ESRC Society Today

Professor Ken Peattie heads the Cardiff-based ESRC funded research centre known as BRASS which focuses on business relationship as the means to create greater understanding of the issues of sustainability, accountability and social responsiveness in the corporate sector. The centre focuses on two key relationships: within the industry supply chain, and between business and the community. These relationships involve consumers, employees, regulators and communities. Others being brought into the research include financial and professional services, waste management, construction and health.

"The research that I would most like to progress in future concerns promoting healthier food choices, particularly amongst children. This would involve taking a social marketing approach in which successful techniques from commercial marketing are applied to social issues such as health diets. Social marketing has become a major phenomenon in the USA and Canada, but government departments and researchers in this country are mostly only just waking up to its possibilities. As an approach it helps us to go beyond the awareness raising of traditional educational campaigns, to really focus on how to change peoples' behaviour. It would involve finding out what the barriers are to healthy eating, and how to dismantle them. Jamie Oliver's school dinners initiative is a perfect example of that kind of thinking in practice. Changing children's diets in schools will need more research into the role that labelling, pricing, promotional incentives and the whole school eating experience has on their food choices. I'm particularly interested in investigating the role that innovative approaches to labelling, and the use of sales promotion techniques, could potentially play.

I enjoy academic research, but the thing that I find frustrating about it is the standard of refereeing in academic journals. Too much of it simply reflects the interests and prejudices of the person doing the refereeing, not the quality of what is being refereed. A lot of referees' comments boil down to nit-picking or a complaint that "If I had been doing this, I wouldn't have done it that way". Proper constructive criticism is great, and I have sometimes received only a few lines from a referee that he opened my eyes to a completely new way of looking at something. Mostly though, the process of responding to referees' comments feels more like jumping through hoops than actually improving the quality of the research. I also sympathise with referees, since refereeing can be a very time-consuming activity, with little in the way of direct benefits to the referee. A few years ago, America's Academy of Marketing did a review of academic refereeing and concluded that it was a sado-masochistic process in which those who had suffered through it early on in their careers got to extract their revenge on the next generation later on! These days I try to be as constructive as I can when refereeing, but sometimes it is hard to tell whether I feel like a sadist or a masochist."