Visiting Professor of Sociology
School of Applied Social Sciences
Julia Evetts is Emeritus Professor of Sociology in the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Nottingham, UK. She is also Visiting Professor at UCS, University Campus Suffolk
For a number of years she has been researching and writing about professions and occupations including women’s and men’s careers in teaching, banking and science and engineering in industrial organizations. She has worked on projects to do with the armed forces, journalism, foster care and social work. She is currently working on the increased use of the concept of professionalism as a mechanism of occupational change and social control in work organizations; and the role of the scientific and engineering institutes in the UK. She has extensive experience of policy, practice, evaluation and assessment in the field of sociology of professional groups, practitioners and clients. This is a field in which she has an established international reputation and has contributed extensively both conceptually and theoretically as well as empirically. She also has extensive experience of research on the career building patterns, trajectories and aspirations of women and men in different occupations.
Her own career was developed in the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Nottingham where she became professor in 1998. From 2001 to 2006 she was Head of School. She was funded to spend one month at the Centre for the Sociology of Law at the University of Antwerp, Belgium in 1995. In 1997 she accepted a fully funded personal invitation to lecture and run a workshop at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She has led the English section of a joint Anglo-French comparative study of School Headship. She has worked with professors from Lodz, Poland (Anna Buchner-Jeziorska) on engineering and Ljubljana, Slovenia (Samo Pavlin) on competencies. In 1995 a Centre for International Professions (CIP) was established based in the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Nottingham, of which she was Director. In 1997 this Centre was expanded to become the Centre for Professions and Professional Work. The Centre was part of a European Network of researchers on professions which developed close links with centres in universities at Antwerp (Belgium), Coimbra (Portugal), Bari (Italy), St. Quentin (Paris, France), Lodz (Poland) and Gothenburg (Sweden); and outside Europe with universities in Boston (USA) and Montreal (Canada).
She has participated extensively in international networks, associations and research teams and has been advisor and consultant on research projects in Canada, France, Poland, Belgium, Sweden and Portugal. She has been President of the International Sociological Association (ISA) Research Committee (Sociology of Professional Groups) a position which she held for 8 years (1996-2004) and where she managed the progress of the group from working group to a full Research Committee. She was also an elected member of the Executive Committee of ISA for two terms where she served on the Research Committee, Publications Committee, Finance Committee and the National Associations Liaison Committee. She was also the co-convenor of the European Sociological Association (ESA) Research Network on Professional Groups where she organised conferences and conference streams and sessions. Regularly and frequently she is an invited and plenary speaker at international conferences including, in 2011, in Portugal, Switzerland and Belgium. At the ESA conference in Geneva in September 2011 she was a plenary speaker.
To date she has written 5 books (one jointly) and edited 2; and 58 papers published in refereed journals. There have been translations of her work into Russian, Spanish, German and Italian. In 2010 it was announced by Sage Publications that her 2003 paper published in International Sociology was the highest cited and down-loaded paper in the two ISA sociology journals.