No / The University of Manchester, England hosted the fourth Work, Employment and Society Conference, on 1¿3 September 2004. Previous WES conferences were held in Nottingham in 2001, Cambridge in 1998, and Canterbury in 1994. Two even earlier stages in the process of institutionalization were the first British Sociological Association conference on the theme of Work in 1984, and the launch of the Work, Employment and Society journal itself in 1987. Although the conference is a separately organized event, it has become de facto the conference of the WES journal.