Alan Fox failed his eleven plus examination and — like most British working class children of his generation — left school at the age of 14.
When the Second World War broke out, Fox joined the Royal Air Force (RAF) and applied for aircrew training, but was rejected due to poor eyesight.
Fox then entered the University of Oxford, where he spent the majority of his academic career, studying economics and political science at Exeter College.
[6] With Allan Flanders and Hugh Clegg, Fox became prominent in a group of scholars known collectively as the "Oxford school of industrial relations".
In "Industrial relations: a social critique of pluralist ideology" (1973) and Beyond Contract (1974), he suggested that unitarism and pluralism, in practice, were often combined and/or difficult to distinguish.