Duncan Gallie: Annual Report 2003-2004

Duncan Gallie (Official Fellow) continued to co-ordinate for the EU (DG Research) a cluster of research projects on unemployment, welfare and work with a view to assessing their mutual implications, drawing the practical lessons about the organization of comparative research and considering the policy implications of the research results. The website (UWWCLUS), designed by Anton Verstraete, http://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/projects/UWWCLUS, provides information about the different projects and facilitates access to working papers. A volume based on the work of the cluster was published during the year (see below, Resisting Marginalization). He was also the local Nuffield co-ordinator for the EU's Economic Change, Unequal Life-Chances and Quality of Life (Changequal) network. This is a pilot project to bring together into a closer working relationship a number of major European research centres, with a view to applying for longer-term funding as an EU Network of Excellence. Details of the programme can be found on the website at http://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/projects/ChangeQual. Together with several other members of the network, he drew up a proposal for a module for the next wave of the European Social Survey. The module, which focused on Work and the Family, was accepted and the group has now completed the design of the interview schedule. The main wave of interviewing is due to be carried out in autumn 2004. He continued analysis, with Francis Green and Alan Felstead, of a number of surveys examining trends in skills in Britain (the 1992 Employment in Britain Survey and the 1997 and 2001 Skills Surveys). His main contribution was a paper on trends in the task discretion of employees, which, contrary to much received opinion, declined over the period 1992 to 2001. He served as a member of the Advisory Committee of the ESRC Research Centre on Micro-Social Change (MISOC), of the Advisory Committee of the ESRC's Future of Work Initiative, of the Board of the European Consortium for Sociological Research and of the Council of the British Academy. He has been a member of the EU's Advisory Group on 'Social Sciences and Humanities in the European Research Area'. He has been appointed Vice-President of the British Academy.

Publications

(editor) Resisting Marginalization. Unemployment Experience and Social Policy in the European Union. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

(with Alan Felstead and Francis Green) 'Job Complexity and Task Discretion: Tracking the Direction of Skills at Work in Britain', in C Warhurst, I Grugulis and E Keep (eds.), The Skills That Matter. Basingstoke: Palgrave, Macmillan, 2004.

(with Alan Felstead and Francis Green) 'Computers and the Changing Skill-intensity of Jobs.' Applied Economics, 35, 1561-1576, 2003.