The traditional way for someone to go about the business of being a book reviews editor would be for me to write begging letters to publishers, offer what I got back on an academic chat forum and send the freeby to whoever replied first (or at least say that was who I had sent to!). This really doesn’t strike me as a very good model. It results in a form of payola. If you wanted an objective view of a particular car, would you be more interested in what a journalist had written about it after a free loan, or what an owner had to say about it?

Another approach would be the ‘old chums’ network. Again, this doesn’t really appeal to me as it is hardly equitable.

What I would like to happen is for academics to approach me with proposals for books they would like to review, ones they have actually spent good money on. This way I hope to get reviews that are written with passion – a passion that might be delight, despair or anything in between.

So, if you have strong feelings about a sports management book, let me know what it is (see contact details) and I’ll send you a pro forma of how the IJSMS book review should be formatted.

It presents particular challenges:

• It is the one part of the degree which we use to ‘tick the box’ of demonstrating that our students can learn independently – where does that leave teaching?
• Supervision is parcelled out across the Department – where does that leave quality (in the QAA sense of the word)?
• Most textbooks assume that the readers are at the brighter and more motivated end of the spectrum – where does that that leave the others, who are often more concerned with satisficing than optimising?

Over the alst fifteen years I’ve sought answers to these questions and tried to develop materials that are genuinely supportive of independent learning for all students.

Although I moved into full-time HE in 1992 I never quite let go of my airline roots – my PhD thesis, completed at Cranfield School of Management in 2003, was entitled Notions of ‘success’ and ‘failure’ held by senior UK airline executives and their perceptions of the causes of ‘success’.

This airline background is part of the reason that I established the ATLAS Mass Tourism Special Interest Group, a network of more than 70 researchers from 19 countries interested in researching mass tourism and the travel industry.

In the mid-eighties, in partnership with three friends, I became co-owner of Errol Station (on the Glasgow to Aberdeen main line, between Perth and Dundee). We undertook considerable rstoration and opened it as a Railway Heritage Centre. In 1991 it won the Best Preserved Station in Britain title in the annual Ian Alan awards scheme.

This practitioner experience certainly gave me considerable insight into the problem of mixing the desires of purist volunteers with the need to develop a workable business plan.

This area of serious leisure – the preserved railway scene – is one I could easily be drawn into for research. An added bonus would be the perfect excuse to indulge myself in one of my favourite pleasures – an all-day breakfast on the platform at Shackerstone Station!

When my first wife died in 1991 I made a conscious decision to take up a serious hobby, and returned to my childhood hobby of philately. Over the next few years my interest became more and more specialised, centring on the postal history of the Austro-Hungarian Navy.

At that time very little had been published in English on the Austro-Hungarian Navy and almost all of that was out of print. I manged to build up a collection of books in German and in English and set myself an objective of making information about the navy’s ships available in English. The initial idea was to write a book, but getting it published was always going to be a challenge, so I settled on a website – John Beech’s Austro-Hungarian Navy Homepage.

Perhaps surprisingly, this interest has once crossed over to my work world – I made a minor contribution to the Landscapes of War project through my colleague Neil Forbes, which included a look at the material culture of the conflict at sea in the Adriatic during World War I.

My work in this area tempts me to work on the concepts of what I term ‘orphaned heritage’ and ‘lost identity’ – the heritage which no-one today claims and the identity which no longer has any adherents.

In 1999 I was the first individual to be awarded a Coventry University Teaching Excellence prize for my information gateways in Leisure, Sport and Tourism.

More recently I have produced the websites associated with The Business of Sport Management and The Business of Tourism Management. The most relevant one to research is the news gateway for the latter.

Currently I am working on developing reusable virtual learning objects with the HEA HLST subject group.

See here for the abstract.

As I felt that this was an article probably no-one could do justice to on their own, I worked with colleagues at Coventry University – Andrew Rigby (professor of Peace and Reconciliation), Ian Talbot (professor of South Asian Studies and cricket fan) and Shinder Thandi (expert on Punjabi Studies and cricket fan).

See here for the abstract.

More recently I wrote a book chapter which was a case study of the Barmy Army during the Cricket World Cup in the West Indies.

The research resulted in six articles, published in 1999 and 2000.

The most notable feature of the websites at that time was their sheer variety. Today’s sites are, through duopolistic intermediation, bland and predictable in comparison. In the nineties there was no registration for direct marketing purposes and gambling was nowhere to be seen. All-in-all, a much gentler and less commercial era. The clubs seem to have picked up well on the idea of the great commercial opportunities, but have not operationalised it imaginatively.

I am currently working, with my colleague Marcella Daye, to produce such material for the HEA HLST Subject Group, who will then make the material freely available.