I have been silent on the concept of culture, not purposely but because I have made it my project for a while to address and redress sociology’s neglect of that of structure. Culture, like agency, I have suggested is structured but not structurally determined. And that’s just about the extent of my recent contribution. I’m… Read More »
Gray’s ‘Elegy’ above all else calls to mind the forgotten multitudes: Full many a gem of purest ray serene The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear; Full many a flow’r is born to blush unseen And waste its sweetness on the desert air. And the very next verse, only the second I can quote… Read More »
I here pull together a family of propositions, if with due caution. In a 1996 paper in Sociology I argued that the conduct of sociology is a logical and moral adjunct to a (Habermasian, ‘reconstructed’) project of modernity, or it is nothing. Sociology, I maintained, must be oriented to ‘lifeworld rationalisation’. What I meant by… Read More »
Ron’s favourite poem was Gray’s ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’. In his old, tattered edition of the Oxford Book of Verse his marker long rested here. From memory, the opening verse runs: The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd winds slowly o‘er the lea, The ploughman homeward plods his weary way… Read More »
From cars to trains and the London underground. From the days of my first full-time job in central London – at St Bartholomew’s, a stone’s throw from St Paul’s tube – I have been a commuter. Many people hate commuting: my parents, Ron and Margaret, could not wait to put safe distance between home and… Read More »
There is something of a conspiracy about conspiracies. ‘Conspiracy theory’ is self-evidently a device employed by the wealthy/powerful/privileged to rubbish critiques of the advantages they enjoy, critiques that – sometimes, not always – err on the side of simplicity. Of course simplicity can be a plus for polemics while being a minus for scholarship. But… Read More »
I have now posted two blogs – ‘taking social class seriously’ and ‘Scambler’s social class classification’ – in which I have posited a breakdown of social class at odds with extant ‘socio-economic schema’. In the second blog I ventured my own schema, re-fashioned from the class analyses of Clement and Myles. In this third blog… Read More »
I recently posted a blog – ‘taking social class seriously’ – in which I posited a (neo-Marxist) breakdown of social class at odds with extant ‘socio-economic schema’. If all such breakdowns are, as has been claimed, research-oriented horses for courses, then the phenomena of prime interest to me, namely, the structural prerequisites and practices and… Read More »
The key advantage of the device of the blog, it seems to me, is that you can think aloud, articulate views that are only partially formed, and circumnavigate peer review. Ok, so it is easier if (a) you are retired and off the roller coaster and/or (b) you are disinclined to be intimidated or constrained… Read More »
So what’s all this about ‘high net worth’ people? This is how it works, courtesy of Guardian journalism. If you are a wealthy person, tax-resident in the UK but with strong foreign links, then you are a ‘high net worth’ individual. The question for you is: do you want to share all your income with… Read More »