I studied originally as a historian (BA at York and MA at Lancaster). I became a sociologist partly by design, since I was interested in the grand theoretical questions which sociologists tend to pose, and partly by luck (the Department of Sociology at Lancaster happened to have a PhD grant available!). My doctoral work, which became my first book, was on the history of the local Labour movement in Preston, Lancashire between 1880 and 1940. Although this was a specific case study, it contains many issues of enduring interest to me: the changing role of place, space, locality; the significance of time; and social inequality and social movements. I have been unable to shake off an enduring enthusiasm for geography (my favourite subject at school) and history.

My research tries to develop a sociology of stratification which is adequate to 21st century complexities and fluidities. This has involved me in thinking about the sociology of the middle classes which now makes up a large proportion of the labour force; in exploring the nature of changing gender relations; in thinking about how people's sense of attachment to place and locale is being reconfigured; and in thinking about new and under-utilised conceptual and methodological tools for understanding social inequality, social protest and social mobility. I have pursued these interests through jobs at the Universities of Lancaster, Sussex, Surrey, Keele, North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and since 1995 I have been here at Manchester (where I was head of Department between 1999-2001). My concerns have crystallized since 2004 in my role as Director of the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC), which brings together anthropologists, media researchers, geographers, historians, political economists, and sociologists from the University of Manchester and the Open University.

I was elected a member of the Academy of Social Sciences (2003), elected Fellow-Designate of the British Academy (2007), and I am a member of HEFCE's Sociology sub-panel assessing the quality of research in the 2008 Research Assessment exercise. I have been visiting professor at the Universities of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (where I was a Fulbright Scholar) and at Sciences-Po in Paris. I was managing editor of The Sociological Review between 2001 and 2007.

Global Change and Local Belonging
The Limits of Local Attachment
Parenting, Education and Elective Belonging
Suburbia and the Aura of Place
The Ambivalence of Urban Identity
¿Manchester, So Much to Answer For¿
Work Cultures and Social Ties
Mediascapes in the Mediation of the Local and the Global
Cosmopolitanism, Diaspora and Global Reflexivity