Expert Comment
The latest entry from Vice-Chancellor Nigel Thrift's blog:
Many academic commentators on contemporary Western higher education want to harken back to what they see as a golden age of academe — and bemoan their present lot. No doubt there are things to complain about. Probably many. But it is possible to become mired in an account which sees nothing but gloom and negativity in the current academic scene and which, by implication, sees no way of ever effecting any positive changes.
Anandi Mani, Associate Professor of Economics, is one of the authors of a study on women’s political representation and its effect on crime in India. As the government reserves for women a third of all seats in local government institutions like the village council, the researchers sought to find out whether having female political leaders at the local level would have a positive effect on women. Instead, they found that the reported number of crimes against women rose. Ms. Mani explained in an e-mail interview with India Ink why that’s not bad news.
In the light of the most recent House of Lords reform failure, Dr John Parkinson from the Department of Politics and International Studies explains how, 'by taking on a battle they had no realistic hope of winning, the liberals have probably scuppered their chances of making less dramatic but very significant deliberative changes'
Why has China succeeded where Russia failed? Professor Mark Harrison from the Economics Department explores how each communist nation approached economic recovery and finds that whilst the results differed greatly, their methods were the same. This raises an important question: will the same recipe of success continue to work for China?
Professor Steve Roper is Associate Dean and Director of the Centre for SMEs at WBS. He guest edited the Entrepreneur page of the Financial Times Money supplement, published on Saturday 28 July. He is also author of an opinion piece on the challenges of ensuring that the UK's mid-market businesses do not continue to miss out on growth opportunities.