Professor Joseph Melling

Research Interests

The development of business welfare and the impact of private company provisions on the evolution of state welfare provision since 1880; Popular and Labour politics in different parts of Britain; the growth of new forms of management in the last century; policies to raise labour productivity at the workplace; different forms of labour management in Britain and other countries, particularly supervisory management and workplace supervision; institutionalisation of the insane in the nineteenth and twentieth century.

Research Supervision

  • History of health, illness and welfare
  • History of insanity and mental illness
  • History of labour and management at work including masculinity
  • White collar trade unionism and labour politics
  • Richard Acland and Common Wealth

Research Students

  • Mary Hilson: the history of dockyard labour and gender in Plymouth
  • Mark Bufton, Productivity Politics in modern Britain
  • Pamela Dale, Mental deficiency and the Idiot Asylum at Starcross
  • Mike Anson, Railway labour in Swindon
  • David Pearce, The Exe Vale Mental Hospital in the Twentieth Century