Dick Hobbs is Professor of Sociology. He worked in a number of manual and clerical jobs before training as a schoolteacher and working in London schools. He undertook postgraduate work at the LSE and the University of Surrey, and worked at the Centre for Criminological Research at the University of Oxford, and briefly at the Polytechnic of Central London, before taking up a post at Durham University in 1990 where he worked in both the Sociology and Law Departments. He joined the LSE in September 2005.

His interests focus on ethnographic work, working class entrepreneurship, the sociology of deviance, professional and organized crime, violence, drug markets, and the night-time economy. Dick Hobbs is currently working on a book looking at the sociology of organized crime in the UK.  He is also working on a 4 volume edited collection on ethnography, and a collaborative book on the policing and security implications of the 2012 Olympics.