Fiona is a Professor of Sociology and Head of the School of Social Sciences at the University of Manchester.  She completed a joint honours degree in Sociology and Government at the University of Essex where she also did a Masters and PhD (attached to the International Class Project directed by Gordon Marshall, David Rose, Carolyn Vogler and Howard Newby).  Her first job was as a Research Officer in the Social Science Branch at the (then) Department of Employment HQ in London which was followed by a research position at the Policy Studies Institute, also in London.  Her first academic job was in Sociology at the University of Liverpool before she moved to Manchester in 1994.

Fiona’s main area of research focuses is on class inequalities and how the economic, cultural and social dimensions of class are reproduced over time and space – or not as the case may be.  Her early work focused on changing working-class communities which involved research on so-called `affluent workers’: car workers and their families living in Luton in the 1980s (and the site of the classic Luton by Goldthorpe and Lockwood in the 1960s).  The focus was not on paid work but on patterns of geographical mobility, patterns of sociability and leisure activities and the extent to which the working class (or classes) are not just a demographic formation but a socio-cultural and political entity too.  The simple answer was yes: the working class continues to exist as a real entity despite many predictions of its demise although it is different from the working class of yesteryear. 

See Affluent Workers Revisited (1992) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Subsequent work has focused on middle-class reproduction and, specifically, how advantaged parents mobilise their economic, cultural and social resources to ensure their children are successful in the field of education and subsequently in the sphere of employment.  With Leverhulme funding, this research was undertaken in Manchester in the UK and then extended to Boston in the US for a UK/US comparative perspective. The key argument of this work is that middle-class reproduction is clearly evident but it is neither inevitable, nor straightforward.  Reproduction can be precarious and requires considerable work and the desired results are not all obtained. This is why there is much anxiety about education. Change is constant and possible. This work is now being replicated with working-class parents and their children. 

See Social Class in America and Britain (1997) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 

See Class Practices (2004) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Finally, spanning all of this work is an interest in methods, especially the mix of quantitative and qualitative methods of enquiry.  A popular text with students, Sociological Research Methods in Context (co-authored with Sue Heath (while she was in Sociology and CCSR in Manchester) and published by Palgrave in 1992) was published in 2009.  The book, Doing Social Science: Evidence and Methods in Empirical Research, edited by Fiona and Sue Heath, looks at a range of innovative methods including research using the internet, the use of time diaries, longitudinal data analysis and so forth. (Sue has now returned to Manchester as a Co-Director of the Morgan Centre for the Study of Relationships and Personal Life opening up the possibility of centre collaborations).  Thinking critically about the nature of evidence and methods underpins all of the substantive work outlined above.