There has been much agonising in recent years over the future of the monograph. A few years ago the Association of American University Presses held a conference entitled ‘The Scholarly Monographin Crisis: or, how can I get tenure if you won't publish my book?’ The dilemma might be rephrased in the UK as ‘how can I survive the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) if you won't publish my book?’ – the pressures may be different, but the problem is essentially the same, summing up the way in which academic publishing has become un comfortably instrumental in the career structure and funding mechanism of the profession.

Development and innovation in learning and teaching tends often to be less advanced in higher education than at primary and secondary levels and those in higher education might usefully learn from work already done at other levels. At the same time, apart from the resulting generic applications of pedagogic models, there is room for more specific work to be done in the context of university learning and teaching.

The exponential growth of the Internet - or World Wide Web - was heralded, in the 1990s, as revolutionising the production and dissemination of information. It has stimulated a great deal of discussion, debate and experimentation. Far-ranging discussions concern both the political implications of the Internet for access to knowledge and its ramifications for teaching subjects such as politics and related fields.

The relationship between the political and social attitudes of Scotland and the rest of Great Britain has long been an area of interest in Political Sociology (Dickson, 1989; Brown et al., 1999 : ch. 4). In particular since the 1974 general election, at which the Scottish National Party (SNP) placed itself firmly on the political map, there has been interest in the extent to which the four party system in Scotland not only produced different electoral statistics but also reflected and helped sustain a distinctive political culture.