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 »
I here pull together a family of propositions, if with due caution. In a 1996 paper in Sociology I argued that the conduct of sociology is a logical and moral adjunct to a (Habermasian, ‘reconstructed’) project of modernity, or it is nothing. Sociology, I maintained, must be oriented to ‘lifeworld rationalisation’. What I meant by… 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 »
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 »
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 »
I have over time arrived at a number of what might be called ‘basic premises’ for studying the human condition, whether from the vantage point of sociology or many other natural, life, behavioural or social sciences. They will be contentious, but I cannot for the life of me see why or how. I will broach… Read More »
In his Mammon’s Kingdom (Allen Lane, 2014, pp.150-1), David Marquand gives eloquent expression to the transmutation of choice into fate in the financial capitalism of the last generation. He is worth quoting at length: ‘We trust people we believe are like ourselves. In an egalitarian society we can safely assume that strangers will be sufficiently… Read More »