Between 1960 and 1962 he was a Philosophy tutor at the London School of Economics, before accepting lectureships in Hong Kong and at the University of York, Ontario.
[1] Jarvie was a member of the Royal Society of Canada and managing editor of the journal Philosophy of the Social Sciences.
Other influences included: David Hume, Bertrand Russell, and Ernest Gellner.
Further, Jarvie's philosophical method owes a debt to training in social anthropology.
His adherence to functionalism in the study of the social differs from that of Durkheim (and his followers) in holding that knowledge and ideas must be presented as causal variables.