1. What is your favorite part of your workday?

I like the morning when it is quiet as people begin to come in.

2. How do you see your role playing out SAGE’s vision to support and foster engaged scholarship and education?

Marketing helps communicate SAGE’s vision to end users and customers.

What’s the most exciting thing happening in publishing right now?

The open access movement is one to watch.

What is the most interesting object on your desk?

My stripey lamp.

What is your favorite thing to do outside of work?

I love to cook.

• January 26-28: Society for Personality and Social Psychology (San Diego, CA)

Have any cool stories to share about your experiences at a convention?? Leave a comment…

• January 20-23: American Library Association Midwinter (Dallas, TX)
• January 21-24: ASPEN’s Clinical Nutrition Week (Orlando, FL)

Have any cool stories to share about your experiences at a convention?? Leave a comment…

In 1947, the Bulletin first displayed the Doomsday Clock on its magazine cover to convey, through a simple design, the perils posed by nuclear weapons. The Clock evokes both the imagery of apocalypse (midnight) and the contemporary idiom of nuclear explosion (countdown to zero).

In a formal statement issued at the time of the announcement, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists noted:

“It is five minutes to midnight. Two years ago, it appeared that world leaders might address the truly global threats that we face. In many cases, that trend has not continued or been reversed. For that reason, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is moving the clock hand one minute closer to midnight, back to its time in 2007.”

SAGE has freed up access to content from the latest issue of the magazine. You can also read more about the decision to move the clock hands here, and listen to audio from the live event here.

What is your favourite part of your workday?
The morning, where I have regular slots to catch up with my direct reports and get an updated sense of what’s going on in their work and subject areas.

How do you see your role playing out SAGE’s vision to support and foster engaged scholarship and education?
Within Books Editorial this is a truly key part of our role, in terms of seeking, selection, development, championing of our authors’ work, and keeping up-to-date with key trends in the academic environment and scholarship.

What’s the most exciting thing happening in publishing right now?
The debate over the future of the book.

What is the most interesting object on your desk?
A Frida Kahlo postcard sent to me by an author many years ago

What is your favourite thing to do outside of work?
Bedtime reading with my children, often nowadays with them reading to me as I snooze!

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 15,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 6 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

• January 10-15: American Psychoanalytic Association (New York, NY)
• January 11-13: meCCSA (Luton, England)
• January 11-15: Society for Social Work Research (Washington, DC)
• January 12-14: Southern Political Science Association (New Orleans, LA)

Have any cool stories to share about your experiences at a convention?? Leave a comment…

Sir Roger Jowell chairing a SAGE debate in 2010

We were very sorry to hear that Sir Roger Jowell passed away over Christmas. Roger was the Founder and Director of the National Centre for Social Research, Britain’s largest social research institute until 2001, and in 2008 was knighted for his services to the social sciences.

We were very privileged to have worked with Roger as an author and friend for many years, most notably on one of his legacy works, the British Social Attitudes report series. In 1983 when it first launched, it was already a significant undertaking, surveying 1700 people in its first year. In an era where surveys were ad hoc and sporadic, work like this made it clear how important tracking opinion and trends over time would be. Writing in that first edition, Roger wrote:  “The term ‘public opinion’ is in itself misleading.  Our data demonstrate that on nearly all social issues there are actually several publics and many opinions.” Published by SAGE since 2000 it is now in its 28^th volume and continues to be just as challenging, and as important.

Roger was also co-founder and Director of the European Social Survey (ESS), a 34-nation comparative study of changing social values throughout Europe. We published the initial book of methods and findings: Measuring Attitudes Cross-Nationally: Lessons from the European Social Survey in 2007.

A key figure for the social sciences he was also, simply, an extremely nice man and a pleasure to work with. He will be greatly missed.

Did you get anything nice for Christmas? Perhaps you bought yourself a little something in the New Year sale? One of my favourite emails of the year is from our sales team, advising us which SAGE titles people were shopping for on Amazon’s website on Christmas day.

Fifty publications were ordered on 25th December, ranging from research methods, to counselling to business and management. The most popular? Andy Field’s Discovering Statistics Using SPSS. Many purchasers were also exploring some of SAGE’s early career literature, including Good Essay Writing: A Social Sciences Guide by Peter Redman and The Literature Review: A Step-by-step Guide for Students by Diana Ridley. It’s good to know people are thinking of SAGE at Christmas!

Those of us who engage with social media, and train our students to do so, will eventually win this race.  Change is coming to academia, but the nature and importance of that change remain up in the air . . .