I have become accustomed to writing blogs as thought-in-progress, typically in a café or bar. This one is no exception. What is slightly different however is that it is entirely spontaneous. I have given its subject matter no thought prior to opening my laptop. It is about stigma and deviance. I have previously commended an… Read More »
In his recently published The Health Gap, Michael Marmot reports on two lists of ‘top ten tips’ for health. The first was published by England’s Chief Medical Officer in 1999 and contains the following items: 1 Don’t smoke. If you can stop, stop. If you can’t, cut down. 2 Follow a balanced diet with plenty… Read More »
In a co-authored piece in the early 1990s the phrase location paradox was introduced. It may appear a slightly clumsy phrase, but the point was: (a) to distinguish between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, and (b) to assert that insiders are listened to insofar as they advocate ineffective policies, while outsiders are hushed or ignored insofar as… Read More »
I have sought to make the case that for all that agency has causal power it is always structured. It is hardly a novel thesis. Over the past months, however, I have been asked two interesting questions. The first, posed by Mark Carrigan somewhere is cyberspace, is that surely my ‘greedy bastards hypothesis’ (GBH) in… Read More »
There are two queries that have been put to me regarding the health of those ‘greedy bastards’ that feature in my greedy bastards hypothesis (GBH). The first was posed back in the early ‘noughties’. ‘Is your argument’, my interrogator enquired, ‘that the greedy bastards live longer than the rest of us?’ It made me question… Read More »
I was asked in passing the other day about my notion of ‘asset flows’ and in consequence I felt another blog coming on. The aim here is to show how and why I think it a useful as well as a credible ‘meta-sociological’ concept. First of all, what do I mean by asset flows (with… Read More »
I have just undertaken the annual pilgrimage to Trondheim for the St Aksel health sociology workshop (and am now, incidentally, chilling with Annette and Marianne Hedlund at out-of-the-way Sparbu, a guest of Bodil Landstad and her delightful family). My contribution to the workshop was a paper entitled ‘the virtues of dialectical critical realism in health… Read More »
Tromso lies within the arctic circle but was bathed in sunshine as a group of local and overseas experts on eHealth – plus Annette and I – met to pool our resources. It was to be one day on the university campus in Tromso discussing a study of the role of video conferencing in the… Read More »
Some blogs should be expressions of indignation, and this one certainly is. Not that being angry/passionate can be allowed to obstruct evidence-based argument. Towards the tail end of 2011 Wendy Savage and I responded to medical students moving on from campaigns against the threefold hike in student fees and the abolition of the EMS to… Read More »
Over a decade ago, in a calculated bid to rile and provoke engagement with other sociologists, I formulated the ‘greedy bastards hypothesis’ (GBH). This asserted that health inequalities in Britain were first and foremost an unintended consequence of the ‘strategic’ behaviours at the core of the country’s capitalist-executive and power elite. It is a hypothesis… Read More »