This is a Thinking Aloud Podcast from the BBC and for more details in our terms of use and much,

much more about thinking aloud. Go to our website at BBC.co.uk. Hello. I must have been lecturing at York University for the best part of 10 years when I was told by a friendly

administrator that I was regarded by the Vice Chancellor as chair material.

Now, although an unkind colleague wondered

this meant that I reminded the VC of uncut Moquette,

I knew it meant that I was getting nearer

to the point where I'd be a professor and I could pontificate

on the Professorial Board and adjudicate on appointment panels.

Well, Professorial Board turned out to be something of anti-climax, but I did love those appointment panels.

It was truly wonderful to sit back in a comfortable armchair in the Vice-Chancellorfully

furnished smoke-filled room and hurl, a disconcerting question at some poor sap of an applicant.

Oh, the power, the power.

Of course, I like to think that all our decisions were based on strictly objective

criteria, but I can readily recall occasions when a candidate will be regarded as a,

well, you know, a bit shifty or rather too relaxed or somewhat scruffy or even more vaguely

as, you know, somehow not the right sort of person for our university.

I remembered that concern to find the perfect, the ideal employee when I was reading a new research

paper in sociology called Drug Taking and Employment,

Exploring the Employable Citizen in UK Policy.

Its author is Charlotte Smith, who is lecturer in management at the University of Leicester, and she's with me now.

I suppose, I mean, your paper is about employment and employability and finding the right sort of employee,

that your title is just

...