Duncan Gallie: Annual Report 2000-2001

Duncan Gallie (Official Fellow) continued to work with Serge Paugam and Sheila Jacobs on the social consequences of unemployment in the countries of the European Union. In particular, they have been using the longitudinal data of the European Community Household Panel to examine the extent to which unemployment leads to financial poverty and social isolation under different welfare regimes.

He completed with Dobrinka Kostova and Pavel Kuchar a comparison of the situation of the unemployed in Britain, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. This showed that, in conditions of a relatively weak welfare state, there was no evidence that community solidarities developed which could offset the economic and psychological severity of the effects of unemployment. In Bulgaria, in particular, unemployment led to exceptionally severe patterns of multiple deprivation.

He is co-ordinating for the EU (DG Research) a cluster of research projects on unemployment, welfare and work with a view to assessing the mutual implications of their results and drawing the practical lessons about the organization of comparative research involving different European research teams. One aspect of this work was the creation of a website (UWWCLUS), designed by Anton Verstraete, which provides information about the different projects and facilitates access to working papers.

He began work, with Francis Green and Alan Felstead, on a new survey to examine trends in skill in Britain (the Skills Survey). This was funded by the former Department for Education and Employment and is a component of the broader SKOPE research programme on skills in Britain. The survey involves a representative national sample of over 4,000 individuals and is designed to provide data that can be compared with surveys carried out in the mid-1980s and in the early and mid-1990s. The fieldwork was carried out by the National Centre for Social Research between February and June 2001.

He organised with Tessa Jowell and Tony Atkinson a seminar in College on 'Employability and the Quality of Working Life' that brought together a wide range of specialists from both inside and outside Oxford. He was a member of the Advisory Board of the British Household Panel Study. He served as a member of the Advisory Committee of the ESRC's Future of Work Initiative.

Publications

(with Serge Paugam) 'La régulation sociale du chômage', in M Oberti and H Mendras (eds.), Le sociologue et son terrain: trentes recherches exemplaires, Paris, Armand Colin, 2000.

(with D Kostova and P Kuchar) 'Social Consequences of Unemployment: an East-West Comparison', Journal of European Social Policy, 11, 2001.