VOICES PAUL BOYLE A life in social science
The ESRC’s new Chief Executive Officer, Paul Boyle, talks to Society Now about his academic career, his priorities for the ESRC and the value of social science
What inspired you to pursue an academic career? I went to Lancaster University because I had a genuine desire to study but I certainly didn’t imagine I would end up as an academic. As part of my undergraduate degree I spent a year on an exchange in Boulder, Colorado and that experience, combined with my final year dissertation, gave me the stimulus to get involved in an academic career. So I applied for an ESRC-funded PhD and was awarded a CASE studentship working with Hereford and Worcester County Council looking quantitatively at migration patterns in the county. Though it wasn’t the most glamorous location that work gave me a set of specialisms and quantitative skills that at the time weren’t that common. After my PhD I went straight into a lectureship at Swansea for four years then another lectureship at Leeds which was one of the leading quantitative geography departments. After another five years I was approached by St Andrew’s to apply for a
“ As a social scientist I have a clear
grasp but I’m not convinced that the public understands social sciences in the same way as the natural sciences
chair there. St Andrew’s was a weaker department – grade 3 in the RAE – but had great potential. That’s what persuaded me to go and I really enjoyed working with colleagues to help shape that department and improve its position over successive RAEs.
What’s been your involvement with the ESRC throughout your career?
I did the ESRC-funded PhD and was lucky enough to get an ESRC small grant quite soon after I started my lectureship in Swansea, providing my first research assistant. Since then I’ve had a number of ESRC grants – a mixture of PhD studentships and grants as well as more significant funding to support the Longitudinal Studies Centre – Scotland, which has been responsible for establishing and supporting the Scottish Longitudinal Study.
The ESRC Centre for Population Change is the most recent big initiative. I was a co-director in charge of the Scottish consortium of five Scottish universities, all of whom collaborate in the centre. It’s really getting off the ground in Scotland – it’s been behind the Southampton investment because it‘s taken a little while to get people in post, but
26 SOCIETY NOW AUTUMN 2010
also because we’re going to base all these people in the General Registry Office in Scotland, which is the Scottish equivalent of the Office for National Statistics, and we want the group of research assistants and PhD students to be working there together to give it a critical mass. This is an exciting approach because the demographers are right there at the heart of the main statistical agency for population issues in Scotland.
It has given the project a real policy focus and the interaction with the Scottish Government has been excellent; they have appointed a person to work at the interface between the Government and the centre to feed ideas back and forth. This helps the centre demographers understand the Government priorities and the government departments are also kept up to speed about the centre activities.
”
What do you believe is the value of social science? Part of the answer to that is working out what social science is in the first place. As a social scientist I have a clear grasp but I’m not convinced that the public understands social sciences in the same way as the natural sciences. For example, there’s a lot of hard science on television but if social science does make it to TV, it often isn’t labelled social science. So one of the things we social scientists need to do is look at how our science projects itself and how we can get across what its value is.
We also need to think about how we can do a better job of engaging with the impact agenda. There will certainly be academics who get quite worried about that – academic work is not just about having a direct economic impact – but I do think that there’s a lot of academic work which could have an impact but which doesn’t; perhaps it isn’t promoted well enough or perhaps some academics have not had enough experience of engaging other groups with their work. The other side of the story is about working with government to make them realise social science isn’t just about economic impact. Of course it’s crucial that some of the work we do does have economic impact – you can understand why the public and the government would like to see that. But a lot of ESRC-funded research has a huge impact on public policy – areas where it can change the way society is run and affect people’s daily lives. Thus, it is essential to recognise that it is not simply about economic impact. There’s cultural, social and intellectual impacts which social science research provides. For example, there are
▲
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32