Academic Profile

Research Interests: design and use of narrative datasets (panel studies, life and work histories, time use diaries); household organisation (division of domestic labour, distribution of leisure), labour force participation, family formation and dissolution, accounts of socio-economic structure social change.

Jonathan Gershuny (Senior Research Fellow) is the Professor of Economic Sociology in the Department of Sociology. He is the Director of the ESRC-funded Centre for Time Use Research,  and was previously a Statutory Professor of Sociology and Head of the Oxford Sociology Department. An Academician of the UK Academy of Social Sciences, he was elected to the British Academy in 2002 and was chair of the BA’s Sociology, Demography and Social Statistics Section from 2006-2009. He won the Silver Medal of the Market Research Society in 1986, and gave the first Millennium Lecture at 10 Downing Street in 1999.

His 1977 doctorate from the University of Sussex was in History and Social Studies of Science, and he spent the first ten years of his academic life as a Fellow of the Science Policy Research Unit at Sussex. In 1984, aged 34, he was appointed to a professorship at University of Bath, and then Head of the School of Social Sciences, before moving to Oxford in 1990, He was the Director of the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex, and the Principal Investigator of the British Household Panel Study from 1993 to 2006, and continues as Principal Investigator of the Multinational Time Use Study.

His books include After Industrial Society? (Macmillan 1977), Social Innovation and the Division of Labour (Oxford University Press 1983) and Changing Times (Oxford University Press, second edition 2003).