Dr Lisa Schulte

Biography

I joined Middlesex University in September 2016 as an associate lecturer in Human Resource Management. I became a senior lecturer in Organisational Behaviour and Employment Relations in September 2019.

Prior to joining Middlesex University I completed a PhD at the University of Greenwich on ‘Industrial policy, skill formation, and job quality in the Danish, German and English offshore wind turbine industries.’ During that time I also worked on the European Research Council-funded project 'The Effects of Marketization on Societies' (Primary Investigator: Ian Greer) and the project 'The Marketization of Employment Services: Dilemmas of Europe's Work-first Welfare States', which was funded by the German Hans-Boeckler-Foundation.

My comparative PhD research has shown the importance of stable institutions and industrial policy and explored the effects of different approaches to industrial policy on job quality, skill formation and industrial development in different national, regional and firm level contexts. I have continued studying the wind turbine industry in the following years and revisited some of my earlier company cases in the British Academy funded research project "Wind energy and the Just Transition: Political and socio-economic pinch points in wind turbine manufacturing and windfarm communities in Europe and South Africa" (Grant COVJT210011) this time with a team of five researchers. We expanded the comparison to South Africa and Scotland and the focus to wind farm communities and research participants’ definition and perception of the Just Transition. Our research showed how the concept Just Transition is a contested one and how even within the wider wind energy sector there are conflicts of interests which are difficult to reconcile, but which need to be addressed by policy markers and other actors to keep wide ranging support for the energy transition. 

Teaching

I am currently teaching in the area of workforce management and wellbeing at work.

I am supervising MA theses in Management with a focus on Human Resource Management, Sociology of Work, Sustainability and Marketing.

I am contributing to the Professional Doctorate Programme in Transdisciplinary Practice as internal examiner and supervisor and to Middlesex University’s collaborative Doctoral Programme with KMU, Austria as Defensio Chair.

I am currently supervising one PhD student. I will be accepting new PhD students from January 2025 preferably in the area of energy industry studies, studies of structural change with a focus on worker outcomes and participation, studies of community empowerment within the energy transition with a qualitative research design.