academy of social sciences | ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS)

Cary Cooper, Distinguished Professor of Organisational Psychology and Chief Project Ambassador for CASS, has been knighted for his services to social science.

“This honour really means a lot to me – particularly as an American who has now made his home in Britain,” said Professor Sir Cooper.

“It’s a real thrill and pretty humbling for someone like me who has come from a working-class background – with immigrant parents from the Ukraine and Romania – and being the first in my family to go to university.

“I’ve lived in the UK for 50 years, having moved to the UK as a student in 1964. So now I feel as if I have finally been accepted!”

Professor Sir Cooper has been chair of the UK’s Academy of Social Sciences, an umbrella body of 46 learned societies in the social sciences representing 88,000 social scientists, since 2009. In 2001 he was awarded a CBE for his contribution to occupational safety and health. He was also lead scientist on the Government Office for Science Foresight project, Mental Capital and Wellbeing, in 2008. He was awarded an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians, was the founding President of the British Academy of Management and is currently President of Relate.

He is the author or editor of over 160 books and written over 400 scholarly articles for academic journals . He is also a frequent contributor to national newspapers, TV and radio.

He is currently working with MPs, Lords and board-level business leaders as part of the All-Parliamentary Commission on the Future of Management. The Commission, which is co-chaired by Peter Ayliffe, President of the Chartered Management Institute, and Barry Sheerman, MP, will report its findings in July.

We are extraordinarily pleased to announce Michael Hoey’s membership to the CASS Challenge Panel. Below, Professor Hoey shares a bit about his personal and professional successes.

I am a funny kind of corpus linguist in that all my publications for the first twenty years of my career were devoted to the study of written discourse analysis. However I had co-authored (with Sue Atkins), under John Sinclair’s direction, the proposal to Collins Publishers that led to the development of the Collins COBUILD dictionary at the University of Birmingham and I inevitably become heavily involved with the running of the project, working closely both with Antoinette Renouf and Patrick Hanks as they wrestled the first-ever corpus-driven dictionary into shape. Without realising it, I was slowly mutating into a corpus linguist, and when near the end of my time at the University of Birmingham I was asked whether I would like to write one of their little COBUILD handbooks on lexical signalling, I leapt at the opportunity. The handbook, though, never appeared – the more I investigated the ways the words were used, the more radical my thoughts on the way language is organised became, and when I was appointed to a Chair at the University of Liverpool, my inaugural lecture was on corpus linguistics.

The second 20 years of my career have seen few discourse analytical publications but more and more corpus linguistic, and particularly lexical priming, papers and books. My corpus linguistic perspective, though still heavily influenced by John Sinclair, one of three giant figures in my development (the others being Randolph Quirk and Eugene Winter), has become ever more eclectic but I am convinced that the current findings of corpus linguists of every tradition not only torpedo most of the major models of linguistics of the past 100 years but point to a quite different way in which language should be conceived, as having a complex lexicon and a very simple grammar. I also believe that we urgently need to link up corpus thinking with psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic thinking that has been done by psychologists and sociologists, rather than tame adherents of existing linguistic models.

The ‘Who’s Who’ facts about me are that I am currently Pro-Vice Chancellor for Internationalisation, Director of the Liverpool Confucius Institute and Baines Professor of English Language at the University of Liverpool. I am an Academician of the Academy of Social Sciences and a member of Council of the University of Chester. I am also a proud grandfather, an inveterate traveller (even when not on University business), a Christian and the former editor of a magazine on beer ‘Ale & Hearty’. Indeed my book on the real ale pubs in the area around Southport has, I regret, been my only best-seller.

Did you miss our previous introductions? Click through to read about Challenge Panel members Alan Partington, Mark Davies and Stefan Th. Gries.