Michael Davis was conferred to the Fellowship of the Academy in spring 2026. He is the Chief Executive of the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen), a registered charity and the UK’s leading independent organisation for social research and the largest social survey provider to governments and academia.
Michael DavisFAcSS
Michael’s career spans the private and public sector, and he has held senior executive leadership positions in various organisations including Kantar, Ecorys and the UK Commission for Employment and Skills. His roles have ranged from public policy formulation to global transformation project reporting, and he has managed teams across the globe, from Seoul in South Korea to Washington DC in the US. Whether in skills and employment policies, large scale social surveys or global business operations, the unifying point of interest in Michael’s career has always been seeking a better understanding of how people, place and policies intersect to deliver positive social and economic outcomes for everyone.
Michael is also Chairman of Capital City College, the largest further education college in London and a Trustee of the RSA.
Why do the social sciences matter?
Society is always changing. The social sciences provide the tools by which we can better understand how people, communities, and the environment, which are fundamentally indivisible, ‘get along’. At its best, it provides evidenced based insights as to how we can improve societal outcomes and, just as critically, be the early warning for changes we need to make in how we live to avoid negative outcomes in the future.
What do you enjoy most about your work?
I’d like to consider myself a ‘doer’ rather than a ‘thinker’ and NatCen is an incredible organisation that has a huge responsibility for getting a lot of things done. This year we’ll complete over 70,000 household interviews, 6,000 biomedical interviews, 10,000 telephone interviews, 125,000 web-based interviews and roughly publish 130 reports – and all that capability is growing. Across the UK we lead surveys covering housing, health, transport, family finances, crime, growing up, and so on. We lead on evaluations across communities, work, income, children, families, and health. Listening to society without an agenda to reveal the issues that matter and solutions that work. In all that ‘doing’ it allows us to partner with governments, academia, and charities to, hopefully, create meaningful societal data and policy insights.
As someone whose career has been primarily a basic user of social research outcomes in public policy, it has been a steep but incredibly enjoying learning curve in understanding the innovation, professionalism and pride that goes into creating datasets and policy insights. That we have teams of people testing questionnaire design, designing sample frames, coding outcomes. All things I was completely ignorant of but now relish the challenge of understanding and working with the teams to continue to improve.
What is the most urgent issue social scientists need to tackle today and within the next three years?
We really need a different way of framing how society prospers, grows, and addresses societal (including environmental) challenges. We are bound by neo-classical economics in how we discuss what are fundamentally issues of society and values. Yet, we’ve completely accepted that value is subjective, it is whatever a market prices a good or service at, and our measure of national prosperity is to add up all those market transactions, call it an economy and unquestionably aspire that it must be bigger in order to fund public services.
I spent last weekend volunteering, probably one of the highlights of my year. It does nothing for growing the economy because amongst the 14 of us no money was transacted, but we all did something that was good for our own wellbeing and, hopefully, good for the wider community in which we all live. Economically it would have been far better to have spent money on things I didn’t need, that probably aren’t good for me, which even better creates a secondary purchase to address the negative externality of the first one. We urgently need a different way of measuring social progress and addressing social concerns.
What does being a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences mean to you?
The social sciences are essential in helping society navigate economic uncertainty, political change and shifting social needs. I’m delighted to have been elected as a Fellow of the Academy joining those who are working for social good.