Health and Wellbeing Research Network

The NBS Health and Wellbeing Research Network aims to develop new pedagogical insights that can inform theory and practice by providing an inclusive and engaging platform to engage in meaningful conversations to share research ideas and explore collaborative opportunities.

Additionally, the network aims to:

• Support and help develop early career academics working in this area.
• Support doctoral students researching on health and wellbeing related topics.
• Facilitate scholarly discussions across NBS and NTU on related topics.
• Provide a platform to encourage interaction between researchers and promote knowledge creation and knowledge exchange.
• Offer workshops related to theory and methods on related topics.
• Facilitate grant capture workshops & support research bids.
• Inform & promote excellence in teaching of related topics across UG, PG and Doctoral programmes.

Key sub-themes include:

• Mental health and Well-being
• Social and Organisational Psychology
• Emotion and Affect
• Memory studies
• Psychoanalytic research
• Organisational Behaviour

Detailed profile:

The NBS Health and Wellbeing Research Network is co-lead by Prof. Steve Brown and Dr. Ishan Jalan and brings together around forty active researchers who have shared interests around research exploring the organizational and institutional dimensions of healthcare provision and the lived experiences of health and wellbeing in the workplace. Members of the network draw upon a wide range of differing theoretical and methodological approaches to understand how organized settings facilitate or impair wellbeing, the ways in which the social determinants of health influence working lives and designing healthcare provision around contemporary challenges. The Network sits within the overall NTU Health and Wellbeing Strategic Research Theme. Members of the network have held external research funding from a wide variety of funders, including ESRC, AHRC, EU, Lloyds Register Foundation, and KTP Partnerships.

The network has particular expertise around workplace wellbeing. For example, members of the research network have contributed to:

• Mapping out the wellbeing consequences of the challenges that have been navigated by this sector during the COVID pandemic (Daniel King);
• Developed a service-user informed approach to studying how the built environment impacts upon health care delivery in these complex clinical and institutional settings based on research carried out in secure psychiatric mental health care (Steve Brown);
• Exploring the ways in which the participation in LGBTQ led sports activities can provide community-based support for wellbeing and the manner in which this connects with other kinds of service provision (Scott Lawley);
• Exploration of whistle-blower subjectivities and its consequences on the self (Ishan Jalan).
• A re-evaluation of the role of presenteeism in relation to work, health and performance and to thinking more broadly about behaviour change in relation to health (Zara Whysall);

Members of the research network regularly publish in top international journals like Organisation Studies, Human Relations, Memory Studies, Culture and Organization, European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, International Journal of Management Reviews, Health and Place, The Sociological Review, International Journal of Law & Psychiatry, Academy of Management Learning and Education, and Organization, to name a few.

Members of the research network also hold editorial positions in top international journals such as Co-Editor of The Sociological Review (Brown), Memory Studies (Brown), Culture and Organization (Lawley), editorial board for journals such as Organization Studies (King), Work, Employment and Society (King), Organization (King), Journal of Management Studies (Jalan).

• Leverhulme Trust, The Impact of Diasporas on the Making of Modern Britain (with Joanna Story and Marc Scully)
• AHRC, Conflicts of Memory: Commemorating and mediating the 2005 London Bombings. (with Andrew Hoskins and Matthew Allen)
• KTP, Culture change (Zara Whysall and Ishan Jalan)