Nurse Review of UK Research Councils published

Digicare Forum 2016

New School policy to support Open Access publishing

Influencing foreign policy and diplomacy around the world

Growing out of Cold War studies, a new research centre called LSE IDEAS influenced diplomacy and policymaking in the UK, US, China and Africa.
>>Read the impact case study

 
Fostering better governance in states moving towards democracy

Professors James Hughes and John Sidel helped to identify and address key challenges in the democratic reform of governance systems and cultures.
>>Read the impact case study

Improving employee engagement and performance

Do you have an invoice or expense claim that requires payment before the Christmas break? If so, take note of the following deadlines:

For payment from a research account: send your paperwork to Research Division by 5pm on Thursday 3 December 2015.

For payment from a non-research account: send your paperwork to Accounts Payable by 10am on Thursday 10 December 2015.

Payment dates will then be:

UK suppliers: Tuesday 15 December 2015
Staff expenses: Tuesday 15 December 2015
Overseas suppliers/foreign currency: Monday 14 December 2015

Payment requests received after the given deadlines will be paid on Tuesday 5 January 2016.


Message from Glen Humbles, Head of Procurement
From Monday 16 November 2015, the Purchasing Team changed its name to the LSE Procurement Team. The name change reflects our move to a more strategic advisory approach to procurement in LSE.

We have updated our website to reflect this change and have simplified the online guidance to both staff and suppliers to make it easier to find solutions to procurement requirements, but we would welcome your feedback on areas you think may be useful additions to the website.

The website includes the new Procurement Strategy, which clearly states our aims for achieving high service quality and best value for money in all procurement activity.

We have recently recruited a new Deputy Head of Procurement who is to join us next month. Once we have the new team in place we will arrange meetings to discuss your upcoming procurement requirements, but in the meantime, please feel free to contact us to discuss any procurement related issues you may have.


Addressing anxiety in the teaching room: Innovative techniques to enhance mathematics and statistics education
Mathematics and statistics anxiety is one of the major challenges involved in communicating complex mathematical concepts to non-specialists. Meena Kotecha reports back from a recent conference where educators and researchers presented on how they have addressed the issue of anxiety in the classroom.
>>View the full article in The Impact Blog

LSE Research Online is a service provided by LSE Library to increase the visibility of research produced by LSE staff. It contains citations and full text, open access versions of research outputs, including journal articles, book chapters, working papers, theses, conference papers and more. 

Researchers of the study – published in the latest issue of Journal of General Management – conducted extensive interviews with senior individuals at ten major London-based national and international executive search firms to find out how they identify suitable candidates for CEO posts.

Rather than being selected on the basis of past performance, candidates were chosen on the basis of more observable factors such as good references, their career path – whether the person has held one or more managerial posts and has had fairly clear upward progression – and the board's anticipated approval of them, what is called ‘fitting in’.
>>More


New flat rate state pension will lead to benefit cuts for some groups
A new report involving LSE academics has found that low earning renters stand to lose the most from planned reforms to state pensions and long-term care if they are not protected.

The introduction of a single-tier pension scheme in April 2016, coupled with changes to long-term care financing in 2020, will affect pensioners in different ways, according to a report released this week co-authored by researchers from LSE’s Personal Social Services Research Unit (PSSRU).
>>More


LSE report will help insurance sector manage climate change risks
LSE has released the findings of a five-year research project tracking the impact of climate change on the insurance sector.

The multi-million pound project, undertaken by the ESRC Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy, has involved more than 30 academics, government and industry bodies, all working together to analyse the financial risks and opportunities posed by climate change.

Links to more than 50 academic publications resulting from the research project are now publicly available in a summary document for the first time, titled Evaluating the Economics of Climate Risks and Opportunities in the Insurance Sector.
>>More


Government regulation and industry practices stalling drug development finds new report
The majority of new medicines entering the market offer few clinical advantages over existing alternatives according to a new analysis article published in the British Medical Journal. Authors of the study, Huseyin Naci and Elias Mossialos of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and Alexander Carter, Imperial College London, conclude that both government and industry practices are responsible for the innovation deficit in the pharmaceutical sector. 
>>More


Regular brisk walking is best exercise for keeping weight down, says LSE research
People are more likely to have a lower weight if they regularly engage in high impact walking compared to doing another vigorous activity like going to the gym, according to new LSE research. The results are particularly pronounced in women, people over 50, and those on low incomes.

Dr Grace Lordan, a specialist in health economics who led the research, examined reported physical activity levels from the annual Health Survey for England (HSE) from 1999 to 2012. In particular, she focused on activities which increased heart rate and caused perspiring.
>>More


Britain needs a new approach to class if inequalities are to be addressed
Politicians and policy-makers must take a new approach to class if the unacceptable rise in inequalities that have characterized the opening decades of the 21st century are to be addressed.

This is one of the calls made in a new book by academics from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), The University of Manchester and University of York. Social Class in the 21st Century charts the rise of a new class system in Britain and examines why existing thinking about class, which tends to focus on the divide between middle and working classes, is outdated.

Read our interview with Professor Mike Savage, lead author of the book, in this month's 60 second interview.
>>More 


Anti-smoking messages can backfire and make it harder for people to quit
New evidence released by LSE shows that public health policies targeted at smokers may actually have the opposite effect for some people trying to quit.

A review led by LSE Research Fellow Dr Sara Evans-Lacko indicates that stigmatising smoking can, in some cases, make it harder for people to quit because they become angry, defensive and the negative messages lead to a drop in self-esteem.

