While I was engaged in trying to establish a virtual Institute of Sociological Studies at UCL, my published work shifted into new areas, at last theoretically (I stuck pretty much with health inequalities and stigma studies). In a sentence I looked in more detail at Roy Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realism and became more familiar with Maggie Archer’s work, especially on the morphogenetic society and modes of reflexivity. There was a lengthy period of gestation before I directly drew on/interpreted their texts and ventured into print (roughly 2006-2012), but with hindsight I can begin to see their growing salience in some of the papers I did publish.
Two of those papers that moved on my macro-theoretical approach to the sociology of health inequalities came out in Social Theory and Health in 2007 and 2009. Both were elaborations of my provocative – some would say polemical, though I cannot understand why – ‘greedy bastards hypothesis’, namely, that it is the hidden, wholly strategic decision-making of a small but intensely strategic hard core of capital owners (the greedy bastards) that provides the most compelling and prepotent cause of growing health inequality. I stressed that the causal mechanism is structural, via financial capitalism’s revised class/command dynamic, that the rich and greedy individuals implicated merely surf these structures to their personal advantage. In a formula: capital buys power from the state to make policy in the interests of its further accumulation.
The first of these papers offered brief expositions of critical realism and critical theory, the perspectives that had for some time framed my own approach, then I critiqued prevailing models purporting to explain health inequalities. Models, I claimed, are generally heuristic devices, not explanations; explanations require testable theory. (I recall now my comment in a seminar Graham Hart asked me to give when I moved over to his Research Department, namely, that I often sat in pubs drafting models replete with arrows, only to reverse all the arrows after a couple of pints.) I will not repeat my subsequent summary and justification of my greedy bastards hypothesis here for fear of wearying anyone still attending to these fragments. Suffice to say the paper also – I think for the first time – drew on the concepts of alienation, surveillance and aspirational consumerism. I suggested: (1) that in line with the logic of regime of capital accumulation, class relations led to exploitation and alienation, and (2) that in line with the logic of the mode of regulation, the command relations of the state led to oppression and surveillance, both of which propositions continue to strike me as eminently warranted. One progeny of each of these two pathways, courtesy of an imposed ideology of consumption and an expediently postmodernised culture, was aspirational consumerism: buy happiness via an identity of your choice. Ok, the argument was a bit more nuanced. Interestingly, I have not since revisited this trio of (important) concepts, at least in detail.
The second paper, in 2009, was more prosaic, but possibly had more bite. I stuck with French regulation theory to frame the greedy bastards hypotheses, and this time focused, predictably enough, on the global financial crisis of 2008-9, and the pensions crisis as case studies. Oddly, looking back, I quoted Robert Peston favourably; at the time he presumably still had pretensions of becoming/being a journalist. In a table I listed 24 members of the capitalist executive and/or power elite of the state unambiguously implicated in the – largely negative, sometimes catastrophic – impact of the global financial crisis on the UK population. I included Clinton, Bush and Brown. I concluded by laying down a challenge to my colleagues in medical sociology. Are we serious in explaining health inequalities, or are we ‘unserious’, to deploy Hegel’s term to define those who decline to practice – in print – what they preach – in conference bars. Again, I think I expressed myself cautiously; but I did argue that sociology was maybe in the process of being ‘tamed’.
Looking back on these two papers I certainly stand by their contents. One remark in response to a paper I gave in Newcastle, I think from Ian Greening and/or William Outhwaite, is worth noting however. Aren’t I, one or both suggested, yielding too much territory to individualists by arguing for structure by writing of greedy bastards, and even naming some? I took and take their point. My defence then and now? These bastards calculatingly surf structures to fuel their off-shore accounts, or are purchased to this end; and I sometimes wish we sociologists would ‘buck the – neoliberal, university – system’ and learn some lessons from investigative, even muck-raking, journalists! And I affirm in 2019 what I felt when I penned these two articles in 2007 and 2009.