Dennis held academic posts at the Universities of
Leeds,
Bristol and
Birmingham before finally holding a long-term post as
Lecturer, later
Reader, in Social Studies at
Newcastle University, where he worked for 35 years. He was a lifelong Labour supporter and was a Labour councillor in
Millfield, Sunderland, in the early 1970s. He was driven to do this by his disgust at the planned slum clearances in Sunderland at the time, which he opposed strongly. It was this that also inspired him to write about economic pressures and how they shape society.
The Daily Telegraph news blogger
Ed West described Dennis as "a key analyst of late 20th-century British society whose influence, I suspect, will stretch long into the 21st". ==Death==