Jane Parry

Jane is a sociologist of work, who is particularly interested in what work means to people, how this changes over the lifecourse, and in the various inequalities in people's experiences of work. She is Director of the Centre for Research on Work and Organisations at the University of Southampton.

Her PhD looked at how Welsh coalmining communities responded to the labour market restructuring that followed the 1984/85 Miners' Strike. This study prompted a long-standing interest in occupational attachments and how these shift and interact with unpaid work, particularly when people's labour market expectations become more uncertain. In the 2000s she worked in the Employment Group at the Policy Studies Institute, focusing on disadvantage and the evaluations of labour market programmes. More recently she has been looking at age-friendly workplaces and work-related blogging.

Jane is currently leading the cross-institutional ESRC/UKRI project Work After Lockdown, which looks at our changing expectations about work and organisational learning around the crisis-driven working from home under COVID-19. She was previously a Parliamentary Academic Fellow undertaking a project on careers after parliamentary internships, and continues to pursue applied policy research.