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 […]
Presumed Consent to Organ Donation – Gesture Politics?
England is looking at changing its organ transplant permission process from on opt-in to an opt out model. While this looks like an easy answer, says our Robert Dingwall, who part of a working group on the issue in the 90s, he doubts such a change will make any significant difference and may actually be counter-productive in terms of public confidence in the system.
Managing Universities: Dodging the Dead Cat
Academics have been disengaged, disengaged themselves, or never been engaged with the challenges of working in, and for, very complex organizations, says our Robert Dingwall. Their distaste for administration in its various forms is a liability.
UK HE: Markets Are Good for Everyone – Except Academics….
So if markets are truly good for English higher education, as many seem to think, should we follow that train of thought to its logical conclusions?
Reimagining the UK Sociology Curriculum: Internationalization, Decolonialization and Employability
How well do sociology departments in the UK teach sociology that originated in the UK? Asking that surprisingly hard question may produce usable insights for academic Britain, argues our Robert Dingwall.
Grenfell Tower: The Missing Social Dimension of Fire Regulations
Fire safety is not just an issue for engineers. People build buildings, people live in buildings, and people use (and abuse) buildings. That creates a need for social and behavioral work to accompany every nail driven.
Leadership and the UK General Election 2017
For social scientists, there must be a concern that a generation’s worth of accumulated empirical evidence on effective leadership has made so little impact on the candidates in the upcoming General Election in the United Kingdom.
Negotiating Brexit – A Clash of Legal Cultures?
Membership in the European Union was a contract, and the differing legal approaches between situational British common law and the more codified French approach helps explain some of the rancor as Brexit comes to be applied.
In Search of Conservative Sociology
As sociology has drifted further and further from any conservative touchstones, argues Robert Dingwall, it has become less and less able to understand the society that provides its subsistence.
