferences, including the Critical Management Studies Conference which she co-founded and is a member of the Steering Group for the International Labour Process Conference.