Duncan Gallie: Annual Report 1999-2000

Duncan Gallie (Official Fellow) completed the comparative European research programme on 'Employment Precarity, Unemployment and Social Exclusion' that he was co-ordinating with Serge Paugam, with the publication of a collective volume. The research highlighted the way in which the differences in welfare institutions between European societies affected the quality of life of unemployed people. It showed in particular the quality of the Danish and Swedish systems, which provided a high level of protection to the living standards of the unemployed with little evidence of a negative impact on work motivation.

During the year he started work on a comparison of the situation of the unemployed in Britain with that in three former state socialist societies - Bulgaria, the Czech Republic welfare state, community solidarities developed which could offset the economic and psychological severity of the effects of unemployment.

He continued his work on employee commitment in the British workforce in the 1990s to see whether new management policies were leading to higher employee loyalty. The evidence indicates that, despite the spread of certain types of 'high involvment' policy, there was no increase over time in employees' alligiance to their firms. This appears to result from the fact that over the same period managements have tightened their systems of control of employee performance and have reduced discretion over the work task.

He was a member of the Advisory Board of the British Household Panel Study and a foreign representative for the editorial board of Sociologie du Travail. He served as a member of the Commissioning Panel and the Advisory Committee of the ESRC's Future of Work Initiative.

Publications

(edited with Serge Paugam) Welfare Regimes and the Experience of Unemployment in Europe, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

'The Labour Force' in A. H. Halsey with J. Webb (eds.), Twentieth Century British Social Trends. London: Macmillan, 2000.

'The Polarization of the Labour Market and the Exclusion of Vulnerable Groups', in K. Isaksson, C. Hogstedt, C. Eriksson and T. Theorell, Health Effects of the New Labour Market. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2000.