Rate My Professor Heejung Chung

Professor Heejung Chung is Professor of Work and Employment in the Department of Human Resource Management at King's Business School, King's College London, and Director of the King's Global Institute for Women's Leadership. She earned her PhD jointly from Tilburg University and the University of Amsterdam, following BA, MA, and MSc degrees from Yonsei University and the University of Edinburgh. Her career includes prior appointment as Professor of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Kent, as well as positions at the European Data Centre for Work and Welfare at Tilburg University, the Amsterdam Institute for Labour Studies, the WZB Social Science Research Centre Berlin, the Korean Labor Institute, and the Institute for Labour Studies (OSA). Chung's research centers on comparative labour market studies, with a focus on work-family dynamics, gender and social inequalities, workers' work-life balance, and well-being outcomes. She investigates flexible, remote, and hybrid working arrangements, their stigmatization by managers and co-workers, differential impacts on marginalized groups such as women and BAME workers, connections to ideal worker norms, and policy interventions. Her expertise spans work-family research, cross-national analyses of welfare states, family and labour policies, cultural and gender norms, advanced quantitative methods using large-scale cross-national and longitudinal data, and qualitative approaches including digital diaries.

Chung authored the book The Flexibility Paradox: why flexible working leads to (self-)exploitation (Policy Press, 2022) and Flexible working arrangements and gender equality in Europe (Publications Office of the European Union, 2024). Her publications appear in journals such as Work, Employment & Society, Human Relations, and European Sociological Review. She has secured over £10 million in research grants as principal investigator and co-investigator from funders including the ESRC (Future Research Leaders award), European Research Council (H2020), Nuffield Foundation, and NORFACE. Chung serves on the editorial boards of Gender & Society, Work, Employment & Society, and Social Policy & Administration, and has held executive board positions with the European Social Policy Analysis Network and Work and Family Researchers Network. Her work has shaped policies in the UK, Korea, Germany, Italy, Estonia, and international bodies like the ILO, UN, and European Commission, contributing to the EU Work-Life Balance Directive and Right to Disconnect discussions. Awards include Fellowship of the Academy of Social Sciences (2026), shortlistings for the Rosabeth Moss Kanter Awards for Excellence in Work-Family Research, and Cambridge University Press Excellence in Social Policy Research. She engages publicly through media appearances in the New York Times, Guardian, Forbes, Economist, BBC Radio 4, Al Jazeera, and others, and was named in Onalytica’s Top Voices in Future of Work 2023. Current projects include ESRC IAA on remote work and family wellbeing, Leverhulme Trust on gendered precarity in technology, and others on hybrid working productivity and flexibility policies.