In his Mammon’s Kingdom (Allen Lane, 2014, pp.150-1), David Marquand gives eloquent expression to the transmutation of choice into fate in the financial capitalism of the last generation. He is worth quoting at length: ‘We trust people we believe are like ourselves. In an egalitarian society we can safely assume that strangers will be sufficiently… Read More »
Sandown Lodge had provided a very pleasant home, but circumstances changed during our time there. When we moved into number 45 in the early 1970s many of the flats were rented via companies to young families in transit. Into Thatcher’s 1980s Freshwater’s policy shifted. While those of us who rented had a degree of protection,… Read More »
There is widespread unease at the sharpening divisions between the haves and the have-nots within the UK and within and between countries worldwide since the onset of financial capitalism in the mid-1970s. At different times and in different places and contexts this unease has fed into serious rebellions and uprisings in the early 21st century.… Read More »
This is my 100th blog, so it seems fitting that it is given over to a reflexive moment. What follows touches only incidentally on the new and growing field of digital sociology. How did I start? Why? And what do I make of it now that I am – I suppose – no longer a… Read More »
Talcott Parsons has suffered from his success. He was the chief exponent of the US-style structural-functionalism that has come closest yet to constituting a Kuhnian dominant paradigm for sociology. His The Social System was the text through the 1950s and ‘60s. The rejection of his work since has in my view been overdone: to fly… Read More »
You can’t escape theory when doing sociology, or indeed much else. If you think you can or have it’s likely to sneak up behind you and, as the saying goes, ‘bite you on the bum’. But principal among those who often think otherwise are the empiricists and positivists. This blog examines in some detail positivists… Read More »
Laurie Taylor. Copyright BBC Radio 4 History of Surfing; Coffee Shops and Idleness Duration: 28 minutes First broadcast: Wednesday 25 June 2014 Surfing – a political history. Laurie Taylor looks beyond the tanned bodies, crashing waves and carefree pleasure, talking to Scott Laderman, Associate Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. His study traces… Read More »
The term ‘precariat’ has been much used and abused of late. It was Guy Standing who precipitated this in 2011 with the publication of his The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (London; Bloomsbury). Since then, earlier this year (2014), he has refined his concept and both extended his analysis and ventured a manifesto entitled A… Read More »
I have long had a bee in my bonnet about ideology. When I learned my sociology its meaning was unambiguous: it referred to a way of seeing and understanding the world that reflected a particular set of vested interests. Nowadays its meaning has shifted, becoming etiolated in the process: it merely denotes the worldview of… Read More »
I am enjoying Piketty’s Capital, which is extremely carefully and well written. This is my second blog on aspects of his argument, and the focus here is on ways of representing inequalities of wealth (capital) and income. Piketty is respectful but critical of some commonly used measures, two of which – the Gini coefficient and… Read More »