Here I am sitting in a café in Dorking pondering how and why some people get paid for writing newspaper columns or other pieces on things they know remarkably little about, as it were, as a job; and now I’m perhaps about to do something comparable, venture a few words on ethics. But I guess… Read More »
Somewhere or other – maybe in a publication, or more likely a blog – I referred to what I called the pendulum paradox. I chose to illustrate this by comparing the sociologist with the historian. Sociologists like me look for patterns in events, and at least some of us then move on to search for… Read More »
Blogs for me provide a way of thinking out loud. Basking in the sunshine of retirement, when CVs take a back seat, they allow for an experimenting of ideas and hypotheses. Ownership of text is no longer important, so the prospect of acting as a catalyst for others is exciting and affords a sense of… Read More »
I have always had concerns about the emergence and consolidation of the concept of ‘hate speech’ in the UK (and indeed elsewhere). It is obvious that it resists easy definition, so let’s start with the current guidelines proffered by the Crown Prosecution Service. ‘Hate crime’ is defined as ‘any criminal offence which is perceived by… Read More »
I have repeatedly dug my heels in to retain the classic concept of ‘ideology’ for sociology. In the proverbial nutshell this refers to a view of the world that reflects the vested interests of – powerful capitalist or elite – members of a society. It does NOT refer to any view of the world held… Read More »
In their Social Class in Europe Hugree, Penissat and Spire have performed a useful service. They are fully cognisant – and open – about the methodological (and consequent theoretical) difficulties of measurement across very different European countries. They used the European Socio-Economic Groups (ESEG) classification and ended up with a breakdown into three main social… Read More »
We have written a paper on the salience of ‘muckraking sociology’ in the era of COVID which has (1) been rejected by a mainstream sociology journal, in part because it apparently doesn’t publish ‘polemical pieces’, and (2) returned to us with a request for a second set of revisions by a specialist health sociology journal,… Read More »
Today my co-authors and I have withdrawn a manuscript under consideration in a well-regarded international journal. We were invited to make a second set of revisions to a paper on ‘muckraking sociology, the NHS and COVID’, but felt that to agree to yet more revisions/compromises would be a step too far, not least in a… Read More »
My terminology to describe the phase of capitalism that started circa 1970 has been tweaked over time. I started by referring to ‘financial capitalism’, which was certainly ok, then ‘financialised capitalism’, which is perhaps marginally better, and now I’m tempted by ‘rentier capitalism’, following the likes of Andrew Sayer (whose work I much admire). This… Read More »
In a celebrated essay entitled Ur-Fascism Umberto Eco reflected on fascism in the Italy of Mussolini and asked the question: are there common features to fascist regimes? He wrote: ‘the term ‘fascism’ fits everything because it is possible to eliminate one or more aspects from a Fascist regime and it will always be recognisably Fascist.… Read More »