The world comes to Brussels

Participants came from America, Asia, Australia, Africa and Central and Eastern Europe as well as throughout the EU, to attend the EMERGENCE conference in Brussels in April entitled the World, the Workplace and We, the Workers (WWWe). Organised by the Higher Institute of Labour Studies and the Department of Sociology of the Catholic University of Leuven, and with the support and sponsorship from the Flemish Ministry of Employment and Tourism, the Belgian Telework Association (BTA), the Flanders Fund for Scientific Research (FWO), CEVORA, the Centre Informatique pour la Région Bruxelloise and the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC), the conference generated excitement and enthusiasm as well as an enhanced understanding of the complexities of eWork.

		European Institutions were well represented, with keynote speeches from Karl-Johan Lönnroth, Deputy Director General, DG Employment and Social Affairs, European Commission, Mel Read, MEP and Peter Johnston, Head of the EC’s New Methods of Work Unit in the Information Society Directorate General. The conference was also addressed by a range of distinguished academic speakers including Professor Saskia Sassen, of the University of Chicago, Dr Rajendra K Bandi of the Indian Institute of Management and Professor Luc Soete of the University of Maastricht. A full list of speakers and copies of most of the papers presented, can be found here.
Ursula Huws, EMERGENCE Director, with Peter Johnston, Head, News Methods of Work, Directorate General Information Society, European Commission

The conference built on the success of the first EMERGENCE conference, held in Budapest in 2000, further consolidating the global network that has grown up around the project. The first conference focused mainly on building up a quantitative picture of the new industrial geography that is emerging in the digital economy, asking questions like: Which regions of the globe are attracting the new information-based telemediated jobs? What are the factors that have led to their success? And which regions are at risk of exclusion? The WWWe conference extended this knowledge by addressing more qualitative questions. What happens when companies attempt to relocate work at a distance? What challenges do they face? What are the implications for employment and for the quality of working life? And what are the implications for policy-makers?

Penny Gurstein, Geraldine Rearden, Ewa Gunnarsson, Joanne Pratt, Jan Sinclair-Jones, Giovanna Altieri		Johan Dejonkheere, Peter Standen, Jörg Flecker, Geert van Hootegem, Javier Vaquero, Peter Bates, Lars Schmidt

A third conference in the series is now being planned, to take place in Vienna on May 8-9 2003. Further details will be posted on this website.