Accepting the post at St Barts established and confirmed my work and my social ‘status’ as a medical sociologist. Within the academic community I had just tentatively set foot in this rapidly became a ‘master status’: in other words, any other components of what American sociologist Robert Merton in his Social Structure and Science termed… Read More »
Worthing High School for Boys was founded in 1924, was enlarged three times before 1929 and again in 1934 and became a grammar school following the Education Act of 1944. It was a financial challenge for my parents to furnish me with the innumerable items of uniform and kit required and they shopped diligently around… Read More »
We are none of us born into circumstances we have chosen. Instead, we enter a readymade society and culture that fashions us before we have had any opportunity to react, let alone to leave our mark. So it was that I arrived in Finchley in North London on 8th October 1948, the first, and as… Read More »
Jurgen Habermas was born in 1929 and raised by a father with Nazi sympathies. He was in the Hitler youth and was briefly sent to man the Western defences. The ‘liberation’ occasioned a reassessment. The brutal reality of Auschwitz gradually emerged and in his gymnasium studies Habermas began to read Marx, Engels and Sartre. He… Read More »
In my forthcoming Healthy Societies: Policy, Practice and Obstacles, I pick up on the longstanding notion that radical change in the United Kingdom in general and England in particular is more than unlikely to be accomplished via parliament. As Ralph Miliband noted many years ago, what we have is a ‘capitalism democracy’; that is, a… Read More »
The title of this blog is one I’ve always wanted to deploy. All being well, I may possibly revisit it in a future publication. The crux of the issue for now is that not only do the theoretical standpoints and analyses of different thinkers and writers often overlap, but that sorting out and coming to… Read More »
I recently posted a photo of myself on Twitter/X with the caption, ’on my way to the pro-Palestinian protest in London’. Unusually for me, it solicited quite some attention, with 7.6 thousand likes and 1.2 thousand retweets. It also provoked a considerable number of responses (which I didn’t bother to count). Many of these were… Read More »
I have increased my rate of reading since retirement. I now read a couple a week on average. For anyone with nothing better to do, here’s my reading over the last seven years. 2017 Dexter: Ted Dexter declares Simenon: Maigret, Longnon and the gangsters Talbot & Weaver: Flight of the martlets Rutherford: Unexpected Simenon: Maigret… Read More »
While Stuart Hall was not a sociologist his work has a clear and lasting relevance to practitioners of the discipline, especially to those interested in culture. Along with Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams he was a founder of a school of thought known as ‘British Cultural Studies; he was a founder too of the New… Read More »
Arlie Russell Hochschild is a pioneer of theory and research on ‘emotional labour’, in the process opening up a novel field of enquiry. Resisting any temptation to ‘reduce’ the emotions either to biological or social phenomena, she argues that they are uniquely related to both action and cognition. Emotions for her, as Simon Williams summarises… Read More »