What has been called ‘the athletic imperative’ has been defined as intrinsic to the human condition. Every person, one historian maintains, is born with athletic capability and every person is predestined, ‘hard wired’, to develop that physical potential. Moreover, ‘competition’ is of impressively ancient lineage, even if it is not inborn. It has to do with evolution and survival. The… Read More »
I have in previous blogs expressed strong reservations about using the notion utopianism, discerning in the use of the term a latent predilection for totalitarian blueprints. One of my blogs was challenged by Steve Hall, who argued that we precisely lack and need an injection of utopian thinking. Those who follow Steve on twitter will… Read More »
This is a blog written a few days after the EU referendum. I confess to still feeling shocked, disappointed and too restless to settle to anything much, even reading. I spent the evening of 23 June at the Dorking Sports Hall as a Labour Party observer of the Mole Valley count. It was a long… Read More »
I have not blogged about the NHS for quite some time. In fact the last occasion I explicitly did so was when Wendy Savage and I were campaigning together in 2011 to strangle the Health and Social Care Bill at birth (our talks to students still reside somewhere on YouTube). I remain sceptical and confused… Read More »
Margaret Archer’s modes of reflexivity are ideal types. Although individuals may tend to settle enduringly into one or another mode, switches are possible and, I suspect, not uncommon. I have written and blogged quite insistently on Archer’s modes of reflexivity but cannot assume these have been picked up, so here’s a précis. In her Making… Read More »
The second half of 2003 also saw the first two issues of Social Theory and Health, a journal with Paul Higgs and I at UCL as the principal active editors and old friend Dick Levinson as our third and less active American editor (in truth he was doing us a favour by squeezing us into… Read More »
I have always been a ‘Sussex man’. In part this identity was formed around a schoolboy support of Sussex CCC. The county team in the Dexter-Parks era used to play two matches in Worthing. Three memories from these festivals pop into my mind: fast-medium pacer Ian Thompson taking all 10 wickets; a run out, with… Read More »
I have been reading Patrick Baert’s excellent study, The Existential Moment, which charts Sartre’s rise to intellectual status and fame in mid-1940s France and concludes with a more general sociological account of intellectuals. In Chapter Three Baert rehearses Sartre’s analysis of ‘collaborationist intellectuals’ in the aftermath of WW2. What was it to collaborate under German… Read More »
February 15, 2003, is a day that will enter the history books. It saw coordinated global protests against the imminent Iraq War in 600+ cities. Experts in social movements have described it as the largest protest event in human history. Estimates of participants worldwide range from 8 to 11 million: Rome saw around 3 million,… Read More »
I have elsewhere added two further types of sociology to Burawoy’s quartet. I have also suggested that each of his four and my two might be associated with a particular type of sociologist and of reasoning. Thus: professional sociology is associated with the scholar and cumulative theory; policy sociology with the reformer and utilitarian theory;… Read More »