Professor Mohamed Branine

Professor Branine's work and contribution has been recognized by many. For example he:

• is Academic Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD)
•  is invited regularly as guest speaker/ lecturer by a number of universities in the UK and abroad, including the University of British Columbia, Vancouver; University of International Business and Economics in Beijing; the Universities of Manchester and Lancaster in England and the Universities of St Andrews and Stirling in Scotland.
• has acted as external examiner of a number of undergraduate and postgraduate degree programmes in more than ten universities. He is currently external examiner for Strathclyde Business School, MSc International HRM and for Manchester University, MSc in HRM (international development).
• been invited to review papers for publication in HRM and International Business Journals
• been invited to review research grant applications for research councils and funding bodies.
• has examined more than 50 PhD and MPhil students in different Universities in the UK and abroad.

Professor Mohamed Branine has made significant contribution to knowledge in theory and practice over the last 20 years through teaching, research and consultancy. His work has focussed on job creation for and employability of women with family commitments, the unemployed and the newly graduated students. This focus has contributed to the understanding and efficient utilization of flexible working practices such as job sharing and part-time work, equal opportunities in relation to gender and age, employment initiatives for the unemployed, and employment prospects of young people leaving further and higher education. This research has had national and European wide impact on policy and decision makers. For example, in response to the coalition government report on allowing new fathers to take up to ten months of paid paternity leave, the Scotsman Newspaper quoted an interview with Prof. Branine as follows:

"Professor Mohamed Branine, an expert in international human resource management at the University of Abertay Dundee, said employees and employers must think carefully about where to draw the line between personal and professional priorities.

He said: "This report is an important warning, particularly given that current economic pressures and uncertainty over jobs are resulting in many people working longer hours. The key to a solution, however, is for people to work more effectively rather than work longer and harder.

"New technologies have played a factor in people working longer hours, with e-mail instantly accessible from mobile phones, but technology also plays an important role in increasing productivity.

"Management and employees should look at how they can effectively use new technology to manage and reduce their workloads, not continually overburden themselves."

He added: "The ideal solution is not job-sharing, but work- sharing. Instead of a single role being done by two or more people, is it possible for an eight-hour day to be reduced to a six-hour day? Can three people work as a team to meet all the demands of two positions? Smaller adjustments like this and smarter working are the answer."

Professor Branine was also invited by the Council of Europe to attend the first meeting to launch a project on 'Quality job creation through community support' held in Strasbourg on 15th and 16th June 2010, and to the second meeting on 4th and 5th October 2010  to advise on the production of a policy document for the European Commission. The project “Quality job creation through community support” set out to:

1. explore various ideas on the basis of existing experiments;
2. formalise approaches to job creation through community support, adaptable to different contexts;
3. test these approaches in territories which have volunteered for the purpose;
4. facilitate capitalisation and transmission of the more innovative experiments;
5. make proposals for policies to facilitate job creation through community support, complementing existing employment policies at local, regional, national or European levels.

Based on his earlier publications on Job sharing, Professor Branine was asked to contribute to the development of methods of sharing work among those who are extremely busy and would like to reduce their working hours and those who have the same basic qualifications but cannot find a job owing to lack of experience and on how work-sharing can be systematically organized in an individual enterprise by reducing working hours for each employee in order to retain all the jobs in the company and thus prevent mass redundancies.