Research

Current Research Topics

I am currently working on the following projects:

  • Further work (with Stefan Kühner) on the putative shift towards ‘productive’ welfarism in high income nations. We first presented work from this programme of research at the 2007 Australian Social Policy Conference and have since presented it at conferences in China and Macedonia. A paper on this theme was published in the Journal of European Social Policy in 2009 and we are working on further papers and a book proposal at the moment. The main feature of this work is, arguably, that it makes use of fuzzy set ideal type analysis.
  • More work on inequality and the knowledge economy. I hope to make use of the EU-SILC data set in order to undertake a EU wide analysis of inequality-knowledge economy links similar to the UK based analysis I had published in Social Policy & Society in 2006.
  • I am also co-convening a Worldwide Universities Network research group on Mega cities, globalisation and social policy, with colleagues at the University of Sydney; we are holding a workshop on the topic in July 2009.

PhD Supervision
Current and recent projects supervised include:

  • John Holmes: Young People and the Internet
  • Dan Horsfall: From Competition State to Competition States?
  • Dr Gyu-Jin Hwang: The Political Construction of State Welfare in Korea (now Lecturer in Social Policy at the University of Sydney)
  • Hongsok Jeon: Comparative Study of e-Government
  • Nam-Kyoung Jo: Culture and Welfare
  • Dr Stefan Kühner: Welfare state change and its determinants (now Lecturer in Social Policy at the University of York)