The findings, published in Social Science & Medicine, highlight the potential for negative stereotypes to backfire, especially when it comes to public health campaigns.
>>More

---

Top tips

How to make the most of your career development during the holiday season
The end of the year can be a great time to reflect on your achievements, realign your priorities and plan for the year ahead. To take advantage of pursuing your career development over the holiday season, VITAE is a very useful UK organisation committed to the personal, professional and career development of doctoral researchers and research staff in higher education institutions and research institutes. 
 
We have selected for you a ‘quick tip’ article from VITAE on creating an action plan for your career development.
 
VITAE also runs training events and meetings for researchers all over the country, as part of its Researcher Development Framework. 
 
Enjoy the holiday season!

---

60 second interview

With Mike Savage, Martin White Professor of Sociology, Head of Sociology Department and Co-director of the International Inequalities Institute
 
Congratulations on the recent publication of Social Class in the 21st Century. Please could you tell us more about the book? How does it relate to the work of BBC Lab UK, which asked the BBC audience to complete a unique questionnaire on different dimensions of class?
The Great British Class Survey (GBCS) has been an amazing roller coaster of a project, and this book is its culmination! The story of the project is that in 2007 I published an article with Roger Burrows called ‘The coming crisis of empirical sociology’. We argued that sociologists were too conservative in their methodologies and should be prepared to think about using new kinds of transactional and administrative data (the ‘big data’ term had not been invented then). The article was controversial and led to lots of discussion about whether we were ‘selling out’, abandoning core social scientific principles, and so on. One very important point was that it was hard to find an exemplar of how digital data had been used productively in social science research. So, when the BBC came along in 2010 to my office in Manchester University (where I worked at the time) with plans for an amazing web survey on social class which they wanted me to design, I felt I could not say no! In truth I was not really sure what I was letting myself in for, but felt it would be an interesting ‘experiment’. And this is certainly true.
 
The web survey went live in 2011 and we downloaded the data and soon realised it was so hopelessly skewed towards the well-educated and well off middle class BBC audience that we could not derive representative findings from it. We persuaded the BBC to commission a small nationally representative survey to go alongside and after several false starts we used questions on economic, social and cultural capital to derive a new ‘model of class’ which was published in 2013, and which the BBC pushed massively in their news broadcasting. They had cleverly devised an interactive quiz which allowed people to find out their ‘new class’ and which went viral – 7 million people did it within a week.
 
I had been very naïve and not really expecting this level of interest – and we were then deluged by lots of critical comments, many from sociologists who did not like our methods, the data sources, or our conceptual approach. It was an amazing but also very disorienting time! One of the results, though, was that Penguin were keen to give us a contract to write a book on the basis of the huge media interest. It is very unusual for sociologists to get the opportunity to write for a popular audience so this was a fantastic opportunity.
 
The book gives an overview of how the findings of the GBCS affect our understanding of class today. It also contains – sometimes implicitly – our response to our many critics of the 2013 BBC launch. In our book we treat the GBCS ethnographically, that is to say not as a ‘representative’ survey of the British population, but as a device which reveals in its take up and reception some revealing features of how wealth elites are becoming increasing cohesive and reshaping the meaning of class today. So far I have been very pleased with the positive reception.  
 
The overall lessons I draw from this project is that we academics can spend a lot of time within our ‘comfort zones’ and sometimes it is healthy to take risks!  
 
You have applied for Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funding in the past and been quite successful. What would you say is your secret? 
It is important to be strategic. You need to put yourself in the eyes of potential reviewers and funders and think about what kind of project would strike them as innovative, unusual and important. In 2002-3 I led a bid for an ESRC Research Centre based at the University of Manchester. I realised that the ESRC mentioned cultural issues in several of their strategic priorities but they had no major Research Centres examining the relationship between cultural and social change. This allowed us to make the case that they needed to strengthen their research in this area, and we then followed this up in our application by emphasising our methodological strengths in quantitative and qualitative methods. We also involved an impressive team of sociologists, cultural and media studies experts, anthropologists, geographers, historians, political scientists, and business school researchers. We were successful in getting core funding of £10 million for the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC) which ran between 2004 and 2014. The GBCS was, in a sense, one of the spin offs from this project.
 
You currently hold an ESRC award for the research project ‘Social and Cultural Inequalities in Britain: A Relational Analysis'. Tell us a bit about your experience since winning the grant? 
Well, this is a strange story as it supports me as a professorial fellow and buys me out of much of my other academic work, which was important as I have also been Head of Sociology Department and Co-Director of the International Inequalities Institute during the same period. The professorial fellowship has also enabled me to work with two amazing post-docs, Daniel Laurison and Lisa McKenzie, and we have managed to achieve a lot of things, certainly on the GBCS but also more generally trying to recharge the sociological debates on inequality. It has been terrifically helpful to have substantial resources to organise conferences and research fieldwork. I am now supposed to write a theory book to sum up the work on this project – this will be a demanding ask!

Who was your hero when you were growing up?
I was an obsessive and nerdy cricket fan in my teens and my heroes from the early 1970s were Derek Underwood (left arm spinner) and Alan Knott (wicketkeeper). One of my favourite journeys was from my home in Raynes Park, South West London, to Waterloo and then to Canterbury or Maidstone to see them play for Kent.
 
What book are you currently reading and which have you enjoyed most in the past? 
This will sound very boring and ‘highbrow’ but Marcel Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’ (or whatever the translation of the title should be) remains head and shoulders above anything else. I first read it in my late 20s, when I basically did nothing else for three weeks. I have returned to it frequently ever since and engaged with some of the critical literature about it. As well as being one of the greatest works of literature it is a stunning work of sociology. I would love to bring out the sociological aspects of what he says about time and place in my future writing.