Posts in Tech Lab
Automated Workflows and Efficiencies

Ughh it’s Friday afternoon, and you’re knee deep in spreadsheets changing and extracting arbitrary values so that you can pass some data onto someone else, who lets face might be doing the same thing. Only a few more hours and you can be free – except you can’t, not until this is done because your line manager ‘really needs’ them for first thing Monday morning. The worst part is that it’s the same job as last week and the week before that… and the week before that. Furthermore, these spreadsheets seem to be getting bigger and requested more frequently. Let’s face it, the reason you’ve left it until Friday is that you can’t bear doing it again. You dream of your next job, maybe someone else will have to do this sort of work, and you can concentrate on what your good at.

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Operation Coffee Connector

You know the problem, you’ve arrived at the company meeting, and you’re looking for someone, anyone, in your team with whom you can sit. You looked out at a sea of people, all of whom you’ve seen around the office but none of which you know their name. If you’re anything like me, you sit down awkwardly on your own for the next hour hoping to bump into someone you know on the way out. The meeting ends and had you realized that the person next to you shares your passion for Extreme ironing (yes it’s a thing, yes I’m fantastic at it.) you would have felt very differently. This is a familiar story in a lot of medium/large businesses, and it can be a problem when trying to encourage a friendly and open culture within the workplace.

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Social Science Jargon

The social and behavioral sciences have always come with their fair share of jargon. Territoriality. Kinesics. Affective events theory. Pygmalion effect. Dystopia. Cacotopia. Those last two even mean the same thing. Sometimes it seems like doing social science means learning another language.

That's why we're releasing everything that we've learned about social science terminology as the first installment in our new Terminology Service. Go to concepts.sagepub.com and click around to discover information on over 61,000 concepts in the social and behavioral sciences, such as definitions of key terms and how they relate to other concepts. You can search for a specific concept, or try clicking the 'Hierarchy' tab and browse through the social sciences from the top down.

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