General information
Nuffield College is the specialist social science college of the University of Oxford, founded in 1937. It has particular strengths in Economics, Politics and Sociology. The College has a strong tradition of quantitative social science, making extensive use of large-scale data sets (both cross-sectional and longitudinal).
The College has a commitment to meeting the Founder’s aim of bringing academics and non-academics together to solve social, economic and political problems. It has a wide range of Visiting Fellows who occupy core institutional roles in politics, the civil service, the media, business and trade unionism. Its Fellows have been active in providing advice to external bodies at both national and European level including the Office of National Statistics, the Cabinet Office, Parliamentary Commissions of Enquiry, DG Employment and DG Research. For instance, among members of the Changequal team, Tony Atkinson served on the Social Justice Commission, served as a member of the French Prime Minister’s Conseil d’Analyse Economique, advised the EU Belgian Presidency on the development of social indicators and was a member of the EU High Level Group on the Future of Employment and Social Policy, advising the Commission. Duncan Gallie contributed to a report on the future of the welfare state for the Belgian EU Presidency and has been an adviser to DG Research on the development of the European Research Area with respect to the social sciences, John Goldthorpe helped the Office of National Statistics to develop its new class categorization, and Anthony Heath has been consulted by the Cabinet Office on the issue of ethnic disadvantage.
Overall, the College has 35 permanent Fellows, 28 Research Fellows and 17 Visiting Fellows. A number of the Fellows hold University posts, including four Professors of Economics, a Professor of Sociology, the Andrew W Mellon Professor of American Government, the John M Olin Visiting Professor in American Government, the Nuffield Professor of Comparative European Politics and the Professor of Economic History.
The College plays an active role in postgraduate social science training. It has a total student body of around 90, of whom about 35 are resident in College. It admits around 30 students a year. It provides both for those taking taught master’s courses, such as M. Phil. degrees in Economics, International Relations, European Politics and Society, Politics or Sociology, and the M.Sc. degrees in Sociology and in Economic and Social History, and for those embarking on a research degree leading to the D. Phil. The size and specialised nature of the College enable students to work closely with each other and faculty members in a stimulating and research-orientated environment. The College Library is one of the finest in the social sciences.
Research programme
- Members of the Economics Group have wide interests in the economics of public policy, including the labour market, the housing market, public finance and the distribution of income. Specific European projects in which members of the Group have been involved include the construction of a Europe-wide tax benefit model (EUROMOD), which is the first of its kind, and allows analysis of social and taxation policy across the 15 Member States, and the preparation of a report for the Belgian Presidency on indicators for social inclusion.
- The Sociology Group has been the main centre in Britain for the development of social mobility research. It has been responsible for two of the most important British programmes of sociological research on employment (the Social Change and Economic Life Initiative and the Employment in Britain Research Programme). It was the co-ordinating centre of the EU (DG XII) research programme – Employment Precarity, Unemployment and Social Exclusion (EPUSE) – which made extensive use of the European Community Household Panel (ECHP).
- Members of the Politics group have been responsible for many of the major national election studies and for a large-scale research programme into political values. This has involved both cross-sectional and longitudinal panel analysis. They also have been responsible for a comparative research programme on social cleavages and political development in Central and Eastern Europe.
International networks and collaboration
Nuffield College is a founder member of the European Consortium for Sociological Research, which exists to promote sociological research in Europe through conferences, annual graduate workshops and an annual graduate summer school. Nuffield hosted the graduate workshops and summer school in September 2000; over twenty different European institutions were represented by the participants.
Nuffield College hosted the European meeting of Research Committee 28 of the International Sociological Association at Oxford in April 2002. Most of the Nuffield team are full members of the Committee, which aims to promote high quality research in social stratification and mobility.
Individual members of the Nuffield team have coordinated comparative projects which bring together institutes and researchers from EU countries. Duncan Gallie coordinated both the Employment Precarity, Unemployment and Social Exclusion Network (EPUSE) and the Unemployment, Work and Welfare Cluster (UWWCLUS). EPUSE was an interdisciplinary EU research programme which comprises leading institutes and researchers from eight EU countries. UWWCLUS was an EU funded project which brings together researchers in economics, sociology and social policy from eighteen different European countries. John Goldthorpe coordinated (with Walter Müller) the Comparative Analysis of Social Mobility in Industrial Nations (CASMIN) Project. Richard Breen has coordinated an international project, ‘National Patterns of Social Mobility, 1970-1995: Divergence or Convergence?’, with researchers from all over Europe. The project is a state of the art comparative study of trends in intergenerational social mobility in twelve countries over the period 1970-2000. Geoffrey Evans has directed major surveys in Eastern Europe designed to study the implications of the transition from communism to post-communism. Academies of Science in the whole range of Eastern European countries have collaborated in the project, which is funded by both ESRC and the EU. Anthony Heath is the coordinator of an international network, ‘Ethnic Minority Disadvantage in the Labour Market: Cross-National Perspectives’. The network includes researchers drawn from Europe, the Middle East, Australia, South Africa, Canada and the USA.