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.
Research
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.
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. He has also worked on new directions in social and public policy, analysing the impact of social change on social welfare and broadening the scope of social policy analysis to include new developments in public sector management, the relationship of the private and public sector and literatures on post-modern approaches to welfare and the political economy of public spending. More recent work draws these themes together in discussion of the impact of welfare state reform on political legitimacy and on social trust in the UK and elsewhere in Europe. His work has attracted particular attention in East Asia, leading to a number of official invitations to Korea and Japan, as a Distinguished Visitor to the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and association with the Risk Research Centre at Beijing Normal University. He is recognised as an influential contributor to current debates about welfare state reform in the recovery from the economic crisis in the UK and has been invited to speak at the British Academy and at more than 60 international conferences. 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. Peter is seeking to present social science ideas to a wider audience through his novels 'The Baby Auction' and 'Ardent Justice'.
