Welcome to Real World Impact

Dr Maureen Brookes is a Reader in Marketing and Teaching Fellow at the Oxford School of Hospitality Management, Oxford Brookes University.   She is Past President of ICHRIE and EuroCHRIE, a CHME Honorary Fellow, a member of the Institute of Hospitality’s Professional Panel and holds an honorary doctorate from NAFEM.   Maureen’s most recent research has focused on combatting human trafficking (THB) in the hospitality industry.   She was a co-investigator on the Combat THB in Hospitality and Tourism Project. Here, she explains the project’s aims and discusses the approach adopted to ensure real world impact from the research. Trafficking in human beings (THB), is a fast growing criminal activity that affects most countries across the globe. It involves the movement of victims through force, coercion or abuse primarily for the purposes of sexual or labour exploitation.   Current estimates by the Walk Free Foundation (2017) suggest that are as many as 4...

In April 2018, at the British Sociological Association conference, a group of UK sociologists launched a curriculum in ‘applied sociology’.  They want to tool up new sociology graduates to use their degrees to improve workplaces, organisations and communities, ensuring the undergraduate curriculum has an applied component. Professor Nick Fox, co-convenor of BSA-SoA , explains… Sociology is a subject that works best when it faces outward, towards the world of people and their social groups, organisations and institutions. Toward the natural and built environment that people inhabit. Toward the ideas, beliefs, values and norms that people use to constitute their social worlds on a day-to-day basis. And toward the processes of power and resistance that mark out both divisions, stabilities and continual change within society.   MyStock photos: reproduced under Creative Commons CC0 licence. Sociologists have much to say about the grand problems facing contemporary...

Karl Spracklen is a Professor of Music, Leisure and Culture at Leeds Beckett University. His research interests include music, subcultures and identity. Here, Professor Karl Spracklen discusses the real impact of research on metal music.  I am fortunate to be involved in two book series with Emerald. I am the co-editor of Alternativity and Marginalization , which explores the meaning and purpose of the alternative and marginal in culture and society. One of the first books in the series is one I have co-authored with Beverley Spracklen called The Evolution of Goth Culture . In this book, we use the idea of collective memory to explore the controversies and boundary-making surrounding the genesis and progression of the modern gothic alternative culture. We suggest that the only way for goth culture to survive is if it becomes transgressive and radical again. In the period before we put the book together we spent time debating the future of goth with a number of peopl...

Claire Seaman is Professor of Enterprise and Family Business at Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh. Her main areas of research encompass networks and leadership in family owned businesses. Here she discusses the need for researchers to work with business organisations to identify information of direct use to policy makers Family owned firms are the most common form of business in existence. Definitions vary (and are indeed the subject of considerable academic debate) but research regularly estimates that 65-80% of businesses are owned and/or run by families.  Family businesses exist across economies, communities and geo-political divides. They exist across all business sectors, most legal forms of business and indeed across the spectrum of small, medium and large businesses, yet family businesses struggle to achieve the recognition they deserve and anecdotally many see benefits in presenting themselves as ‘corporate businesses’ to preserve the ‘professionalism’ with...