Introducing the Young CAS Fellows 2023/2024
Meet the Project: Work and Wellbeing in History
What makes a “good job”? And how can we know whether work offered people dignity, stability, or opportunity hundreds of years ago? These are the questions at the heart of the Young CAS project Work and Wellbeing in History, led by Benjamin Schneider, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Oslo Metropolitan University and one of the 2023/24 Young CAS Fellows. His project aims to improve the tools historians and social scientists use to understand job quality in the past—and to connect those historical insights with today’s debates about work and wellbeing.
Schneider’s interest in the topic began with a problem that had bothered researchers for years. Contemporary job quality indices, developed by organisations such as the International Labour Organization and the European Trade Union Confederation, offer detailed ways to compare occupations today. But, he explains, “their context-specific data sources and methodologies mean they cannot be extended into the past.” Without reliable historical measures, scholars have struggled to map long-term changes in job quality or to evaluate which factors shape good work over time.
During his doctoral studies at the University of Oxford, Schneider tackled this issue directly. Drawing on evidence about what historical workers themselves valued, he developed the Historical Occupational Quality Index (HOQI), the first systematic tool for measuring and comparing job quality in the past. The Young CAS project builds on this foundation: refining HOQI, extending its scope, and creating ways to link it with present-day measurements of good work.
A long-run view of working life
Schneider’s wider research sits at the intersection of labour history, economic history, and social science. His earlier work explored incentives for innovation during the British Industrial Revolution and examined how new technologies altered jobs in Britain and the United States in the 18th and 19th centuries. These interests converge in his current project.
“Most people have an intuitive sense of what a ‘good’ job is,” he says, “and that some occupations are better than others.” Yet historical sources rarely speak the language of modern labour metrics. One of the central challenges in building HOQI was therefore deciding how to translate qualitative descriptions—such as dangerous working conditions, autonomy on the job, or opportunities for skill development—into consistent and comparable data.
The CAS project brings together collaborators who each contribute a different methodological angle. The team includes Professor Jane Whittle (Exeter), Dr Judy Stephenson (UCL), Dr Robin Philips (Utrecht), Dr Meredith Paker (Grinnell), and Dr Vincent Delabastita (Radboud). Their combined expertise spans labour history, quantitative economic history, econometrics, and historical methodology.
Together, they will refine the criteria used to assess past occupations, improve the weighting of different components in HOQI, and expand the index to cover new aspects of working life. The project also aims to add areas missing from the original version—such as travel-to-work and career progression—while developing ways to compare HOQI directly with modern indices.
Why this work matters now
Although the project is historical in nature, Schneider is clear about its relevance for today’s debates on work and wellbeing. “When I developed the HOQI in my doctoral thesis, I wanted to ensure that it would become a shared enterprise with many inputs and applications, like the Maddison Project on historical national income,” he explains. A robust historical index opens the door to long-run analysis of how work has changed, what factors improve job quality, and how technological and economic developments shape people’s everyday lives.
He also emphasises the value of interdisciplinary collaboration. “Every scholar in our discipline has a different mix of skills from history, economics, and other social sciences, and high-quality research demands a diversity of approaches and expertise,” he notes. The Young CAS programme provides the ideal framework for building the kind of collaborative environment needed for a project of this complexity.
Looking ahead
Schneider is also hopeful that the project will strengthen ties between present-day work research and historical social science. “Present-day work research can benefit significantly from the long-run perspective provided by historical analysis,” he says, adding that historical researchers can in turn learn from modern approaches and communication strategies. The project aims to serve as a hub for dialogue between Norwegian economic historians and the global community, building on Norway’s long-standing tradition in economic and social history.
For CAS, Work and Wellbeing in History reflects the centre’s commitment to supporting ambitious, cross-disciplinary scholarship—and to giving younger researchers the space to develop innovative research agendas. Over the next two years, Schneider and his team will use their workshops and research stay at CAS to advance a framework that helps us understand not only how people worked in the past, but how work continues to shape wellbeing today.