Prof. Edward Webster

Professor of Sociology and Research Professor in SWOP
Ela Bhatt Visiting Professor of Development and Decent Work at the International Centre for Development and Decent Work, Kassel University, Germany
BA (Hons) (Rhodes), MA (Oxon), BPhil (York), PhD (Wits)

Edward Webster's current research interests are in three areas: theories of democratic transition; changing workplace representation and their relationship to economic performance; and the changing role of labour during the consolidation of democracy in South Africa. He is the author of Cast in a Racial Mould: Labour process and trade unionism in the foundries (Ravan, 1985). He has published Essays on Southern African Labour History (1978), Change, Reform and Economic Growth (1978) and co-edited Work and Industrialisation in South Africa (1994). In 2000 he published a book with Glen Adler on Trade Unions and Democratisation in South Africa 1985-1997. During 1995 he was a Fulbright Senior African Research Fellow at the University of Wisconsin (Madison). He also published (with Karl Von Holdt) a volume of collected essays, titled Beyond the Apartheid Workplace (UKZN Press, 2005), and more recently (with Rob Lambert and Andries Bezuidenhout) Grounding Globalization: Labour in the Age of Insecurity (Blackwells, 2008), winner of the 2009 Distinguished Scholarly Monograph Prize, awarded by the American Sociological Association Labour and Labour Movements section.