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.
If you were to make up a fantasy football team for, say an intellectual Premier League, which thinks from Socrates forward might be among your picks?
Many social scientists find themselves members of a cult of quantification, argues Robert Dingwall, in love with numbers for their own sake even when those numbers produce no useful knowledge.
No one expected Tamiflu to be a wonder drug, but indications are that it’s moderately useful in fighting a serious public health threat. But that message was lost last week in an ill-starred rush to beat up on ‘wicked’ Big Pharma, argues Robert Dingwall.
Back in the summer, John Holmwood, the current BSA President, sent me an email about impact and research ethics. Various […]
As academics think about impact, they can draw on some of the lessons and strategic approaches used by civil society and campaigning groups.
A recent Ipsos-Mori survey reveals the crucial role that social science has to play in modern democracy, a role which is frequently sabotaged.
Social scientists have nothing to fear from the impact agenda, but must be more willing to talk to “strangers” such as the government in order to realise their full value – a talk by Prof. John Brewer
Recently I’ve seen a lot of hero/heroine narratives. They now seem to be popping up in research impact plans and claims about impact.
A comparison of two studies on the coverage and range of citations in Open Access, comparing OA and non-OA journals.
If policy influence becomes so unequal that the wishes of most citizens are ignored most of the time, a country’s claim to be a democracy is cast in doubt. And that is exactly what I found in my analyses of the link between public preferences and government policy in the U.S.
While parts of Aditya Chakrabortty’s recent piece in the Guardian were sensible and informed, its central claim was unfair – that social science disciplines have been unable or unwilling to explore, explain, and confront the ‘Great Financial Crash’ of 2007-9
