Jane is an Associate Professor of Work and Employment at the University of Southampton. She is a sociologist of work, who researches what work means to people, changes in ways of working, and in the various inequalities in people's experiences of work.

Her PhD looked at how Welsh coal-mining communities responded to the labour market restructuring that followed the 1984/85 Miners' Strike. This study prompted a long-standing interest in occupational attachments and how these shift and interact with unpaid work, particularly when people's labour market expectations become more uncertain. In the 2000s she worked in the Employment Group at the Policy Studies Institute, focusing on disadvantage and the evaluations of labour market programmes.