I recently read Camus’ The Fastidious Assassins, and I found myself reacting with the usual uneasy admix of judgement and feeling. Camus writes wonderfully well and with considerable subtlety and depth. Yet he refuses to ‘spells things out’. This is of course a strength as well as a weakness. Its strength is the avoidance of… Read More »
The other day I attended the launch of a two-volume ‘Encyclopaedia of Informality’ edited by Alena Ledeneva, an impressive and valued former colleague at UCL for whom I have a lot of time. I had hoped to get there early enough to participate in one or another small-group workshop sessions on selected topics, but I… Read More »
I’ve just started John Bargh’s Before You Know It: The Unconscious Reasons We Do What We Do, and it’s fascinating. I may grow less impressed as I get into it, but I doubt it. And he writes so clearly and well. I have the habit of folding the corner of pages containing passages I might… Read More »
I have for many years, but without good reason, jotted down the books I’ve read. Maybe it’s at least prevented me reading the same book more than once (though I once bought the same book four times, each of its predecesors having long been buried in cliff-hanging piles in my office or study). For many… Read More »
I was a while ago asked to contribute an item to the Wiley Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/book/10.1002/9781118663219). The topic was plastic sexuality. This blog summarizes what I had to say. Although the concept might be said to have a long pedigree, longer in fact than the term now conventionally deployed to… Read More »
Having just returned from an excellent two-day conference on stigma I cannot resist a short blog. It reflects both what I learned from others’ research and an attempt to further clarify my own thinking. In my own contribution I focused on what I call the ‘weaponising of stigma’ in line with neoliberal ideology, itself a… Read More »
If there is a theme running through my sociological writings (published stuff) and ramblings (blogged stuff), it is probably the attempt to build bridges between two discourses that I have long insisted have been too discrete, or non-dialectical, namely, social and sociological theory and empirical research. This was certainly an explicit intention behind the edited… Read More »
I recall as an undergraduate reading a review of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations by Peter Strawson. Even then I saw a disjunction between two philosophical approaches. Strawson tried, with predictably mixed results, to define more precisely what Wittgenstein was arguing for. In a way he was searching for ‘systemness’ in a ‘post-system’ discourse. He wanted to… Read More »
Earlier this year I read Evans and Tilley’s The New Politics of Class: the Political Exclusion of the British Working Class (Oxford University Press, 2017). I enjoyed it, with qualifications. I have recently chanced upon an edited version of a Mike Savage commentary on it and thought I might stick my oar in. In general… Read More »
The recent article in the BMJ purporting to show the negative effects on mortality in England of funding ‘constraints’ on health and social care has excited considerable attention (if not by the BBC). In this blog I precis the article in the hope of encouraging more people to read the original. The authors note that… Read More »