Brendan Burchell

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Brendan J. Burchell is a professor at the University of Cambridge, in the Faculty of Human, Social, and Political Science, and a professorial fellow at Magdalene College. He has held several leadership roles at Cambridge, including director of graduate education in sociology (2008–2012), head of the sociology department (2012–2014), and director of studies in politics and sociology for Magdalene College. He also led the Cambridge Undergraduate Quantitative Methods Centre from 2014 to 2018.

Burchell studied psychology as an undergraduate at Birmingham University (1977–1980) and earned a PhD in social psychology from Warwick University, researching person perception in the lab. After a year teaching at City University, he joined Cambridge in 1985 as a research officer in the Department of Applied Economics on the Social Change and Economic Life Initiative, working with economists, social psychologists and sociologists on labour markets and their effects on people. In 1988 he moved to the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences as a lecturer, teaching data analysis, unemployment psychology, work intensification, job insecurity and supervising undergraduate projects.

In 2011 he won the Pilkington Prize for teaching excellence. His research explores how labour market experiences affect well-being, work pressure and insecurity; the move into self-employment; how managers and employees view jobs, part-time work and gender differences in working conditions; and issues such as restless leg syndrome and financial phobia. He has received many research grants and his work has been widely published and covered by the media. In 2019 his team’s Employment Dosage Project received broad media attention.

Burchell has supervised 25 PhD students. More recently he led a Cambridge team monitoring a trial of a four-day working week in 61 UK companies—the world’s largest trial of its kind. His work appears in published reports, journal articles, book chapters and books (edited and authored).