People, Work and Organizational Psychology Summer Seminar
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck Clore Management Centre
The People, Work, and Organizational Psychology Subject Group at Birkbeck Business School is pleased to invite you to this year’s Summer Seminar, which will take place in person on Birkbeck’s central London campus.
The 2025 seminar explores the theme of Change and the Contemporary Workplace, reflecting the profound and ongoing transformations reshaping the world of work. From the growing role of artificial intelligence and algorithmic decision-making to the evolving expectations around inclusion, identity, and purpose, contemporary workplaces face complex challenges and opportunities that demand both scholarly and practical attention.
Birkbeck has a long-standing tradition of critical engagement with work and learning. Founded to widen access to education for working people, and home to the UK’s first Department of Organizational Psychology, Birkbeck continues to be a leading voice in examining the social, technological, and institutional forces that shape working life.
This year’s seminar will bring together staff, students, and alumni to examine how individuals and organisations are responding to change - from structural shifts in power and policy, to the lived experiences of professional identity, resistance, and care in the workplace. Presentations will draw on both empirical and conceptual work in the fields related to research carried out by colleagues in the People, Work and Organizational Psychology Subject Group. These offer insights into how work is being redefined, and the implications this holds for theory, practice, and policy.
We warmly welcome current and prospective students, alumni, staff, and anyone with an interest in how work is changing and how we might respond.
Programme
13:30 Registration
13:45 Welcome address
Professor Andy Adcroft - Head of BBK Business School
Dr Mark Stringer - Subject Lead for People, Work, and Organizational Psychology
14:10 Machines need stability, not mothers: Capital, technology, and the gendered logic of exclusion
Dr Ashok Kumar
This study challenges Labour Process Theory by showing how technological advancement drives workplace defeminization, as firms prioritize stable workforces and penalize women’s higher absenteeism caused by unpaid care burdens. The findings reveal that defeminization stems not from skill biases alone but from capital’s demand for stability conflicting with gendered social reproduction pressures.
14:50 “Not the top of the pyramid”: Clergy resistance to managerialism
Dr Rebecca Whiting
This presentation examines clergy resistance to managerialism within the Church as exposed and debated during the pandemic. This saw a dramatic change to clergy work practices, particularly the widespread adoption of digital ministry amid a flurry of Church directives. Digitalisation offers potentially new spaces for resistance but also new managerialist practices to resist. We examine a range of discursive practices of resistance by clergy such as disengagement; challenging; intensifying work engagement; and producing a frontline worker identity.
15:30 Break
16:00 Student Showcase - “Just because we do good, it doesn’t mean we’re not doing harm” A Critical Discourse Analysis of intersectional identities and the ideal worker concept within the professionalized UK non-profit sector
Nicola Benthem
This presentation explores to what extent racially minoritized female and non-binary workers are excluded from the ideal worker concept in UK non-profits, specifically whilst these organizations undergo change to become more professionalized and engage in practices that mirror the for-profit and public sectors.
16:25 Student Showcase - “How to champion culture-add hiring in the age of AI?”
George Ko
16:45 Why do replications struggle to make an impact?
Josefina Weinerova
Replication studies represent one of the main mechanisms of scientific self-correction. However, studies often do not cite replications alongside original findings. This project aims to identify factors predicting replication impact
17:15 Break
18:00 Hope and healing in the contemporary university workplace: an outsiders' story
Kayleigh Woods Harley, Sarah Molyneaux, and Holly Nicholas
In this talk, we reflect on our experiences as professional service women within the contemporary university workplace. We share our story of how a workshop on office housework led to a published paper in collaboration with academic colleagues, through a series of virtual collective writing sessions. These sessions provided a reflective space in which we wrote about and shared our experiences of office housework as a method of hope and healing. We propose that this process demonstrated resistance in two ways: both in bridging structural divides between professional services and academic staff in the contemporary neoliberal university workplace, and in contributing to academic knowledge production as “outsiders.” We also reflect on the challenges, unexpected diversions, and surprising realisations encountered along the way.
19:20 Closing remarks
19:30 Close
Contact name: Kevin Teoh
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