Name Peter Taylor-Gooby | Role Professor | |
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Books Reframing social citizenship, European Welfare Futures: T, The Double Crisis of t, Public opinion - ideology, Social theory and social wel Similar People Giuliano Bonoli, Hartley Dean, Stefan Svallfors | ||
Peter Taylor Gooby SF2017
Peter Taylor-Gooby OBE is a Professor of Social Policy at the University of Kent who is internationally noted for his work on new social risks, an area of study he helped create and develop. He has published more than 130 articles, 100 book chapters and 22 books.
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He has led major European and UK Research Programmes which have opened up new areas in social policy research and has advised the UK government and the European government in relation to welfare reform and building public trust. His work is widely recognised across Europe and in East Asia. He has had considerable influence on the study of social and public policy in the UK and internationally and has been recognised by a number of external bodies, including 'Who's Who' and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy, one of only six academics in his discipline to receive this honour.
He chairs the British Academy New Paradigms in Public Policy Programme, 2009–11 and the Nudge: Scope and Limitations of Behavioural Economics Project, and directed the ESRC Social Contexts and Responses to Risk, and Economic Beliefs and Behaviour Programmes, and the EU Welfare Reform and the Management of Societal Change Programme. As mentioned he is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Founding Academician at the Academy of Social Sciences and a Fellow of the RSA. He participated in the Prime Minister's No 10 'progressive consensus' Round Table and was an Advisor to Prime Minister's Strategy Unit 2009–10. He served as President of the Sociology and Social Policy section of the BAAS from 2005 to 2006.
He has been closely involved in research assessment and served on various ESRC, Nuffield, Joseph Rowntree Foundation and HEFCE Panels and as an advisor to assessment exercises in Italy, Canada, Norway and Hong Kong. He chaired the HEFCE Social Policy and Social Work Research Assessment Exercise Panel 2001-4 and the HEFCE Social Policy and Social Work Research Excellence Framework Panel 2010–15.
Taylor-Gooby was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2012 Birthday Honours for services to social science.
Contribution to social policy
He played a major role in developing academic work as the first to apply quantitative attitude measurement to the politics of social policy in UK through a series of research projects financed by the Economic and Social Research Council and the Nuffield Foundation during the later 1970s and 1980s. He recognised the value of cross-national work in analysing change in public policy and pursued this by leading a series of collaborative European research projects financed by ESRC and the EU. This generated a new and influential analysis of welfare state change in terms of 'new social risks'. He then developed interdisciplinary approaches which combined political science, sociology, economic, psychology and social policy literatures on risk and risk analysis with policy work and applied this in a comparative context. This led to a series of books and articles on risk and policy, invitations to present papers in Barcelona, Chiba, Beijing, Berlin, Boston, Durban, New York, Oxford, Seoul, Sydney, Taipei, Toronto and Vancouver and the establishing of thematic groups on risk in the International Sociological Association and the European Sociological Association and to an international risk conference in Beijing.
He has also worked on new directions in social and public policy, analysing the impact of social change on social welfare and broadening the scope of social policy analysis to include new developments in public sector management, the relationship of the private and public sector and literatures on post-modern approaches to welfare and the political economy of public spending. More recent work draws these themes together in discussion of the impact of welfare state reform on political legitimacy and on social trust in the UK and elsewhere in Europe. His work has attracted particular attention in East Asia, leading to a number of official invitations to Korea and Japan, as a Distinguished Visitor to the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and association with the Risk Research Centre at Beijing Normal University.
He is recognised as an influential contributor to current debates about welfare state reform in the recovery from the economic crisis in the UK and has been invited to speak at the British Academy and at more than 60 international conferences.
Peter received special recognition award from the Social Policy Association in 2013. He directs the Norface WelfSOC: Welfare State Futures: Our Children’s Europe project.
Peter is seeking to present social science ideas to a wider audience through his novels 'The Baby Auction' (The Conrad Press, 2016) and 'Ardent Justice' (Troubador 2017).