On retiring, contentedly enough, in 2013, I began to think through my future in more detail. I’d never had any intention of stopping either lecturing or writing/publishing (though I didn’t for a moment presume a flow of invitations for the former or interest/acceptance in relation to the latter). The thing about retiring is that you cease to be of (institutional) relevance or interest some considerable time before you actually clear your office and shelves and vacate the premises, essentially because any power/authority you might have up to that point (I didn’t have much as it happened) evaporates/disappears well before you do. It is important that people recognise, anticipate and come to terms with this; but as a sociologist who had never aspired to institutional sway it wasn’t difficult fo me to do so. (My late engagement with the failed bid for a virtual UCL Institute of Sociology was the exception that proved the rule.)
Having established a website and taken to Twitter, courtesy of my daughter Rebecca, I began to tweet with some abandon. In one tweet I lamented the fact that I had never been employed in a Department of Sociology and had in consequence missed out on a degree of disciplinary collegiality, having spent my career more or less incognito in various University of London Medical Schools. In a surprising act and welcome act of generosity, Rachel Brooks, Head of the Department of Sociology at Surrey University, responded to my tweet with: ‘Email me Graham’. If by happenstance or accident anyone has followed my fragments of a ‘sociological autobiography’, they will know that I did my undergraduate degree at Surrey University, studying sociology under the tutelage of Asher Tropp and his colleagues, 1968-1971. I well recall the excellent and celebrated Sara Arber’s appointment as a lecturer back in the day.
I replied positively to Rachel and, to cut a not overly long story a bit shorter, I was appointed a Visiting Professor of Sociology at Surrey University in 2014. Sara Arber was very welcoming, which I appreciated. I was allocated a Guildford office, to be shared with Martin Bulmer, in the process succeeding another occupant, Keith MacDonald, who taught me ‘industrial sociology’ as an undergraduate. I was never to meet Keith again but Martin was very welcoming (I still owe him a lunch!). In the event I rarely used this facility (and have subsequently, and happily, relinquished all rights to it).
I have appreciated, and continue to appreciate, this linkage with Surrey’s excellent Department of Sociology. I live a twenty-minute drive from Guildford, plus I have a sense of coming home. Rachel has now left and, ironically, is now at UCL’s Institute of Education. Jon Garland has taken over.
I had a record at UCL of disappearing to write in central London’s cafes and bars. I am the archetypical nomadic/peripatetic academic – always have been! Although I have invariably responded positively to invitations to participate in Department events (I have taught, chaired the odd meeting and given a couple of research seminars), I have only intermittently stopped by. I have on several occasions stopped off on the way to the Department, either to write in Guildford, which remains very familiar, to me or to write in a campus café, without ever actually reaching the Department precincts. This is not a problem for me, but I can understand how my new colleagues might think it odd. And I admit it is somewhat inconsistent with my original tweet desirous of, even hankering after, a sense of a sociological community. Rightly or wrongly, I have considered that my continuing productivity will somehow or other prove beneficial for/benefit Surrey’s Department of Sociology.
I am unsure whether my publications in retirement qualify to be included in Surrey’s returns. It might be recalled from the last fragment that my productivity has hardly dropped off since 2013. Not that productivity is a decent measure of quality of course. But to repeat the numbers: I have since joining the ranks of Surrey’s Department of Sociology published four books (two of them edited), 15 chapters and 12 journal articles. I think the quality is acceptable. One book, Sociology, Health and the Fractured Society: A Critical Realist Account, won the Cheryl Frank Memorial Prize for the best critical realist contribution in 2018; and another, A Sociology of Shaming and Blaming: Insiders versus Outsiders, published in 2019, has been well received. The chapters are a mixed bunch, but a few interesting papers have been forthcoming, published in journals like Contemporary Sociology, Social Science and Medicine, The Lancet, Social Theory and Health, Qualitative Health Research, Sociological Review and The Journal of Classical Sociology. And there are further publications in press or forthcoming: a co-authored book with old Norwegian friend Aksel Tjora entitled Communal Forms: A Sociological Exploration of Concepts of Community due out in April, 2020; four more book chapters; and another journal article for The Journal of Critical Realism (actually an overly early draft of the Cheryl Frank Memorial Prize Lecture I’ve been invited and agreed to give mid-2020. So I’ve been ticking over. Every now and again I update Jon Garland on ongoing projects in the hope that he and his colleagues will continue to tolerate me. I’d do more teaching for them if they asked, but for a steady and continuing input they would have – like UCL – to pay me, and they may understandably be reluctant to do this. Budgets are tight. At any rate, for the time being my photograph remains on the Department noticeboard as a Visiting Professor, which is doubly gratifying given my undergraduate studies there back in the day.