Duncan Gallie (Official Fellow) continued to co-ordinate (with Serge Paugam) a comparative European research programme on unemployment precarity, unemployment and social exclusion. The research has been funded by the EU under the Targeted Socio-Economic Research Programme (TSER). The project team has been drawn from eight countries – Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Ireland, Italy and Sweden. The research has shown that differences in welfare institutions between European societies have significant consequences for the quality of life and for the labour market behaviour of the unemployed. But the experiences of the unemployed are also strongly affected by the types of family structure and patterns of sociability prevalent in the society.

The project has drawn on a number of different data sets. National data sets, with detailed information on income have been harmonised, in order to provide a picture of the vulnerability of the unemployed to poverty in the different countries. Several national work history data sets have been compared to examine the differences between countries in the factors that affect vulnerability to unemployment. The project also has made use of the first wave of the European Community Household Panel which provides for the first time detailed information for all member states on labour market experience, incomes, sociability and psychological well-being. The analyses are now complete and a substantial manuscript is in press.

He has also been carrying out work on employee commitment to organisations, comparing trends in Britain across the 1990s to see whether new management policies have been successful in securing higher employee loyalty. An extension of this work involved a comparison of employee commitment in Britain with that in three former state socialist societies (Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and Slovakia). This sought to explore whether the hierarchical nature of state-socialist type work organisation undercut employee motivation and may have helped to contribute to the economic difficulties encountered by the societies which had been slowest in changing their patterns of work organisation.

He is a member of the Advisory Board of the British Household Panel Study (University of Essex), a foreign representative for the editorial board of Sociologie du Travail, and a member of the Advisory Committee of the ESRC’s Future of Work Initiative.