Previous Postgraduate Researchers

Jean Cushen

Jean's research interests include shareholder capitalism, corporate culture, HRM and the employment experience. She was exploring these issues by conducting a six month ethnographic analysis of an Irish subsidiary of a listed muilti-national firm. Jean was supervised by Professor James Wickham and she was in receipt of a postgraduate scholarship from the Irish Reseach Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Emma Calvert

Emma holds a Masters in Sociology from University College Dublin and was a PhD student under the supervision of Professor James Wickham. Her doctoral research, funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences, explored workplace bullying in the public and private sector. She is a member of the British Sociological Association and the Sociological Association of Ireland.

Michael Doherty

Michael's research seeks to explore the changing role of trade unions as agents of social partnership. Unions have had to respond to a transformation of their economic, legislative and regulatory environment. The new emphasis on partnership and the ways in which it is achieved suggest that union organisation and strategy are undergoing far-reaching changes.

His interest lies in exporing the ways in which unions can contribute to improved productivity and performance by securing workforce co-operation, and the manner in which they can interact with competing 'individualised' employment arrangements, as well as enterprise-level councils and similar bodies that may not have a formal union involvement.

Michael graduated from TCD Law School with an LL.B. in 1998 and has also an LL.M. from Queens' College, Cambridge. As a result, his research has a somewhat multi-disciplinary approach, with strong inputs from sociology, socio-legal studies and industrial relations expertise.

Michael is currently a Lecturer in the School of Law and Government at Dublin City University. He is a Barrister-at-Law, having been called to the Irish Bar in 2002. Michael can be contacted via email (michael.doherty@dcu.ie)

Aileen O'Carroll

Aileen's research investigated changes in how working time is structured and in our understanding of the relationships between time and work. These changes are linked to the adoption of a flexible form of work organisation. It would seem that at the heart of this new work organisation is the development of a new time contract which seeks to bind time spent at work tightly with task completion, without altering the reward received.

Although she graduated with a BA in Natural Sciences from Trinity College Dublin, a series of happy coincidences led her to study sociology in University College Dublin, from which she received a Diploma in Social Research in 1994, followed by a Masters in Social Science in 1995. In 2000 she received a Government of Ireland Scholarship which as afforded her the luxury of devoting her time completely to her studies.

Selected Conference Papers
- From the Coal Face to the Interface: Technology and new experiences of work at the 1997 Sociological Association of Ireland Annual Conerence.
- Picking Cherries of a Tree: Decasualisation and the Dublin Docker at the 1998 Sociological Association of Ireland Annual Conference, revised in 2000 for Irish Labour History Society Annual Conference.
- Changing experiences of Working Time at the Employment Research Centre, TCD in 1999.
- Working Time in the Irish Software Sector at the Employment Research Centre TCD in 2000.
- Time to work, Time to play; Working Time in the Irish Software Center at the Labour Process Conference, Glasgow in 2000.
- Skills Dillemmas at the - Employment Research Centre Research Symposium 'Perspectives on the Software Skills Shortage' in 2000.