Professor Jonathan Winterton

Professor Jonathan Winterton

Profile

After an apprenticeship as a technician instrument maker, I studied Industrial Technology at the University of Bradford, followed by a Masters in Industrial Relations at the London School of Economics and a doctorate from the University of Leeds. I taught in the Engineering Faculty at Bradford, then moved to Bradford Management Centre before being appointed to my first Chair at Napier University, Edinburgh, to establish and lead the Employment Research Institute in 1997. In 2000 I moved to Toulouse Business School as the first Director of Research and after 10 years assumed responsibility for International Development. In 2015 I moved to Borneo as Dean of the Faculty of Business at Curtin University in Sarawak, moving after two years to Peninsular Malaysia as Executive Dean of the Faculty of Business and Law at Taylor’s University. I returned to the UK in 2019 as Head of the Department of Management at Huddersfield Business School and took up my post as Head of the Work and Employment Relations Division at Leeds University Business School in August 2020.  

Responsibilities

  • Head of Work and Employment Relations Departrment

Research interests

My principal research interests centre on human capital, including work along two axes: one concerned with the quality of work and the other with how human capital is developed, deployed, and retained. On the quality of work axis, I address the good, in the form of anthropocentric work organization and high involvement work processes; the bad, where restructuring causes precarious work; and the ugly, in the form of modern slavery. On the other axis, I am working on skill formation systems, competence and employability; skill utilization and skills mismatch; and labour turnover and human capital retention.

Over the years, this research has been funded variously by: international organizations, including the ILO and OECD; European Commission programmes and agencies, notably Cedefop and the ETF; various government departments in the UK and Lithuania; state research funding agencies in France and Malaysia; trade unions and central union confederations in the UK, Norway, Sweden and at EU level; local authorities and industry bodies. 

Qualifications

  • PhD Economics
  • MSc (Econ) Industrial Relations
  • BSc (Hons) Industrial Technology and Management

Professional memberships

  • Companion of the Chartered Management Institute
  • Chartered Manager

Student education

Specialist areas of teaching include doctoral research methods, particularly case study research design, and managing work and people in EU and ASEAN contexts

Research groups and institutes

  • Centre for Employment Relations, Innovation and Change

Current postgraduate researchers