Dr David Spencer is Senior Lecturer in Economics at Leeds University Business School, the University of Leeds. His main research interests lie in the areas of work and labour. He is also interested in job quality. He is author of The Political Economy of Work (Routledge), which draws upon and develops his research output to-date. His research interests are focused on the economics of work, the history of economic thought, and political economy. He has written on the nature and development of economic ideas on work, and has engaged with broader debates regarding work, including the labour process debate and theoretical and empirical analyses of the quality of work. Currently, he is involved in a joint research project investigating the changing nature of job quality in Britain. This research was funded by an initial grant from the DTI (now BERR) and has been widely referenced and reported. A central objective of his research is to champion the case for ‘political economy’. He is particularly concerned to develop a ‘political economy of work’. He seeks to advance beyond the mainstream economic analysis of work and demonstrate the advantages of perspectives from outside mainstream economics. His research is interdisciplinary and aims to build bridges between economics and the other social sciences. He has published extensively across his core interests in leading scholarly journals.