Director, ESRC Research Programme Public Services: Quality, Performance, Delivery 2004-Present

Gladstone Professor of Government and Fellow of All Souls College Oxford.

Fellow of the British Academy (chair of the BA’s Politics Section 2002-2005) and Academician of the Academy of Learned Societies of the Social Sciences.

Christopher Hood specializes in the study of executive government, regulation and public-sector reform. Before coming to Oxford in 2001 he held chairs at the London School of Economics (he was head of the Government Department there from 1995 to 1998) and the University of Sydney, NSW, and he has also worked at the universities of Glasgow, York, Bielefeld, the National University of Singapore and the City University of Hong Kong. His publications include The Limits of Administration (1976), The Tools of Government (1983) (updated as The Tools of Government in the Digital Age (2007) with Helen Margetts) and The Art of the State (1998 and 2000) for which he was awarded the Political Studies Association’s W.J.M. Mackenzie Book Prize in 2000. In 2007, Christopher Hood was awarded the Public Management Research Association's H. George Frederickson Award for Career Contributions to Public Management Research, and was also elected a Fellow of the Sunningdale Institute. In 2008, a prize for Political Theory at the University of Sydney was named in his honour and in 2010 he was awarded the Routledge Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Public Management by the International Research Society for Public Management. In February 2010 Christopher Hood presented "Risk and Government: The architectonics of blame-avoidance" as part of the Darwin College Lecture Series. His presentation is available to view as a video.

Christopher Hood is a Council member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics and chairs the Working Party on Personalised Medicine.

Christopher Hood's recent policy briefings Public Spending in Hard Times and Managing by Numbers: the Way to Make Public Services Better? are now available online. His forthcoming book The Blame Game will be published by Princeton University Press in 2010.    

Project Assistant: Dr Ruth M. Dixon, Department of Politics and International Relations.

Email and telephone: please use the University of Oxford Contact Search service.

Mail: All Souls College, Oxford, OX1 4AL, UK.