George Matheson

BSocSC, PhD (UNE)

Location: 19:2026
Email: gmath@uow.edu.au
Phone: (02) 4221 3743

George Matheson was educated at the University of New England (BSocSc 1987, PhD 1994). A lecturer at UoW since 2001, he worked in social research for about fourteen years, eleven of them (1989-2000) at the Social Policy Research Centre, UNSW.

Matheson studies and teaches methods of inquiry in the human sciences. That includes the details of techniques and procedures of all kinds. It also includes their history, theory and criticism, as well as their uses in making policy or otherwise organizing social life. He notes that being a methodologist has its good and bad points. On the one hand, you do end up third- or fourth-named author more often than not, and in an acknowledgment footnote more often still. Then again, life is never dull. You get to look at a lot of things. Here are some examples:

• G. Matheson (1999) Carry your gods and your kings along: A sociological theory of the Millennium. Proceedings of TASA ’99: Sociology for a New Millennium
• G. Matheson and M. Wearing (1999) Within and without: Labour force status and political views in four welfare states, in S. Svallfors and P. Taylor-Gooby (eds), The End of the Welfare State? Responses to State Retrenchment. London and New York: Routledge/European Sociological Association
• M. Bittman, G. Meagher and G. Matheson (1999) The changing boundary between home and market: Australian trends in outsourcing domestic labour. Work, Employment and Society 13(2): 249-273
• G. Matheson (1997) Universality, selectivity and public attitudes towards income support for the aged, in S. Shaver, Universality and Selectivity in Income Support: An Assessment of the Issues. Aldershot: Ashgate
• M. Fine, S. Graham and G. Matheson (1995) The Institutional Population of Australia: 1976-1991. Report of a Feasibility Study. SPRC Reports and Proceedings No. 119, February
• P. Saunders, B. Halleröd and G. Matheson (1994) Making ends meet in Australia and Sweden: A comparative analysis using the subjective poverty line methodology. Acta Sociologica 37(1): 3-22

Searchable RIS publications from 2000 to date