Dr Jane Parry BA, MSc, PhD, PGCAP (FHEA), Academic MCIPD
Associate Professor in Work and Employment, Head of Research at the Department of Organisational Behaviour and HRM, and Director of Centre for Research on Work and Organisations (CRWO)
Dr Jane Parry is a Associate Professor and Director of Research for HRM and Organisational Behaviour within Southampton Business School at the University of Southampton.
I am interested in the relationships between the changing world of work and how individuals’ work fluctuates over the lifecourse, but also in how inequalities, occupational differences, and people’s portfolios of paid and unpaid labours play into this.
Jane is a sociologist of work and employment who has been working in applied research for a wide range of bodies and government departments for the past two decades, following her PhD which looked at how social solidarities and work have been reformulated in former coalmining communities. Her research looks at how employment and careers are changing within different occupations, as well as how disadvantage operates within labour markets, with a particular focus on life course factors.
Jane has worked across various universities and for a diverse range of funders and government departments, leading projects and being involved in numerous successful collaborations, having come to an academic career from starting out as a researcher for Peter Hain PC. She is particularly concerned with producing impactful research, and involving policymakers and practitioners to ensure that that policy is continually informed by high-quality evidence. For example, her research on independent living was taken up by the Minister for Pensions to inform the then Link Age strategy, she has run a roundtable at Portcullis House on flexible work sponsored by the Shadow Minister for Work and Pensions, and she sits on an expert group for BEIS in their evaluation of Shared Parental Leave policy. She has worked for clients including the Health and Safety Executive, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Economic and Social Research Council, and on many occasions, the DWP. She has recently sat on BEIS working group on The Future of Work.
Methodologically, Jane is a qualitative researcher, who specialises in depth interviews often supplemented with visual techniques or with an ethnographic grounding, and has frequently worked as part as a mixed methods team. Jane is a former Parliamentary Academic Fellow for the Parliamentary Office for Science and Technology (POST), and is leading Work After Lockdown, a cross-institutional UKRI/ESRC project that looks at how COVID-19-driven working from home will change the way we work.