Professor Barbara Pocock is Director of the Centre for Work + Life at the Hawke Research Institute for Sustainable Societies, at the University of South Australia. She established the Centre in 2006.

Barbara was initially trained as an economist and has been researching work, employment and industrial relations for over twenty-five years. She has worked in a range of jobs including the Reserve Bank of Australia, farming, trade unions and in government. She has also worked advising politicians and as a mother.

Her past research includes analysis of employment relations, work, gender, vocational education, the regulation of industrial relations, unions and inequality.  She has led the Australian Association of Industrial Relation Academics of Australia and New Zealand, and is a board member of The Australia Institute, the SA Public Sector Performance Commission Advisory Board, the Strategic Council of the Climate Institute and the Festival of Ideas Board. In 2007, Barbara won the ‘society’ category of The Bulletin’s ‘Smart 100 Australians’. She has been a Dunstan Fellow (2006), a Queen Elizabeth II fellow (2003-2007), a Visiting Fellow at the International Institute for Labour Studies, International Labour Organisation, Geneva, and a Visiting Fellow at Ruskin College, Oxford in 2005.

At present, with colleagues at the Centre for Work + Life, Barbara is studying the changing nature of work and its intersections with changing household and social life, with Australia as the primary focus.