Digit Debates • Digit

Our flagship Digit Debates series of online talks aims to spark debate, challenge assumptions and provides unmissable insights from leading thinkers into how digital technologies are transforming work.

Watch past talks

29 November 2023	Counter-hegemonic Neoliberalism? Making sense of EU platform regulation Philipp Staab explores EU platform regulation and how it relates to the historical trajectory of the platform economy and established path dependencies within the EU.
22 November 2023	How cultural workers address racism and work in the digital age Francesca Sobande explores how cultural workers address racism and work in the digital age.
15 November 2023	Making AI work for Britain Jake Wall discusses insights from techUK’s new report ‘Making AI work for Britain’, which explores the impact of AI on jobs, work and the workforce.
12 July 2023	Digitalization and the future of the welfare state How will digitalization transform not only social risks in health, education and the labour market—but also the means by which these risks are addressed?
21 June 2023	From algorithmic fairness to algorithmic robustness and back Novi Quadrianto presents new research on developing machine learning models that are both algorithmically robust and fair.
7 June 2023	The political consequences of digital futures at work Bruno Palier and Zhen Im present findings from their work exploring the political consequences of the digital transformation of work.
8 March 2023	Women in Tech Professor Heather Haveman discusses recent findings from her research on work-life balance and gender inequality in the tech sector.
23 November 2022	Working from home after COVID-19 Pawel Adrjan asks how increasing and declining pandemic severity has influenced advertised telework from 2019 to today?
16 November 2022	Shaping the Future of Work: An Activist Research Agenda Professor Thomas Kochan asks how researchers can take an activist role in studying how to best design and use technology for the common good.
9 November 2022	Restarting the future: how to fix the intangible economy Jonathan Haskel discusses how the vital institutions that underpin our economy remain geared to an outmoded way of doing business and presents new ideas to help us catch up with the intangible revolution.
2 November 2022	Digital Levelling Up in Sussex Dr Becky Faith asks who is being left behind by the digital transformation and how can we imagine a more inclusive digital future for Sussex?
12 October 2022	Can we talk about strategic Human Resource Management in the gig economy? Professor Fang Lee Cooke provides an overview of research on digitally enabled gig employment and the implications for human resource management research and practice.
15 June 2022	Skills for the Planetary Labour Market – Indian Workers in the Platform Economy How can governmental, private and third-sector skills training approaches be adapted to meet the needs of Indian cloudworkers?
8 June 2022	Automating job interviews: Experiences and implications for job seekers How do asynchronous video interviews affect the behaviour of young job seekers during interviews, and their post-interview perceptions of self and work?
25 May 2022	The covid pandemic and the resurgence of the shorter working week Early reflections on ongoing research investigating the rapidly-growing number of employer-led experiments with the ‘4 Day Week’, following the Covid pandemic.
18 May 2022	Authoritarianism, oligarchy, localism or democracy? Alternative Futures for the Digital Transformation How can four scenarios for the future trajectory of the digital transformation help us trace and understand the future trajectory of the digital transformation?
4 May 2022	The Metric Society: On the Quantification of the Social How the ubiquitous language of ranking and scoring has changed profoundly our perception of value and status.
30 March 2022	How fixing the digital divide will help the country level up What do you need to cross the divide as an individual and what would a digitally included nation really deliver us?
16 March 2022	Is AI taking our jobs? Lessons from a survey of UK business leaders What can a survey of UK business leaders tell us about the impact of AI on jobs?
9 March 2022	Threat or opportunity? (Social) media perspectives on AI and the future of work What can online discussions about AI and the future of work tell us about how the impacts and possible futures are understood?
23 February 2022	Can HR adapt to artificial intelligence? How can the HR profession shape the future to put fairness and ethics at the heart of AI development and use?
24 November 2021	Digit Debates: Do workers need a legal right to disconnect? Our Digit Debates Right to Disconnect panel, comprised of experts from law, academia, trade unionism and journalism, discuss whether workers should have the right to disconnect.
