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 »
I have in this series of sketches of my academic life often referred to the important role of cafes and bars. They have become over the decades part and parcel not only of the transfer of thoughts to manuscripts but also of who I am. I’m no fan of the current displacement of structural theory… Read More »
One of the pleasures of working at the Middlesex and then UCL has been their locations in central London. Maybe this has even fuelled my career via the sheer number and variety of seductive cafes and bars available as unofficial workplaces. The Middlesex nestled on the edge of Fitzrovia, just north of Soho, while Bloomsbury,… Read More »
It came out of the blue! It was an initiative taken from within the office of the UCL’s Vice-Provost for Research, David Price, and I was contacted as a likely lead for an exciting proposal, namely, the establishment within UCL of a Virtual Institute of Sociological Studies. It had long been a grievance of mine… Read More »
Having grown accustomed to arguing for the sociological importance of social structural analysis, maybe it was unsurprising that I came to turn this lens onto my own and others’ studies of stigma. As early as 2004 I published a paper in Social Theory and Health entitled ‘Re-framing stigma: felt and enacted stigma and challenges to… Read More »
Maggie Archer has distanced herself from a significant post-doc mentor, Pierre Bourdieu, by suggesting that he paid too little attention to agency. It is a disagreement that trespasses on fine-grained philosophical territory, but it also provides a convenient opening here. What did Bourdieu argue? I will be brief and am again resorting to what I… Read More »
In 2005 I was invited to give a plenary lecture at the annual autumn meeting of the Medical Sociology Group of the British Sociological Association. This represented, and represents, a kind of coming of age for medical sociologists in the UK. The title I chose was ‘Social Structure and Health: A Narrative of Neglect?, and… Read More »
To most people reading thus far it will be apparent that my lasting attractions to the works of Habermas and Bhaskar suggests a sympathy with ‘left-of-centre’ thinking. After all, Habermas was once a Marxist, and Bhaskar remained one. Sketch 1 traced my ancestry and established that my parents, Ron and Margaret, were not politically motivated… Read More »
My theoretical deliberations didn’t play out in an institutional vacuum. In 1997 I was appointed a Reader at UCL, and in 2001 a Professor. True to form for one of Margaret Archer’s meta-reflexives, I had rarely shown myself to be proactive in my own interests. My idea of ‘getting on’ was, and remains, largely confined… Read More »
I remarked in passing that I had read and relished Roy Bhaskar’s Realist Theory of Science soon after it was published in the mid-1970s, and indeed that it was prescribed reading on my ‘conceptual foundations of modern sociological thought’ unit on the Intercalated B.Sc for medical students from London University well before the end of… Read More »