The Power Elite Since the publication of C Wright Mills (1956) seminal The Power Elite times have changed: the elite-versus-mass industrial society of the USA in the 1950s differs in many ways from post-industrial Britain in the second decade of the 21st century. There have been several mentions of Mills’ text during the present era… Read More »
In much of what I have written in formal academic publications or in blogs the focus has been on social class (as in the class/command dynamic that characterises financial capitalism and, for me, constitutes its chief generative mechanism). I have had much less to say about gender, ethnicity and so on. There is a rationale… Read More »
I have become accustomed to writing blogs as thought-in-progress, typically in a café or bar. This one is no exception. What is slightly different however is that it is entirely spontaneous. I have given its subject matter no thought prior to opening my laptop. It is about stigma and deviance. I have previously commended an… Read More »
Bertrand Russell once told a story with a purpose behind it. Imagine, he wrote, that a turkey wakes up each morning to a rising sun, a feed and, well, the prospect of a mundane but decent enough day. As the days pile up his sense of security and comfort grows. Then, out of the blue… Read More »
A few years back, in 2012, I published a paper (in ‘Medical Sociology Online’, Vol 6 Issue 3) with an old mate, Aksel Tjora, on what we called ‘familiarity bonds’. I liked it perhaps more than I should. But then I still like it! Our central hypothesis was that associations of the familiar have more… Read More »
Perhaps the paramount research question confronting sociologists today is: why is it that those being exploited and oppressed are not rising up? And as a follow-up: what are the most likely drivers of social change? In this blog I focus on the second question and consider and comment on several possible ‘drivers’. The primary characteristics… Read More »
I have sought to make the case that for all that agency has causal power it is always structured. It is hardly a novel thesis. Over the past months, however, I have been asked two interesting questions. The first, posed by Mark Carrigan somewhere is cyberspace, is that surely my ‘greedy bastards hypothesis’ (GBH) in… Read More »
There are two queries that have been put to me regarding the health of those ‘greedy bastards’ that feature in my greedy bastards hypothesis (GBH). The first was posed back in the early ‘noughties’. ‘Is your argument’, my interrogator enquired, ‘that the greedy bastards live longer than the rest of us?’ It made me question… Read More »
I was asked in passing the other day about my notion of ‘asset flows’ and in consequence I felt another blog coming on. The aim here is to show how and why I think it a useful as well as a credible ‘meta-sociological’ concept. First of all, what do I mean by asset flows (with… Read More »
I have been silent on the concept of culture, not purposely but because I have made it my project for a while to address and redress sociology’s neglect of that of structure. Culture, like agency, I have suggested is structured but not structurally determined. And that’s just about the extent of my recent contribution. I’m… Read More »