Embargoed until 00:01hrs Thursday 18th December 2008
How should social policy, such as welfare payments, react to an individual's changing circumstances? Is intergroup conflict inevitable? When will people fight for justice and social change, even against their own interests? If we have a better understanding of individual behaviour and decision making, will we be better able to understand how the economy behaves? Can patients suffering a condition through no fault of their own justly make a claim to very expensive health care resources? What is 'resilient development' and why is it important?
These are just some of the topics that will be addressed under the latest Professorial Fellowships funded by the ESRC. These awards are intended to push back the frontiers of social science by allowing the UK's leading scholars the time and opportunity to carry out cutting edge research that will deepen our understanding of a number of critical social scientific questions in areas that will have an impact on the future of our society.
Professor Ian Diamond, Chief Executive, Economic and Social Research Council, said "These fellowships are designed to support leading social scientists working in the UK. The scheme offers Fellows with an outstanding track record in research, the time and funding to pursue an exciting research agenda, and to carry out innovative and creative work that will have economic, social land policy impacts. Each of the six successful individuals has an international reputation as a leader in their respective fields."
The six new Professorial Fellowships are:
Albert Weale, Professor of Government, University of Essex.
What constitutes a benefit that is public in order for an organisation to qualify as charitable? How should forms of public consultation be designed so as to satisfy criteria of democratic legitimacy? Questions like these are both central to public policy and involve social and political values. The research will seek to identify the nature of the social contract in terms of which we could answer such questions as well as the way in which they can be reasoned about in public institutions. It will link these general ideas to the political theory of a property-owning democracy, taking certain public policy questions as reference points for illustrating the strength of the arguments involved. In short, the research programme will rise to the theoretical challenges involved in synthesising social contract theory and deliberative democracy, explore the implications of this synthesis for our understanding of the political theory of the property-owning democracy and provide examples of the role of political values in policy analysis in the light of the theory developed.
Katrina Brown, Professor of Development Studies, University of East Anglia
Resilience is a term being used widely by policy-makers and analysts. We hear the term applied to how the national economy might deal with recession; or communities with natural disasters. It is increasingly used as a goal of policy - that we should strive to make society and people more resilient so they can better cope with shocks and changes. It is now being used by development agencies, such as the World Bank and United Nations Development Programme, promoting ideas such as 'climate-resilient development'. Resilience concepts have been applied across social and natural sciences, defined as the ability to absorb disturbance whilst retaining its basic function and structure. In the social sciences, there are important gaps in our understanding of what this approach might mean for society; who the winners and losers are; how different people understand and perceive their own resilience. These issues are especially important if this thinking is applied in the context of developing countries. This fellowship critically examines how these ideas might be applied to re-thinking international development and the ability of poor people to respond to environmental change.
Herb Marsh, Professor of Department of Educational Studies, University of Oxford.
Educational research is inherently multilevel, in which students are nested in classrooms, classrooms and teachers in schools, schools within districts, and districts within countries. Traditional single level statistics are therefore inherently biased and ignore contextual effects associated with group-level attributes (e.g., the motivational climate of the class). Using a new technique (multilevel latent variable approach), developed as part of his proposal, Professor Marsh will provide insights to critical, unresolved educational issues.
John Hills, Director, Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, London School of Economics.
Most analysis of social policies and taxation is based on comparing alternative situations at a fixed point in time. But this is a limited perspective: policy is often best understood as a changing process, not as a fixed package. Wherever people's entitlements to services or benefits or their liability to tax depend on their circumstances, similar questions have to be addressed: not just which circumstances, but also over what time period and remaining in place for how long? This research will explore questions about the ways in which social policies react - or do not react - to people's changing circumstances. Areas to be covered include: the design of social security benefits and tax credits; "welfare to work" and employment policies; income tax and national insurance contributions; social housing and other support for people's housing; support for children from both state and absent parents; patterns of saving for retirement; paying for long-term care; and inheritance. As well as examination of each specific policy area, the research will bring the findings together within a single framework, comparing current British practice with examples from other countries, and drawing out implications for how future policy might develop.
Graham Loomes, Professor of Economic Behaviour and Decision Theory, University of East Anglia
In order to understand people's economic behaviour we need better models of how they make decisions: how they weigh different goods and services against their costs, how they judge risks, how they balance present and future considerations. Traditional economic models lack psychological insight and behavioural realism and often fail to provide good predictions. This research aims to develop more realistic decision models which take partial and imprecise preferences as a starting point. Better models of consumer behaviour may help us to improve the way markets operate. Better models of how people evaluate things like health care, safety measures and environmental benefits may enable us to make better use of survey data to inform public policy in these areas.
Russell Spears, Professor of Psychology, Cardiff University
Social identity theory, a key approach to intergroup relations within social psychology, and increasingly influential outside, attempts to provide some of the answers by conceptualising the self at the group level ("social identity"). It aims at a group-level but psychological explanation of behaviour that combines theoretical generality with the specificity necessary to understand and predict diverse behaviour in the varied social contexts of modern societies. The research proposed develops and integrates three refinements of the social identity approach (the three "C's" of commitment, content and communicative context). The content of group norms and group emotions help to explain the specificity of group behaviour, which together with commitment (or group identification), account for its motivation and intensity. Communicative context refers to the situational factors that can render identity salient and facilitate and constrain its expression. The proposal develops an integrative account for the diversity of group life and intergroup behaviour, explaining the extreme forms it can take. As well as providing insights into the nature of chronic intergroup conflicts this approach should also help us to understand new social phenomena (e.g., "happy slapping", "flaming"). Rather than treating such behaviour as the product of self interest, irrationality, or "mad mobs", the research will highlight the "emotional rationality" of behaviour in the group.
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Notes to editors
- The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) is the UK's largest funding agency for research and postgraduate training relating to social and economic issues. It supports independent, high quality research relevant to business, the public sector and voluntary organisations. The ESRC's planned total expenditure in 2007/08 is £181 million. At any one time the ESRC supports over 4,000 researchers and postgraduate students in academic institutions and research policy institutes. More at http://www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk
- ESRC Society Today offers free access to a broad range of social science research and presents it in a way that makes it easy to navigate and saves users valuable time. As well as bringing together all ESRC-funded research (formerly accessible via the Regard website) and key online resources such as the Social Science Information Gateway and the UK Data Archive, non-ESRC resources are included, for example the Office for National Statistics. The portal provides access to early findings and research summaries, as well as full texts and original datasets through integrated search facilities. More at http://www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk