A Sociological Autobiography: 32 – Researching Sex Work
I gave a talk about sex work in New Orleans in 1991, flying to the ASA’s Southern Sociological Association meeting to propound my theories in eight minutes, the remaining two being reserved for...
View ArticleA Sociological Autobiography: 33 – A Statement on Sex Work
Chronology is not everything, especially in the context of the kind of disjointed fragments that comprise this ‘sociological autobiography’. So I am jumping ahead a few years, the rational being that...
View ArticleSociological Theorists: Erving Goffman
Erving Goffman may or may not have been a symbolic interactionist, but he was undoubtedly influenced by G.H.Mead. Mead distinguished between the I, or the spontaneous self, and the Me, or the...
View ArticleA Sociological Autobiography: 34 – The Coming of Higgs
The mid-1990s brought with it a new kind of companionship at UCL. For many years I had soldiered on with my medical school teaching without much by way of support, seasonal peripatetic tutors apart...
View ArticleA Sociological Autobiography: 35 – Masters in ‘Sociology, Health and Health...
As one of our early joint initiatives Paul Higgs and I got the paperwork for a new Masters in ‘Sociology, Health and Health Care’ through the UCL bureaucracy and approved. We had not wanted to tread on...
View ArticleA Sociological Autobiography: 36 – The Beer Halls of Munich
In 1995 I accepted an invitation to go to Munich to give a keynote address to the German Society for Neuropharmacology and Clinical Neuropsychology. I seem to recall that the invitation emanated from...
View ArticleIf Society is Broken, Who Broke It?
Buried deep in my laptop’s memory is a letter I wrote to the editor of the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine following the infamous London riots. It was intended as a corrective to a...
View ArticleA Sociological Autobiography: 37 – Olympics in Atlanta
As the summer of 1996 approached, American friends Dick Levinson and Mike McQuaide suggested that we consider visiting Atlanta for the Olympic Games. Mike, in particular, was adamant that we should....
View ArticleA Speech Ed Miliband Never Made
In this second decade of the twenty-first century we have reached a crossroads. The end of the cold war has not led to a new and more stable world order but instead to widespread disorder and human...
View ArticlePremises of Human Sociability
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...
View ArticleRoy Bhaskar, 1944-2014
By chance I came across Roy Bhaskar’s A Realist theory of Science soon after Harvester Wheatsheaf added it to their list in 1978. Unlike some others of those who sampled it early I found it rigorous...
View ArticleA Sociological Autobiography: 38 – Cars!
As I commence this I have just bought a new car. Well, I say ‘new’. It is our first twenty-first century car, and I write at the fag end of 2014. We have actually never before this spent more than...
View ArticleSociological Theorists: Alfred Schutz
Alfred Schutz might be more philosopher than theorist but I recall my excitement on reading his Phenomenology of the Social World (first published in 1932) and my sense of its strikingly acute...
View ArticleClassical Left Theories of Sport
Alienation is a pivotal notion in the writings of the young Marx, and one which is perhaps most accessible via an understanding of his views on human nature. Unlike other species, humans are endowed...
View ArticleMeta-Reflection in Sociology
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....
View ArticleWorkers’ Olympics
The instructive story of the ‘Workers’ Olympics’ has been neglected, glossed over by many historians of sport. In this blog I draw in particular on the pioneering work of James Riordan (see below). In...
View ArticleThe Compression of the Past
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...
View Article‘High Net Worth?’ How to Fleece the Rest
So what’s all this about ‘high net worth’ people? This is how it works, courtesy of Guardian journalism. If you are a wealthy person, tax-resident in the UK but with strong foreign links, then you are...
View ArticleTaking Social Class Seriously
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...
View ArticleScambler’s Classification of Social Class
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...
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