Jim taught at the Universities of Coventry, Leeds, Wolverhampton and the Open University in Britain before joining the Social Sciences Department in 1998 and, on visiting professorships, at various universities abroad over the years; and previously worked as a research officer at the Arts Council of GB and as a script editor in BBC TV’s Drama (Plays) Department.
His visiting professorships abroad include Bergen, Canberra, Canterbury (Christchurch), Catalonia, Copenhagen, Izmir, Jyvaskyla and Rostock. Jim spent the Autumn of 2012 as Senior Visiting Research Fellow at IFK, the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften (International Centre for Cultural Research) in Vienna. His work has been translated into Chinese, Croatian, Farsi, German, Korean, Japanese and Spanish. And, in recent years, he has delivered keynote addresses at conferences in Australia, Austria, Canada, Croatia, Finland, Germany and Israel/Palestine and presented papers and given guest lectures at various universities in Britain and elsewhere. The doctorates that Jim has supervised cover various topics, including comparative youth culture, cultural work, Hollywood synergy, the wedding ceremony and several other topics particularly in cultural policy studies.
Jim served on several editorial boards and has been a reviewer and expert research evaluator for the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the European Commission. Also, he has served on an AHRC panel for postgraduate awards.
- Contemporary social theory
- Cultural-materialist research paradigm
- Cultural policy
- Cultures of neoliberal capitalism
- Life and work of Raymond Williams
- Satire and social criticism
- ‘Fahrenheit 451 – The Higher Philistinism’, Eleonora Belfiore & Anna Upchurch, eds., The Humanities in the 21st Century, London: Palgrave Macmillan.
- ‘Cool Art on Display' – Andrea Whitcomb & Kylie Message, eds., Museum Theory, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
- ‘Raymond Williams on Culture and Society’, Keywords 10, pp 40-54.
- ‘The Coolness of Capitalism Today’, Triple C – Cognition Communication Co-Operation 10.2, pp 425-438.
- ‘The Cultural Public Sphere – A Critical Measure of Public Culture?’, Giorgio, L., M. Sassatelli & G. Delanty, eds., Festivals and the Cultural Public Sphere, London & New York: Routledge, pp79-9
- ‘From Cultural Populism to Cool Capitalism’, Art & the Public Sphere 1.1, pp7-18.
- ‘Creative Labour, Cultural Work and Individualisation’, International Journal of Cultural Policy 16.3, August, pp323-333.
- Cultural Analysis, London, Thousand Oaks & New Delhi: Sage.
- ‘Doing a Florida Thing – The Creative Class Thesis and Cultural Policy’, International Journal of Cultural Policy 15.3, August, pp 291-300.
- Cool Capitalism, London & New York: Pluto.