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 »
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 »
So the Sunday Times now treats us to a separate analysis of the ‘super rich’, offered a week in advance of its well-established annual ‘Rich List’. This blog is a brief response to its listing and portrayal of Britain’s billionaires. Some basic facts: there are 104 billionaires in the 2014 Rich List, worth a total… Read More »
Like many others I purchased a copy of Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-first Century early on. One of Heffers sales people mentioned in passing that a Yale rep had told him it was the most significant book they have published in a generation. That was enough for me. But it is a big fat book… Read More »
On 24 and 25 April this year I attended the 10th Norwegian Health Sociology Workshop at Trondheim. It was actually my eighth visit, during each of which I have been asked to give one of the keynote addresses. Organized by Aksel Tjora, these are wonderful events, a mix of festival and conference, and a chance… Read More »
There is a dearth of information on the composition of what I have called governing oligarchies in countries like the UK and the USA. This includes data on top income earners. In his The Killing Fields of Inequality (Cambridge; Polity Press, 2014), however, Goran Therborn cites data from the US Congressional Budget Office (2011) on the composition… Read More »
In two tentative blogs on sociology and jazz I mentioned the hypothesized linkage between imperishable characters and performances and drugs from heroin to alcohol. After all, so many ‘giants’ were heavy users, a circumstance that often contributed to their premature demise. In the first blog I highlighted the linkage, in the second backed-off. Well I… Read More »
Finding myself with a couple of hours to spare between meetings I sat with a glass of wine in a London pub and wrote a short blog on ‘jazz and sociology’. As a long-time listener to jazz of most – non-banal – varieties, and an avid reader, I had a few half-formed views up my… Read More »