My predilection for solitary reading and writing, which doubtless has its pros and cons, is in all likelihood associated with other personality traits. Over a period of decades I have moved ‘leftwards’ politically. There was no sudden lurch towards Marx and Marxism, though I came gradually to the view, articulated in an earlier fragment, that… Read More »
I have ruminated on and off about being an only child and being happy with my own company. I have also discussed writing on my own, the norm for me since my undergraduate days. Sitting in the corners of cafes and bars, initially with exercise book and biro and latterly with my laptop has been… Read More »
When I was a child – adolescent too – in Worthing I used to attend the two annual Sussex CCC matches played on the Broadwater pitch, that is, before it was deemed unfit for purpose. I also used to travel to nearby Arundel to see that year’s vising tourists play the Duke of Norfolk’s XI… Read More »
This is second of a two-parter, and cannot be properly grasped on its own. In the last blog in this seemingly interminable series I drew on Bokadi and Goldthorpe’s excellent research to show the changes of absolute social mobility over the course of my lifetime (I was born in 1948). But as these authors make… Read More »
In an excellent new book by Erzsebet Bukodi and John Goldthorpe, entitled Social Mobility and Education in Britain, the class (as defined by NS-SEC) distributions of economically active men and women are calculated at the census years of 1951, 1971, 1991 and 2011. Why is this relevant to my ‘sociological autobiography’? And does this Weberian… Read More »
My parents live on as consociates or contemporaries in defiance of their status as predecessors. I have in frames in my bedroom photos of them attending my wedding (back in 1972), plus an assortment of portraits of them singly or together stretching back to the 1930s. While I’ve not yet reached the stage of talking… Read More »
I’m hitting 70 as I’m writing this, though I’ve only actually reached my late 50s in my ‘sociological autobiography’. But I can please myself what I write when: no publisher to satisfy. So in this fragment I’m drawing on Schutz plus some thinking of my own (in a continuing collaboration with Aksel Tjora) on familiarity.… Read More »
There was once a time when I could reasonably be defined as ‘religious’, if in a vague protestant/CofE way: I held my hand up in an earlier fragment. With a degree of embarrassment I suspect it coincided with a phase of my life during which I was a more or less decent human being (though… Read More »
In February 2007 I received an unexpected email from Selwyn College Cambridge inviting me to attend a formal, black-tie dinner and give an after-dinner speech. I had at it happens spoken at an array of Cambridge Colleges, including a formal lecture at St John’s, but only to deliver standard sociological fare. This was different. I… Read More »
The point I’ve reached in this ‘sociological autobiography’ was one of flux and change. I had managed to work my way around what had been presented to me by Stan Newman as an attempt to get me out of UCL – though all was later mired in confusion – and Graham Hart had welcomed me… Read More »