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 the sociology of work, international migration, and social inequality. He has a long-running research project that examines problems of theory and method within the qualitative case study tradition in employment relations and the sociology of work. Drawing on an analysis of articles published in ten major journals over a twenty-five year period, this work aims to open up a much-needed discussion about the current direction and future prospects of a research tradition that was once central to the study of industrial relations.

In the area of international migration he has been working with Omar Hammoud-Gallego (Durham University) and Eiko Thielemann (LSE) to identify a new development in immigration control that extends beyond national borders into the workplace. Using evidence from legislative changes in Austria, Germany, Ireland and the UK, they highlight a trend towards labour market protectionism that challenges prevailing claims about the declining power of the state.

Finally, with Martin Bauer and Sandra Obradovic (both LSE), he is engaged in ongoing research into how social and economic inequality is framed in the mass media. 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 examines the way different moral and market justifications are used to legitimate prevailing patterns of 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.