I have long adopted Chomsky’s formula: capital buys power to make policy. I was interested therefore to read a new report ‘Politics for Sale: Analysing Twenty-One years of UK Political Donations’ by Tom Mills and colleagues. The report draws on official data from the Electoral Commission plus data from Companies House, Wikidata and the Parliamentary… Read More »
The other day I purchased a slim volume entitled ‘John Berger: The Undergound Sea’, edited by Tom Overton and Matthew Harle, on the miners and the miners’ strike. The bulk of the book was given over to Berger quotes and atmospheric – or fuzzy, depending on your mood – photos of miners at work and… Read More »
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 »