Evaluating the Business Impact of Social Science: a report to the ESRC

This report presents the main findings from a project entitled ‘Evaluating the Business Impact of Social Science', commissioned by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and undertaken by a team of researchers from the University of Hull. In brief, the project involved an examination of the processes through which social science research and related activities impact upon business (defined broadly to incorporate large and small private sector businesses as well as social enterprises, but excluding public sector organisations) in relation to three of the UK’s leading business/management schools that have received significant amounts of ESRC funding in recent years: Cardiff Business School, Lancaster University Management School, and Warwick Business School

Rethinking the Conflict-Poverty Nexus: From Securitising Intervention to Resilience

We are witnessing nothing less than a revolution in international policy-thinking, with a shift from imagining that international policy-makers can solve development/ security problems through the export or transfer of policy practices or their imposition through conditionality, to understanding that problems should be grasped as emergent consequences of complex social processes which need to be worked with rather than against. This paper, prepared for the 2014 CEPA conference, focuses therefore less on the politicisation and securitisation of questions of conflict and poverty and more on the depoliticisation of questions of conflict and poverty, especially through frameworks of resilience.