Dr Patrick McGovern

Patrick McGovern is the co-founder and current Director of the MSc International Migration and Public Policy and an Associate Professor (Reader) in the Department of Sociology. Pat holds a doctorate from Oxford University and First Class degrees in Sociology (BSc) and Industrial Relations (MSc) from University College, Dublin. He specialises in the sociology of work, employment relations, and international migration. Pat has served on the editorial boards of the British Journal of Industrial Relations, The British Journal of Sociology and Work, Employment & Society.

Key expertise: Employment, Sociology of Work, Economic Migration, Theory

Pat specialises in two areas: economic sociology and international migration. He is currently working on three research projects that are motivated by his interests in work, economic conflict and social inequality.

One project focuses on problems of theory and method within the qualitative case study tradition in industrial relations and the sociology of work. Drawing on an analysis of studies published in eleven major journals over a fifteen year period this work is intended to open up a discussion about the current state of theorising in employment relations research. In doing so, he hopes to address some of the mystique around workplace case study research.

With colleagues from the Universities of Amsterdam, Harvard, Luxembourg, and Sydney, he is currently investigating trends in immigration policy across major OECD countries. Known as the ‘IMPALA Project', this innovative, multi-disciplinary endeavour seeks to develop comparable measures of restrictiveness based on the creation of database of national immigration policies relating to economic, family, humanitarian and student migration (http://www.impaladatabase.org/). Along with Eiko Thielemann (LSE), he is using IMPALA data to examine changes in labour market access across different categories of migration.

Finally, Pat is working with Martin Bauer (LSE) on a project that examines the way income inequality is framed in mass media discourse. Remarkably, the explosion of mass media interest in pay, especially in the form of “executive compensation” for CEOs, has been largely ignored by cultural sociologists, social psychologists and media scholars. Funded by LSE’s International Inequalities Institute this project will explore the way different moral and market justifications are used in discussions of rising income inequality.

Pat is part of the Economic Sociology research cluster.

Pat teaches courses on Work, Inequality and Society, International Migration and Migrant Integration and Researching Migration: research questions and research methods.