J. Merton England to Jim, 17 October 1957

Professional correspondenc

The political process of constructing a sustainable London Olympics sports development legacy

This study attempts to develop a research agenda for understanding the process of constructing a sustainable Olympic sports development legacy. The research uses a social constructivist perspective to examine the link between the 2012 London Olympic Games and sustainable sports development. The first part of the paper provides justification for the study of sport policy processes using a constructivist lens. This is followed by a section which critically unpacks sustainable sports development drawing on Mosse’s (1998) ideas of process-oriented research and Searle’s conceptualisation of the construction of social reality. Searle’s (1995) concepts of the assignment of function, collective intentionality, collective rules, and human capacity to cope with the environment are considered in relation to the events and discourses emerging from the legacy vision(s) associated with the 2012 London Olympic Games. The paper concludes by proposing a framework for engaging in process oriented research and highlights key elements, research questions, and methodological issues. The proposed constructivist approach can be used to inform policy, practice, and research on sustainable Olympic sports development legacy

Describing the impact of health research: a Research Impact Framework

BACKGROUND: Researchers are increasingly required to describe the impact of their work, e.g. in grant proposals, project reports, press releases and research assessment exercises. Specialised impact assessment studies can be difficult to replicate and may require resources and skills not available to individual researchers. Researchers are often hard-pressed to identify and describe research impacts and ad hoc accounts do not facilitate comparison across time or projects. METHODS: The Research Impact Framework was developed by identifying potential areas of health research impact from the research impact assessment literature and based on research assessment criteria, for example, as set out by the UK Research Assessment Exercise panels. A prototype of the framework was used to guide an analysis of the impact of selected research projects at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Additional areas of impact were identified in the process and researchers also provided feedback on which descriptive categories they thought were useful and valid vis-à-vis the nature and impact of their work. RESULTS: We identified four broad areas of impact: I. Research-related impacts; II. Policy impacts; III. Service impacts: health and intersectoral and IV. Societal impacts. Within each of these areas, further descriptive categories were identified. For example, the nature of research impact on policy can be described using the following categorisation, put forward by Weiss: Instrumental use where research findings drive policy-making; Mobilisation of support where research provides support for policy proposals; Conceptual use where research influences the concepts and language of policy deliberations and Redefining/wider influence where research leads to rethinking and changing established practices and beliefs. CONCLUSION: Researchers, while initially sceptical, found that the Research Impact Framework provided prompts and descriptive categories that helped them systematically identify a range of specific and verifiable impacts related to their work (compared to ad hoc approaches they had previously used). The framework could also help researchers think through implementation strategies and identify unintended or harmful effects. The standardised structure of the framework facilitates comparison of research impacts across projects and time, which is useful from analytical, management and assessment perspectives

Trends and transitions in the institutional environment for public and private science

The last quarter-century bore witness to a sea change in academic involvement with commerce. Widespread university-based efforts to identify, manage, and market intellectual property (IP) have accompanied broad shifts in the relationship between academic and proprietary approaches to the dissemination and use of science and engineering research. Such transformations are indicators of institutional changes at work in the environment faced by universities. This paper draws upon a fifteen-year panel (1981–1995) of university-level data for 87 research-intensive US campuses in order to document trends and transitions in relationships among multiple indicators of academic and commercial engagement. The institutional environment for public and private science is volatile, shifting in fits and starts from a situation conducive to organizational learning through high volume patenting to a more challenging arrangement that links indiscriminate pursuit of IP with declines in both the volume and impact of academic science. The pattern and timing of these transitions may support an enduring system of stratification that offers increasing returns to first-movers while limiting the opportunities available to universities that are later entrants to the commercial realm. Unpacking the systematic effects of university research commercialization requires focused attention on the sources and trajectories of profound institutional change.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/42839/1/10734_2004_Article_2916.pd

A model of intermarriage involving attribute exchange

The increasing pace of globalization has significantly affected our lives in many profound ways. One of the consequences of globalization is the rise of intermarriage, i.e., the marriage between couples of different nationalities or different social, economic, religious, or racial backgrounds. Since our understanding of intermarriage is limited, this paper attempts to shed lights on intermarriage by developing a formal model based on attribute exchange. After examining the motivation and micro and macro consequences of intermarriages, our model shows that different value systems regarding marital attributes among different groups drive individuals with attributes valued lower in their group to seek intermarriage. As a result, the essence of intermarriages is the movement of attributes from groups in which such attributes are relatively abundant to groups where the same attributes are relatively scarce. Thus, intermarriage makes individuals with attributes valued lower in their original groups better off. At the inter-societal (or inter-group) level, the equilibrium of intermarriage is determined by the relative scarcity of marital attributes in different groups (societies). In the long run, intermarriages converge different groups in terms of their value systems regarding marriage.

European banking integration, ten years after

Ten years ago, the White Paper on the Completion of the Single Market announced the integration of European banking markets. the purpose of this essay is to identify four public issues that remain to be addressed. Home country control of international banks need to be complemented by host country control. the deposit guarantee schemes should be modified by rendering insured deposits 'first order claim'. A European authority is needed to ensure that banks do not exploit domestic rents to subsidise international activities. Finally, tax evasion is a fourth issue that remains to be addressed. Copyright Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1996.