Bloody Work with Cara Reed, Jenna Pandeli, and Helen Williams

Absolutely.

And with any luck, we've done our part today.

Good stuff.

OK, for my final question, I wanted to look a little bit more broadly at social science.

It seems to me that the social sciences are brimming with excellent research on incredibly important topics with clearly useful recommendations.

And then somehow a lot of it never seems to make the leap into the real world, if you will, or in this case, I guess, the workplace.

So I was wondering, to your mind, what is it that's restraining the impact that social science research could have on making our workplaces better?

Yeah, I think it touches on what Helen was talking about, about the kind of fact that a lot of the time it's complicated answers.

and that these are quite complex issues that you're trying to unpack and break down.

And understandably, for a lot of workplaces and policymakers, It does mean sometimes I think the evidence base that they tend to draw from will be the material that's a bit more digestible, perhaps presented a bit more simply, perhaps more numerical and has that more practical kind of feel to it.

So people can feel they're making a difference quite quickly and easily to things.

And that's all perfectly understandable.

I can understand why that that kind of can dominate.

But again, a lot of the time, the social sciences end up pointing to more complexity because you're dealing with power and those kinds of things that inevitably a lot of the time you just can't give simple answers.

It will require a lot of different actors taking different actions that over time will hopefully eventually start to move things in the right direction.

But that message is just a wee bit harder, I think, to sell than that.

x percent of people think this if you did these three things it would change in this way thanks very much so i think that's a factor in some of it

as well as that um historically academia, kind of the big markers of success for both academics themselves and also for institutions has been journal articles, so academic publications.

And so that has been where you focus.

So you will find the answers to all of these really interesting questions deep buried in academic journals.

But, you know, they never see the light of day.

So I think it has to be it's very much been the passion of academics to for wanting to kind of be a part of change and wanting to do something positive in society as to where we kind of see those things move out.

But I do think that that might be changing going forward.

Most of our universities now are realising the importance of impact and that is becoming kind of institutionalised.

And so we're seeing lots of our organisations changing seeing impact as a marker of success as well so i'm optimistic um not on many things um but for this eventually we might see some of these um big issues coming coming out of academia a little bit more than they historically have