Dr Knut Laaser is a Senior Lecturer in Employment Relations at King's Business School and Research Theme Lead for Sustainable Leadership at the Centre for Sustainable Business.

His research interests include the politics of meaningful and meaningless work, the moral economy of work and employment, social theory and work, labor process analysis, and the changing nature of bank work.

Before joining King's, Dr Laaser was a Senior Researcher and Interim Professor in the Sociology of Work at Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus–Senftenberg and a Senior Lecturer at the University of Stirling. From 2019 to 2023, he held a recurring Summer School Visiting Professor position at Aarhus Business School.

Dr Laaser's research has been featured in leading academic journals, including Work, Employment and Society, International Journal of Management Reviews, Organization, and International Journal of Human Resource Management. More recently, together with Jan Ch. Karlsson, he co-authored The Politics of Working Life and Meaningful Waged Work (Cambridge University Press, 2023). His research article on meaningful work, published in Work, Employment and Society, was awarded the WES Sage Innovation Prize in 2023.

Since 2022, Dr Laaser has served as an Editor of Work, Employment and Society, having previously been on its Editorial Board from 2019 to 2022. He has also been a Guest Editor for the Special Issue on Moral Economy at the Crossroads in Economic and Industrial Democracy (2025) and the upcoming Special Issue on Meaningful Work in International Human Resource Management (2026).

Dr Laaser has delivered keynote presentations at the international ADAPT conference in 2023 and the Work, Employment and Society Online Conference in 2024. He has also given guest lectures in various countries, including India and China.

Dr Laaser is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Dr Laaser is currently accepting new PhD students.