Could Distributed Peer Review Better Decide Grant Funding?
The landscape of academic grant funding is notoriously competitive and plagued by lengthy, bureaucratic processes, exacerbated by difficulties in finding willing reviewers. Distributed […]
The Rule of Optimism – Thirty Years On
Not many social scientists introduce a phrase into the English language and its subsequent history is instructive about the ways in which the impact of successful sociology becomes invisible. It is also a nice example of how ideas become assimilated into a societal environment that finds it hard to accept the sociologist’s focus on systems and organizations.
Why Social Science Education is as Important as STEM…
A recent Ipsos-Mori survey reveals the crucial role that social science has to play in modern democracy, a role which is frequently sabotaged.
Who Really, Really Wants Open Access?
There is broad agreement is the desirability of wider access by readers to scholarly journal articles. There is less agreement on who these imagined readers might be.
Groped at Luton Airport: Accountability and the Security State
I was still wearing my belt and triggered the detection gate. What followed was the most intrusive search that I have experienced at any UK or US airport.
The BBC, North Korea and the Culture of Impunity
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.
Modernizing Universities?
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.
Postgraduate Study – A right or an opportunity?
There are all sorts of things from which we are excluded by limited means. Is postgraduate education really so different?
Edward Hopper: An ethnographic sensibility?
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?
