While Stuart Hall was not a sociologist his work has a clear and lasting relevance to practitioners of the discipline, especially to those interested in culture. Along with Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams he was a founder of a school of thought known as ‘British Cultural Studies; he was a founder too of the New… Read More »
Arlie Russell Hochschild is a pioneer of theory and research on ‘emotional labour’, in the process opening up a novel field of enquiry. Resisting any temptation to ‘reduce’ the emotions either to biological or social phenomena, she argues that they are uniquely related to both action and cognition. Emotions for her, as Simon Williams summarises… Read More »
I recall in particular here two sessions of the British Sociological Association, I think in the mid-1970s. The first was at Surrey University and involved a group of ethnomethodologists from Goldsmiths College in London who had pre-circulated the text of a book on ethnomethodology they’d just written and, when presenting to an audience of 100+,… Read More »
William Du Bois, born in 1868, was raised by his mother, a domestic and washerwoman and grew up like may black children in the shadow cast by American slavery. His m0ther died when he was 16. The only black child in an all-white school, he determined to make good a promise once made to his… Read More »
I have not (yet) written on Lacan, who has been a catalyst for much social and sociological thought. Luce Irigaray studied with Lacan before developing her own influential feminist standpoint. I shall as ever in these ‘taster blogs’ have to abbreviate my exposition. The feminine, Irigaray maintained, cannot be captured, represented or symbolised adequately under… Read More »
In his Rules of the Sociological Method Durkheim offered a significant pioneering prescription for those wanting to study society empirically. Sociology, he insisted, is about understanding ‘social facts’. Such facts have distinctive characteristics: ‘they consist of ways of acting, thinking and feeling, external to the individual and endowed with a power of coercion, by reason… Read More »
Zygmunt Bauman (‘Ziggy’), like Bowie, was constantly reinventing himself, though I suspect he saw more continuity through his multiple publications (50+ books) than may be apparent to others. Starting from a firmly theoretical perspective, he wrote initially on stratification and social class and the likes of hermeneutics (understanding/interpreting) in social science, following up with a… Read More »
Ulrich Beck’s fortunes took off with the publication of his ‘Risk Society’. Widely translated, its key message was that contemporary society is not only characterised by enhanced risk, but that risk has become ubiquitous. There is no longer any escape route: risk’s ‘boomerang effect’ now ensures that a catastrophe in one part of the world… Read More »
David Lockwood has been neglected as a sociological theorist. Babyboomers like me remember him chiefly through The Blackcoated Worker, in which he argued, albeit with important qualifications, that white-collar work was being proletarianized; and his involvement with John Goldthorpe and others in the classic studies of affluent skilled manual workers in Luton, in which it… Read More »
What to my mind Luhmann exposes, after the manner of Parsons’ structural functionalism and the American neofunctionalists who walked and still walk in his footsteps, is that key mechanisms at the level of social strata impact beneath-the-surface or behind-our-backs. As absent presences, they can escape reflexive interrogation. In his The Differentiation of Society he argued… Read More »