Prof John Clarke

Professional biography

Professional affiliations

I am a member of the Association for Cultural Studies; the UK Social Policy Association, the American Anthropological Association, the Society for the Anthropology of North America and the Association for the Anthropology of Policy. I am also a member of the Academy of Social Sciences.

Research interests

My work has explored ways in which welfare states have been transformed since the late twentieth century, with a particular interest in how the relationships between welfare, state and nation have been reconstructed. I am fascinated by how understandings of what the 'social' in social policy means, and how its meanings are constructed and contested, particularly in relation to dominant political and managerial conceptions of the public and the public interest. I have an interest in the ways in which national, international and trans-national processes intersect in the reshaping of social welfare, its social relations and its governance systems. These interests are linked by a commitment to making cultural analysis contribute to the analysis of social policy. This was the focus of a book, Changing Welfare, Changing States: New Directions in Social Policy, published by Sage in 2004.

I have a long standing concern with the political, cultural and organizational changes associated with the impact of managerialism on public services and their reform. A collaboration with Janet Newman in 1997 explored The Managerial State (Sage), while more recently we have co-authored Publics, Politics and Power: remaking the public in public services (Sage, 2009). These concerns connected me to the Publics Research Programme of the University's Centre for Citizenship Identities and Governance (CCIG). and were also central to an exploration of the role of consumerism in public service reform in the UK through a funded research project Creating Citizen-Consumers: Changing Relationships and Identifications. A book from the project Creating Citizen-Consumers: changing publics and changing public services was published by Sage in January 2007.

A collaborative project on citizenship that began in Paris in 2007 resulted in a co-authored book with Kathy Coll, Evelina Dagnino and Catherine Neveu: Disputing Citizenship (The Policy Press, 2014). Subsequently work withNoemi Lendvai, Dave Bainton and Paul Stubbs on the politics of policy translation in transnational settings rersulted in a co-authored, Making Policy Move: towards a politics of translation and assemblage,( Bristol: Policy Press, 2015).

I have been part of an ESRC funded bilateral research project with Scottish and Swedish colleagues: Governing by Inspection: School Inspection and Educational Governance in Scotland, England and Sweden (2010-2014); and was subsequently part of an ERC funded project at Bristol University, led by Morag McDermont, on New Sites of Legal Consciousness which resulted in a book edited by Samuel Kirwan: Advising in Austerity: reflections on Challenging Times for Advice Agencies (Policy Press, 2016).

My project on reitrement (at the end of 2014) was to explore the inttelectual dynamics of working collaboroatively. This exploration resulted in a book of conversations with a dozen people who have helped me to think: Critical Dialogues: Thinking Together in Turbulent Times (Bristol: The Policy Press, 2019)

Most recently, I have been working on the questions of how to analyse the moment of 'Brexit' and its consequences, returning to an approach from my early years in Cultural Studies: conjunctural analysis. I have written a number of articles and chapters exploring how such a 'conjunctural analysis' illuminates these issues. I held a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship (2019-2022)  to continue this work on 'Brexit and Beyond', resulting in a book The Battle for Britain: Crises, Conflicts and the Conjuncture, published by Bristol University Press in 2023.

Recent publications include:

Janet Newman and John Clarke (2017). The instabilities of expertise: remaking knowledge, power and politics in unsettled times. Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research, 30(1): 40-54.https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/rgQJ3Sedr8XAdSFdBiBF/full

A repository of research publications and other research outputs can be viewed at The Open University's Open Research Online.

Teaching interests

After coming to The Open University in 1980 I worked on a wide range of courses, from level one to Master's courses. Although my work has been mainly focused on social policy courses, I have been involved in other courses across the faculty. Most recently I have contributed to Welfare, crime and society (DD208) and Introducing the social sciences (DD101). My final teaching contribution was to work on the production of DD102: a number which brought my Open University career full circle, as I was first appointed to work on D102.

I have also been a visiting scholar at a number of other institutions including NOVA in Oslo, the Danish Social Research Institute (SFI) in Copenhagen, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Central European University in Budapest.