Biography
John has over thirty years teaching in UK and Canadian business schools specialising in employment relations and the sociology of work. His research interests and publications have focused on the politics of technology, labour relations, workplace learning and organisational leadership.
John Bratton's research ranges widely across the sociology of work and management. Particular interests include work design, workplace learning, organizational leadership, employment relations and classical social theory. His doctoral research examined the effect of new technology on skills and management practices in the mechanical engineering industry.
John received funding from the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council to investigate work design and employment relations in the pulp and paper industry and, in a separate study, the Cultural Future of Small Cities. The Alberta Ministry of Advanced Education funded his case study research on leadership in Calgary Police Service, Banff Springs Hotel, Pan Canadian Petroleum, The Body Shop and Volvo Motors, Sweden. While John has written peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, he considers his principal scholarly outputs to be his seven authored and co-authored books:
Japanization at Work: Managerial Studies in the 1990s (1992)
Workplace Learning: A Critical Introduction (co-authored) (2004)
Organizational Leadership (co-authored) (2005)
HRM: Theory and Practice (with Jeff Gold) (2017), now in its 7th edition
Capitalism & Classical Social Theory (with D. Denham) (2019), now in its 3rd edition
Work and Organizational Behaviour (2020), now in its 4th edition
Organizational Leadership (Editor) (2020)
He was the first Director of the Workplace Learning Research Unit at the University of Calgary, Canada. He was a member of the editorial board of Leadership, the Journal of Workplace Learning and the Canadian Journal for the Study of Adult Education. Over a span of 30 years, his teaching commitments, at both undergraduate and graduate levels, traverse management and sociology including courses in HRM, leadership, research methods and classical social theory, mainly in the UK and Canada, but also in Finland and Singapore. Currently he divides his time working in Edinburgh and Calgary.