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 […]
Louise Richardson: Educational Divide Fuels Corrosive Populism
Speaking before a sell-out audience of policymakers, journalists and academics in Whitehall, Louise Richardson FAcSS, vice chancellor of the University of Oxford, said we must bridge the educational divide to prevent populism for threatening democracy
The Constant Diplomat: Neil Smelser, 1930-2017
Sociologist Neil Smelser, whose research on collective behavior and economic sociology were rivaled by his tenure as a mentor, teacher, and liaison to a restive University of California-Berkeley student body in the 1960s, has died at age 87.
Political Activism is Not Just for Youngsters
David Canter reviews a new range of studies that shows people can be politically active from childhood to old age
Limiting Campus Free Expression is Intolerance, Too
The response on many universities to a high tide of intolerance has been to limit free speech. That, says James Turk, is exactly the wrong response.
Alan Krueger: Where Does Public Policy Fit in a Gig Economy?
American labor law and social programs were developed in an age where workers labored for a company and could plan to be there for years, if not a lifetime. The velocity of the gig economy’s expansion has left policymakers far behind, says economist Alan Kruger, and he’d like to bring them up to speed.
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.
