There is widespread unease at the sharpening divisions between the haves and the have-nots within the UK and within and between countries worldwide since the onset of financial capitalism in the mid-1970s. At different times and in different places and contexts this unease has fed into serious rebellions and uprisings in the early 21st century.… Read More »
This is my 100th blog, so it seems fitting that it is given over to a reflexive moment. What follows touches only incidentally on the new and growing field of digital sociology. How did I start? Why? And what do I make of it now that I am – I suppose – no longer a… Read More »
Talcott Parsons has suffered from his success. He was the chief exponent of the US-style structural-functionalism that has come closest yet to constituting a Kuhnian dominant paradigm for sociology. His The Social System was the text through the 1950s and ‘60s. The rejection of his work since has in my view been overdone: to fly… Read More »
You can’t escape theory when doing sociology, or indeed much else. If you think you can or have it’s likely to sneak up behind you and, as the saying goes, ‘bite you on the bum’. But principal among those who often think otherwise are the empiricists and positivists. This blog examines in some detail positivists… Read More »
Laurie Taylor. Copyright BBC Radio 4 History of Surfing; Coffee Shops and Idleness Duration: 28 minutes First broadcast: Wednesday 25 June 2014 Surfing – a political history. Laurie Taylor looks beyond the tanned bodies, crashing waves and carefree pleasure, talking to Scott Laderman, Associate Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. His study traces… Read More »
The term ‘precariat’ has been much used and abused of late. It was Guy Standing who precipitated this in 2011 with the publication of his The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (London; Bloomsbury). Since then, earlier this year (2014), he has refined his concept and both extended his analysis and ventured a manifesto entitled A… Read More »
I have long had a bee in my bonnet about ideology. When I learned my sociology its meaning was unambiguous: it referred to a way of seeing and understanding the world that reflected a particular set of vested interests. Nowadays its meaning has shifted, becoming etiolated in the process: it merely denotes the worldview of… Read More »
I am enjoying Piketty’s Capital, which is extremely carefully and well written. This is my second blog on aspects of his argument, and the focus here is on ways of representing inequalities of wealth (capital) and income. Piketty is respectful but critical of some commonly used measures, two of which – the Gini coefficient and… Read More »
I was reared on the Daily Telegraph and began my undergraduate life at Surrey University considerably misinformed. I recall in the early weeks of year one term one defending this Worthing stalwart and arbiter of common sense when confronted by Pete Kirby, a patient if querulous mature student and member of the Communist Party. But… Read More »
If my new life within UCL required adjustment, other more intellectual matters offered succour. I have mentioned my use of Habermas’ theories in my edited collection Sociological Theory and Medical Sociology, published in 1987. We academics in particular learn from others all the time, whether we realize it or not; but Jurgen Habermas and Roy… Read More »