EQUALSOC -Economic Change, Quality of Life and Social Cohesion
The network will mobilise and develop research expertise across Europe on economic change, quality of life and social cohesion. It will stimulate high quality comparative European research on social cohesion and its determinants; encourage the development of additional research centres; provide an infrastructure for training the rising generation of young researchers in the skills of comparative research; and facilitate access to the most recent results of research for the wider research community and for policy makers.

The central focus will be on social cohesion and its dependence on social differentiation, assessing the relationships between the growing importance of knowledge in the economy, the different chances that individuals and groups experience with respect to the quality of life, and social cohesion.


http://www.equalsoc.org/

The 2006 British Skills Survey
The 2006 Skills Survey will provide a resource for analysing skill and job requirements in the British economy in the middle part of the current decade, thus providing continuity with the previous sequence of surveys, and a benchmark for comparison with the past and possible future surveys. Stemming from this overarching aim, there are several specific objectives of the survey:
Objective 1: to provide an analysis of the level and distribution of the skills – both broad and generic (including computing) skills – being utilised in British workplaces in 2006.
Objective 2: to provide a picture of recent trends in broad and generic skills.
Objective 3: to update our knowledge of the valuation of skills, and of the association of skills usage with other worker rewards and indicators of well-being, and of how skills are related to the evolution of inequality.
Objective 4: to provide a description of the work preferences and work motivation of those in employment in Britain, and for the first time a systematic analysis of how preferences and motivation relate to the skill development that people experience in their jobs.
Objective 5: to develop further our knowledge about the relationship between employers’ human resource practices, the competitive environment in which they operate, and the level and development of their employees’ skills.
Objective 6: to provide detailed analyses of skills levels and distributions within and between regions of the United Kingdom.