Peter Taylor-Gooby

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).

Peter received special recognition award from the Social Policy Association in 2013. He is director of the WelfSOC: Welfare State Futures: Our Children’s Europe projectwhich is part of the NORFACE Welfare State Futures Programme.

According to the British Academy, Taylor-Gooby's research focuses on "risk and uncertainty; social policy and state welfare, especially theoretical and normative approaches; cross-national comparative work in Europe and East Asia; public attitudes to inequality, social justice and social policy". He has directed approximately 40 Economic and Social Research Council projects, published over 30 books and 300 articles, and chaired the British Academy's 'New Paradigms in Public Policy' programme in 2010–11. He was also a panel chairman on the Research Assessment Exercise 2008 and Research Excellence Framework 2014.

In 2001, Taylor-Gooby was elected a founding Academician of the Academy of Social Sciences (subsequently known as a Fellow); eight years later, he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy, the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences. He has also been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts since 2005, and was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Social Policy Association in 2013. Taylor-Gooby was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2012 Birthday Honours for services to social science.

In 1974, Taylor-Gooby took up a lectureship in social administration at the University of Manchester. Five years later, he joined the University of Kent as lecturer in social policy; promotions to senior lecturer and reader followed before he was appointed Professor of Social Policy there.

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.

Peter Frederick Taylor-Gooby OBE FBA FAcSS FRSA (born 5 March 1947) has been Professor of Social Policy at the University of Kent since 1990.

Peter Frederick Taylor-Gooby was born on 5 March 1947 to John and Irene Taylor-Gooby. After studying at Watford Grammar School, he completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Bristol, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy and English literature in 1969. Three years later, he completed a Diploma in Social Administration at the University of York, where he completed a Master of Philosophy degree in the same subject in 1974. York awarded him a doctorate in social policy in 1984.