Luke is a political sociologist at the University of Sussex in the UK. He has written on globalisation, socialism and social democracy, and environmentalism. He is writing a book on the future of social democracy.

The Sociology of Globalization was published by Polity Press in January 2010. In the late 1990s and early 2000s Luke wrote two books with Stephen Driver, New Labour and Blair's Britain. He edited Social Democracy: global and national perspectives, and The Third Way and Beyond: criticisms, futures, alternatives.

Ecology and Society, 1994, looked at political and sociological dimensions of environmentalism. Luke's PhD thesis in the late 1980s was on Socialism and Associational Democracy and he published articles on this in the journal Economy and Society in 1992 and 1993.