Robert Dingwall

Robert Dingwall is a consulting sociologist, providing research and advisory services particularly in relation to organizational strategy, public engagement and knowledge transfer.

More about Robert Dingwall...

The BBC, North Korea and the Culture of Impunity

By Robert Dingwall | Published: April 16, 2013

The controversy over BBC journalists’ use of a student tour group linked to the London School of Economics should not be allowed to go away quietly.

Posted in News, Public Policy, Research Ethics | Tagged BBC, Craig Calhoun, Ethics, London School of Economics, LSE, Media, North Korea, Panorama, policy, Project Camelot, research, Social research, social science, social science research | 1 Comment

Modernizing Universities?

By Robert Dingwall | Published: April 8, 2013

Universities are starting to look like the behemoths of the US auto industry of the 1980s, with highly-paid CEOs buried in their offices looking only at numbers.

Posted in Higher Education Reform, International Debate, News, Public Policy | Tagged CEO, Corporatization, economics, employment, Funding, higher education, innovation, managerial, organizational management, social science, University management | 1 Comment

Postgraduate Study – A right or an opportunity?

By Robert Dingwall | Published: February 18, 2013

There are all sorts of things from which we are excluded by limited means. Is postgraduate education really so different?

Posted in Academic Funding, News, Public Policy | Tagged Funding, higher education, Postgraduates | Leave a comment

Edward Hopper: An ethnographic sensibility?

By Robert Dingwall | Published: February 3, 2013

This is not a body of work that instructs us what to think – it invites us to ask the question that an ethnographer would ask: confronted with this scene, what is going on here?

Posted in Research Methods, Resources | Tagged Art and Social Science, Edward Hopper, Ethnography, humanities, Research Methods, sociology | Leave a comment

OA and the Man from Del Monte…

By Robert Dingwall | Published: December 16, 2012

Older readers may recall a series of advertisements on UK TV in the 1980s, featuring the Man from Del Monte. The international corporation’s representative arrived in a Latin American village where the peasants were waiting anxiously for his verdict on their fruit crop. When he declared that it was good enough for the company to [...]

Posted in News, Public Policy | Tagged Academy of Social Sciences, ACSS, higher education, open access, research funding | 2 Comments

Sir Jimmy Savile’s Crimes

By Robert Dingwall | Published: November 20, 2012

The English in full moral panic are never an edifying spectacle. The Jimmy Savile affair is no exception, as self-appointed experts on child abuse, BBC-bashing tabloids and ambulance-chasing lawyers have piled into the fray.

Posted in Featured, Impact, Interdisciplinarity, International Debate, News, Public Policy | Tagged age of consent, BBC, child protection, children, ephebophilia, Jimmy Savile, Media, moral panic, paedophilia, social science, sociology, Sociology of Childhood | Leave a comment

Why Open Access is Good News for Neo-Nazis

By Robert Dingwall | Published: October 17, 2012

Much of the debate on Open Access has concentrated on the shift from a subscription model that opens access for authors, while restricting access for readers, to a publication charge model that restricts access for authors, while opening access for readers. The proposed requirement to publish under a Creative Commons CC-BY licence may, though, be [...]

Posted in Communication, Impact, International Debate, News, Open Access, Public Engagement, Public Policy, Research Ethics, Resources | 15 Comments

Why Open Access will Stifle Innovation

By Robert Dingwall | Published: September 2, 2012

It is curious that the UK government department promoting Business, Innovation and Skills should be so committed to a policy that might almost be designed to achieve the opposite effect.

Posted in News, Open Access, Public Policy | Tagged higher education, open access, policy, research funding, social science | 2 Comments

Open Access or Legalized Piracy? Open Access and the Finch Report

By Robert Dingwall | Published: July 18, 2012

It seems we are to get Open Access in the UK whether we like it or not. It is, though, interesting to note how cavalier some people are about others’ intellectual property rights.

Posted in Communication, News, Public Policy | Tagged Authors Licensing and Copyright Society, copywrite, eminent domain, Horizon Funding Programme, Intellectual Property Rights, open access, Publishing, research, The Finch Report, The Gold Route, Writers Guild | 2 Comments

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