Prof. Edward Webster

Professor of Sociology and Research Professor in SWOP
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.