Dr Matt Vidal

Matt received his PhD in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2007. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. Matt has been a research fellow at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society (2019), and a visiting researcher at the Department of Management, Paris Dauphine University, Paris (2018), and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne (2015). Matt joined the King’s College London Department of Management as a Lecturer in 2008 and joined Loughborough University London in 2017.

Matt has two primary research streams. The first is on work organisation and human resource management, focusing on job quality, employee involvement, lean management and organisational performance. The second is on the comparative political economy of western capitalism, focusing on growth regimes, labour markets, stagnation and crisis. Matt works across disciplines, developing synthetic theories drawing from sociology of work, organizational sociology, human resource management, employment relations, comparative political economy, and heterodox economics, including marxist theory, evolutionary economics, and post-keynesian theory.

Current PhD / research supervisions

Matt is currently supervising the following PhD students:

• Nicos Moushouttas, “Worker Cooperatives as Alternative Economies within Capitalism: Potentials and Limitations of Labour Ownership and Control” (co-supervisor)
• Ian Hill, “Teamwork and collaborative community in IT consulting and clinical medicine” (first supervisor)

Completed PhD / research supervisions

• Bo-Yi Lee, “Determinants of job quality” (co-supervisor)
• Giga Giorgadze, “The Dynamics of Public Healthcare Policy Change in Post-soviet Georgia” (co-supervisor)
• Seyed Mousavi, “The Social Reproduction of Iranian Elites: A Case Study of an Elite School,” 2020, King’s College London (first supervisor)
• Farhad Mehraban, “Supply Chain Knowledge Creation Applications of organizational knowledge creation theory,” 2013, King’s College London (first supervisor)
• Hsiao-Wen Ho, “Knowledge Transfer, Organisational Learning, and the Performance of International Strategic Alliances: A Co-evolutionary Perspective,” 2011, King’s College London (second supervisor)

In addition to numerous journal articles and book chapters, Matt is author or editor of:

• Management Divided: Contradictions of labor management. Oxford University Press (2022).
• The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx. Oxford University Press (2019; co-edited with Tony Smith, Tomás Rotta and Paul Prew).
• Comparative Political Economy of Work. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (2014; co-edited with Marco Hauptmeier).
• Organizing Prosperity: Union Effects on Job Quality, Community Betterment, and Industry Standards. Washington DC: Economic Policy Institute (2009; with David Kusnet).

Matt is the founder and former editor-in-chief (2011-19) of Work in Progress, a public sociology blog of the American Sociological Association on the economy, work and inequality. He is founder and former commissioning editor (2017-20) of the Marxist Sociology Blog, another public sociology blog of the ASA.