As a historian, my broad interest has always been in social systems and their underlying dynamics - how they are organised, which groups have power and status and why, and how social and cultural power has been maintained and challenged over time. Most of my own research and writing in this sphere has been on the pattern and processes of social mobility and career development over the past 200 years, and what this reveals about trends in stratification and life chances in modern societies. My book Social Mobility in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century England (Macmillan, 1999) remains the only systematic study of historical social mobility in the UK.

My current interests are more focused on the present and on how this is constructed from the contexts and experiences of the post Second World War generations. In working in this area, I share wider CRESC concerns about the somewhat cavalier ‘epochalism’ that has tended to dominate recent sociological thinking. My focus at present is on the dynamics of social and cultural participation. I am interested in the demographic, spatial and longitudinal dimensions of cultural engagement, in the formation and influence of cultural elites, and in the emergence of the cultural sector in the post war period. Connected to this, I also have a particular interest in mixed methods approaches to social and cultural research. 

I recently completed a study of the ‘non-users’ of cultural events and venues, based on a large collection of in-depth qualitative interviews. I am now developing this into a broader research project on everyday participation and cultural value, leading a consortium of academic and sector-based researchers which has just won a development project grant under the AHRC’s Connected Communities funding scheme. I am also currently working with Mike Savage at York on the relationship between social and cultural participation, mobility and identity based on a major new collection of qualitative life history narratives from the 1958 Birth Cohort Study (National Child Development Study). This joint CRESC/Centre for Longitudinal Studies project is the first systematic qualitative study linked directly to a major quantitative panel survey. My third main focus is my involvement in an innovative collaboration between transport researchers at Leeds and CRESC social scientists (including Niamh Moore and Mike Savage) on changes in travel behaviour. This project, which is funded by EPSRC to the tune of £1.5 million, aims to inform the development of transport modelling by locating people’s travel and transport decisions in the wider contexts of their everyday lives. It will develop the world’s first longitudinal qualitative panel survey of household travel practices.

A key part of my role at CRESC has been to broker the Centre’s user engagement and knowledge transfer activities with the broader cultural sector. In this capacity, I have developed strategic partnerships at both local/regional and national levels and in 2009 was seconded to the Department of Culture, Media and Sport as an ESRC Placement Fellow. I continue to work directly with cultural sector organisations and agencies on the development of research and evaluation tools to determine the impact and value of cultural projects, including interventions in key social policy areas. In this connection, I have worked with a range of client groups, including individual arts organisations, voluntary bodies, local and regional authorities, NDPBs and government departments. A particular focus of my work here has been the arts in criminal justice, where I am a former Chair of the inter-governmental Research into Arts in Criminal Justice Think Tank (REACTT). Currently, I am working on several projects connected to the legacy of the 2012 Olympic Games, including the Arts Council’s research and evaluation programme for the Cultural Olympiad in the Northwest.