VOICES PAUL BOYLE


to be much more strategic and that will probably mean cutting back quite significantly on some of the areas that we fund at the same time as protecting other activities.


However, the spending review does present us with opportunities as well. There will be many organisations – public service areas, other research councils, charities, all sorts of groups – for whom funding is perhaps becoming more difficult now. When individual organisations are struggling financially there may in fact be more to gain by getting involved with collaborative work because it not only creates huge value, it’s also cheaper for each organisation.


When linked together, data from multiple sources can provide exciting new insights


numerous major texts written decades ago which at the time might have had absolutely no impact but which led to fundamental changes in society – think of some of the key economic texts that weren’t necessarily valued at the time they were written. For this reason we must never lose that kind of blue-sky thinking in social science. It is also short-sighted to view social science in isolation. There is a growing recognition across the breadth of academic enquiry that inter-disciplinary approaches are often required and that social science often has a vital role to play. There are various complex questions which require analysis from a range of perspectives – take, for example, climate change. We rely on natural scientists to provide reliable evidence on the extent of global warming, and what the contribution of human activity is to this.


However, we require social scientists to help us understand how to change people’s behaviour so that society becomes more sustainable; to provide advice on how to calculate realistic approaches to carbon trading; and to work with governments to help identify how sustainable policies


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And there are other ways that we can make more out of what we’ve got. One of the achievements I’m most proud of is setting up the Scottish Longitudinal Study. This uses resources that already exist so instead of doing a survey of 264,000 people the study uses anonymised information that’s already been collected from the census, from hospital records, vital events registrations, education records and so on. Of course you have to be very strict in the way you handle that data but, linked together, it can provide exciting new insights which may be impossible from surveys which are inevitably smaller scale.


What is going to guide ESRC funding decisions in future? We’ve already taken a decision that we’re going to introduce three key priorities to direct our decisions. They are: Economic Performance and Sustainable Growth; Changing Behaviour and


I’m impressed by how efficient the


ESRC is and by how much work is done by a relatively small team to further the cause of social science research


can be identified that are acceptable to business and the public.


What are the main priorities for the ESRC now and over the coming years?


I’ve come to the organisation mid-way through a spending review which is going to be different to all the other spending reviews of the recent past and is inevitably going to affect the ESRC significantly. I have to say I’m impressed by how efficient the ESRC is as an organisation and by how much work is done by a relatively small team to further the cause of social science research. However, we do have to think very carefully about what we do within the organisation – how we manage whatever cuts we have to handle, how we’re going to restructure ourselves internally, what sorts of changes we make to the business we do. It’s also thinking about the investments that we make and prioritising them. We can’t just make cuts across the board at an even rate – we need


28 SOCIETY NOW AUTUMN 2010


Informing Interventions; and A Vibrant and Fair Society. These are the areas we have decided to focus our strategic investment around in the next couple of years.


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I’m also keen that, unlike the strategic plans of the past that tended to take five years to turn over, we revisit these priorities regularly to see if we’ve done enough work on them and to decide whether they need refreshing. It may be that some priorities need more attention and longer term funding than others and we also need to be flexible enough to identify new priorities as they arise.


It’s important to remember that the ESRC does not make unilateral decisions on its priorities and the way it directs funding. We have a council and well-governed procedures of involving council and our committees in decision making, and we have always, and will continue, to involve the academic community in important decisions affecting the work we do. These may be challenging times, but exciting ones too! n


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