I was born and socialised in a social world markedly at variance with the one entered by my grandchildren. WW2 had thrown our parents’ plans and prospects into disarray, destined for the most part to construct DIY biographies in a world radically departed from the one they had been used to in the interwar years.… Read More »
It has frequently been intimated in these sketches that sociology ought to lead to commitment and engagement beyond Burawoy’s recommendations, and one that recovers and explores alternative modes of social organisation that promise a better society. I have drawn on critical realism to suggest that this is consonant with a general notion of human emancipation.… Read More »
Despite numerous suggestive remarks, some of them uncompromising, I have not directly confronted the circumstances facing sociologists and sociological practice in the rentier capitalism of the 21st century. Anyone who has been with me from the start of this series of epistles will have noted the enormous changes that have impacted academia in general and… Read More »
Having never lost my fascination for sport, especially but by no means only rugby, cricket and track-and-field athletics, I returned to it as the subject matter of a new book in the noughties. As I write this I have – literally – just finished correcting the proofs on A Critical Realist Theory of Sport, which… Read More »
I will not rehearse yet again the genesis of the COVID pandemic, but rather precis what happened in the UK. Enough has been reliably established to affirm a series of propositions. I draw here on a paper I published in Frontiers in Sociology in 2022: the UK was ill-prepared for a pandemic, having paid too… Read More »
In terms of my theorising a good deal had happened during my protracted if somewhat threadbare tenure at Surrey University. One way of encapsulating this is by reference to a concept that I began to deploy to characterise contemporary British society. Chairing a meeting of critical realists in the British Library, I once heard Maggie… Read More »
When in 1998 I had been a visiting professor at Emory University in Atlanta I was slightly envious of Mike McQuaide’s post on Emory’s Oxford campus. This was because the Oxford campus was much like a village, affording Mike an opportunity to get to know a small and manageable number of undergraduate students well. The… Read More »
We had lived in Epsom since 1972, for no better reason than it happened to be the place we found a decent flat; subsequently, we bought our first house a few hundred yards away. My mother, Margaret, had died aged 84, spending her last days in Shoreham Hospital. My father, Ron, two years older than… Read More »
I was ambivalent about retiring but not worried at the prospect. Grieving occurs when something irrevocably ends, and for academics there is often a prospect of continuing to work, but in such a manner that it is no longer seen or experienced as ‘work’. In my case I was set on doing some more lecturing/teaching… Read More »
I retired on 1 October 2013, shortly before the deadline for being entered for the Research Excellence Framework (REF). The REF was introduced to satisfy a threefold purpose: to provide accountability for public investment in research and produce evidence of the benefits of this investment; to provide benchmarking information and establish reputational yardsticks, for use… Read More »