Ron’s favourite poem was Gray’s ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’. In his old, tattered edition of the Oxford Book of Verse his marker long rested here. From memory, the opening verse runs: The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd winds slowly o‘er the lea, The ploughman homeward plods his weary way… Read More »
From cars to trains and the London underground. From the days of my first full-time job in central London – at St Bartholomew’s, a stone’s throw from St Paul’s tube – I have been a commuter. Many people hate commuting: my parents, Ron and Margaret, could not wait to put safe distance between home and… Read More »
There is something of a conspiracy about conspiracies. ‘Conspiracy theory’ is self-evidently a device employed by the wealthy/powerful/privileged to rubbish critiques of the advantages they enjoy, critiques that – sometimes, not always – err on the side of simplicity. Of course simplicity can be a plus for polemics while being a minus for scholarship. But… Read More »
I have now posted two blogs – ‘taking social class seriously’ and ‘Scambler’s social class classification’ – in which I have posited a breakdown of social class at odds with extant ‘socio-economic schema’. In the second blog I ventured my own schema, re-fashioned from the class analyses of Clement and Myles. In this third blog… Read More »
I recently posted a blog – ‘taking social class seriously’ – in which I posited a (neo-Marxist) breakdown of social class at odds with extant ‘socio-economic schema’. If all such breakdowns are, as has been claimed, research-oriented horses for courses, then the phenomena of prime interest to me, namely, the structural prerequisites and practices and… Read More »
The key advantage of the device of the blog, it seems to me, is that you can think aloud, articulate views that are only partially formed, and circumnavigate peer review. Ok, so it is easier if (a) you are retired and off the roller coaster and/or (b) you are disinclined to be intimidated or constrained… Read More »
So what’s all this about ‘high net worth’ people? This is how it works, courtesy of Guardian journalism. If you are a wealthy person, tax-resident in the UK but with strong foreign links, then you are a ‘high net worth’ individual. The question for you is: do you want to share all your income with… Read More »
This short blog transcribes a thought perhaps more salient and pressing than original. There are those who believe that our post-1970s financial capitalist present is characterized above all by acceleration. For example, Giddens compares modernity to an out-of-control juggernaught; Archer now writes of the advent of ‘unbound morphogenetic society’; and so on. It is salutary… Read More »
The instructive story of the ‘Workers’ Olympics’ has been neglected, glossed over by many historians of sport. In this blog I draw in particular on the pioneering work of James Riordan (see below). In some ways it was less the idealism of de Coubertin, founder-in-chief of the ‘reconstructed’ modern Olympiad, than its institutional product that… Read More »
This is a quick one-off blog calling for a greater commitment to what I have called meta-reflection in sociology. Meta-reflection refers, first, to the putting aside of time to think things through. Much of life, and more of academic life, now consists in riding a roller-coaster to nowhere in particular in order to keep body… Read More »