book reviews J. Appl. Cryst. (2018). 51 https://doi.org/10.1107/S1600576718013195 1 of 4 Managing Science: Developing your Research, Leadership and Management Skills. By Ken Peach. Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. 288. Hardback Price GBP 25.49. ISBN 9780198796077. John R. Helliwell* Department of Chemistry, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, UK. *Correspondence e-mail: john.helliwell@manchester.ac.uk The title Managing Science immediately raises several questions: Who in universities, research institutes or large-equipment installations would benefit from such a text? The scientist who is going to take on some management task because they wish to get promoted? The manager who does little or no science? The scientists who have to endure an apparent complexity of management over their heads and seek illumination as to just what is going on? The sub-title Developing your Research, Leadership and Management Skills suggests it is for the heads of department alone. If so, will the book be solely retrospective? Or will it also offer prospective solutions, for example addressing the agreed ills of the science workplace the world over, such as male-dominated workplaces? I should mention that I worked alongside Ken Peach when he and I were directors of different aspects of the Council of the Central Laboratories of the Research Councils, the CCLRC. I observe that Ken Peach is very well qualified to address the topic of this book, with more than 40 years of experience managing science, in the UK and at CERN in Geneva, including 25 years at a UK university, as he puts, it managing his own science. As for the book’s aim, the back cover states it is ‘to introduce the working research scientist to the art and techniques of management and the skills necessary to be a good and effective manager and leader of science and scientists’. The Preface adds ‘Balancing the needs of science – which has to be free to follow the trail, wherever it may lead – with the demands of society – that it be accountable, responsible and, if possible, useful – is a skill that needs to be carefully developed.’ Let us see what the answers to the various ques- tions posed above are. After Chapter 1, an Introduction of two and a quarter pages, Chapter 2 defines and sets the boundaries of the fundamentals, namely Science, Research, Development and Scholarship. Of these four terms and their domains, scholarship is the most difficult to define but this is skilfully done. Chapter 3 continues the domains, this time in the setting of Universities and Laboratories. With a book of this sort, knowing quite where to pitch is difficult. The author opts for a down to the very basics approach and describes a university as an organization. On page 14 he states that ‘The management of under- graduate teaching is beyond the remit of this book, as is some postgraduate education, namely that which leads to a taught diploma or a master’s degree.’ I confess to some disappointment in that decision: I consider an ideal university to be one that intertwines teaching and research such that in an undergraduate course an academic sets individual and team projects at or near to the research frontiers so as to be both not like under- graduate laboratory experiments and yet achievable in their goals. Such projects are also, besides a learning exercise, ones where both incremental and innovative research can be attempted by the first-degree student. The layout of Chapter 3 seems to me rather odd. It has section 3.1 on Universities and, later, section 3.4 on Universities as businesses. One issue that Chapter 3 might have wrestled with is the rise of managerialism in universities, adopted from the large laboratories or what might be bundled together as the ‘scientific civil service’, admittedly a UK terminology. Since the book is about managing science, and thereby de facto its utility, the alternative, cynical, view of management, i.e. managerialism, is outside its domain. Chapter 4 is the first to get down to business in describing Leadership, Management and Communication. In section 4.1 I found the opening unpromising: ‘There are ISSN 1600-5767 Keywords: book reviews; management; leadership. # 2018 International Union of Crystallography