17 November 2021	Digit Debates: Connectivity – OECD perspectives and policies to expand network coverage and quality In this Digit Debate, Verena Weber, Head of the Communication Infrastructures and Policy Unit at the OECD, discusses current state of communications infrastructures and the policies that can help expand network coverage and quality.
10 November 2021	Digit Debates: Mind the gap: Digital platforms and the future of social and employment protections Digit’s Steve Rolf and Marc Meryon from Eversheds Sutherland present their Digit Debate on digital platforms and the future of social employment protections
3 November 2021	Digit Debates: Diversity and Digital Exclusion: developing an inclusive agenda for digital futures at work techUK’s Nimmi Patel presents her Digit Debate on developing an inclusive agenda for digital futures at work.
20 October 2021	Digit Debates: The Gender Wage Gap in an Online Labour Market: The Cost of Interruptions Professor Abi Adams-Prassl presents her Digit Debate on the gender wage gap in an online labour market.
16 June 2021	Digit Debates: How does labour market digitalization affect social mobility? Professor Vili Lehdonvirta discusses research examining whether labour market digitalization could be decoupling inherited occupation from job quality.
9 June 2021	Digit Debates: Pandemic, Performance and the Pace of Work Professor Abigail Marks discusses findings from her Working@Home research project following the experiences of 80 ‘new’ homeworkers during the Covid-19 pandemic.
26 May 2021	Digit Debates: Live from the farm: How Chinese video apps are changing the global development landscape Professor Xiaolan Fu explores how Thai durian growers and Rwandan coffee sellers are becoming microcelebrities in China and elsewhere using short form video apps.
19 May 2021	Digit Debates: Automation and the End of Work? Dr Aaron Benanav considers the relationship between automation and demand for labour.
12 May 2021	Digit Debates: Platform firms and the restructuring of work Professor Anke Hassel discusses how platform firms are contributing to the restructuring of work.
5 May 2021	Digit Debates: Technology & Transformations in US Retail Professor Chris Tilly and Professor Chris Benner consider the broader workplace implications of the growth of e-commerce, particularly the recent grocery and meal e-commerce surge.
17 March 2021	Digit Debates: Algorithmic workplace surveillance Aida Ponce Del Castillo discusses Algorithmic workplace surveillance.
10 March 2021	Digit Debates: What to do? Almost everything about us, is happening without us Dee Masters and Robin Allen QC discuss their recent work mapping the way current equality and employment laws apply to the use of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in the workplace.
3 March 2021	Digit Debates: Protecting workers in the digital age Janine Berg argues that debates on the future of work have focused far too much attention on possible job losses, ignoring the deterioration in job quality experienced by many of the world’s workers.
24 February 2021	Digit Debates: The geo-politics of artificial intelligence Alexandra Mousavizadeh discusses Tortoise’s Global AI Index, the first index to benchmark nations on their level of investment, innovation and implementation of artificial intelligence.
10 February 2021	Digit Debates: Why the world needs to worry about the ethics of AI Simon Greenman discusses the risks and challenges of AI and argues that it can only live up to its potential benefits if people can trust in its use.
3 February 2021	Digit Debates: Decoding employment status Simon Deakin discusses the classification of work relations.
9 December 2020	Digit Debates: How can online employee reviews help firms to innovate? Nachiappan Subramanian discusses how online employee reviews can help firms innovate as part of the Digit Debates series.
2 December 2020	Digit Debates: Perspectives on the future in the sociology of work Professor Duncan Gallie considers what we can learn from past predictions about the future of work.
25 November 2020	Digit Debates: A typlology of crowdwork platforms Professor Debra Howcroft provides a timely review and classification of crowdwork.
18 November 2020	Digit Debates: What do platforms do? Beyond the pro-con debate on gig labour Professor Juliet Schor discusses new research on platforms in the post-covid period to ask—what do platforms do?
11 November 2020	Digit Debates: The digital lives of black women in Britain: Between creativity, community and commodification Dr Francesca Sobande explores the tensions between digital culture’s communal, counter-cultural, and commercial qualities, focusing on how these matters are shaped by intersecting anti-blackness, sexism, and other forms of entangled oppression.
4 November 2020	Digit Debates: Is music streaming bad for musicians? Problems of evidence and argument Professor David Hesmondhalgh considers the claim that that music streaming has made it harder than before for musicians to make a living from music.