Sue Konzelmann and Frank Wilkinson

16 August 2015

Tony Blair’s assertion that the Labour Party faces “annihilation” if Jeremy Corbyn is elected leader, is little short of astonishing. Just three months ago in Scotland, Labour actually was annihilated – by the rise of the SNP, a left-of-centre party, opposed to austerity and strongly supported by young people. Currently, the Scottish Labour Party is being rejuvenated by the prospects of Corbyn as leader. It is clearly fanciful to suppose that Labour faces crushing defeat simply because opposing austerity will make it look too left wing.

28 January 2015

By Sue Konzelmann and Frank Wilkinson.

Osborne argues that the economy is on the road to recovery. Cameron claims that the government is well on the way to reducing the national debt. So how come most people still feel under-paid, over-charged and living on the edge? In the second of a series of blog pieces, Frank Wilkinson and Sue Konzelman expose the fiction behind the government’s financial arguments. Analysing the UK’s history of economic performance, they conclude that austerity doesn’t work. It hasn’t in the past and it won’t in the future.

Sue Konzelmann

Sue Konzelmann is a Reader in Management at Birkbeck, University of London. She is also Director of the London Centre for Corporate Governance and Ethics, Co-Executive Editor of the Cambridge Journal of Economics and a Research Associate in the Cambridge University Centre for Business Research. Sue’s research brings together historical, economic, social and political perspectives to explore a range of different areas, most recently the political economics of austerity and the ‘variety’ within liberal capitalism that became apparent in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis. The next stage of this research considers the alternatives to austerity, including industrial strategy, social policy and financial reform, with the aim of informing theory and practice as well as policy. She is particularly interested in how the interaction of societal, economic and political forces shapes the direction of theory and policy – and how this, in turn, influences developments in global financial markets and the broader economic system in which they are embedded. Sue has also conducted comparative work on corporate governance and HRM, considering the degree to which corporate governance might serve as a constraint on the ability of senior managers to effectively manage their human resources as a consequence of the need to prioritize the interests of shareholders over all other corporate stakeholders – workers, in particular. She has also explored the dynamic processes underpinning the spread of national varieties of capitalism by means of approaches taken by multi-national firms. For further information, including a list of publications, please visit http://www.bbk.ac.uk/management/our-staff/academics/konzelmann.

17 December

By Sue Konzelmann, a Reader in Management at Birkbeck, University of London and Frank Wilkinson, a founder member of the Institute for Employment Rights and Emeritus Reader, University of Cambridge.

Both Government and Opposition spokespersons offer the same dire warning. They claim that anything other than persistent austerity will “return the country to the 1930s”. Such claims demonstrate their complete ignorance of what was actually achieved in the 1930s.