I agree with Stephen Hawking (Brief Answers to Big Questions, p.38): People want answers to the big questions, like why we are here. They don’t expect answers to be easy, so they are prepared to struggle a bit. When people ask me if a God created the universe, I tell them that the question itself… Read More »
Not before time a head of steam has been built up against publications hidden behind publisher’s paywalls. It is just a matter of time before open access becomes the norm. Halting and intermittent progress has been made too on easing generalised surveillance and control of discourses and peer review journals out of the flexed hands… Read More »
I have been reading the journals/notebooks of Camus and Simenon and it is striking, as so often with major literary figures, that they felt they ‘had to write’; they had no option but to translate an urge to commit pen to paper (in those faraway days) into publications. In one respect I am at one… Read More »
‘World-systems analysts are not against quantification per se (they would quantify what can usefully be quantified), but (as the old joke about the drunk teaches us) they feel that one should not look for the lost key only under the street lamp just because the light is better (where there are more quantifiable data). One… Read More »
It is important not to be beholden to philosophers, social theorists, or indeed to anyone. Fidelity only matters in exegesis, otherwise the outputs of others are there to be used, that is, adapted, revised or applied. Winch tarred the later Wittgenstein with the brush of anthropological relativism, and there is indeed ambiguity in Philosophical Investigations… Read More »
In a blog on autoethnography I set some parameters. It should (a) be informed by theory (or at least be ‘theory-literate’); (b) be consonant with substantive research findings; (c) not merely report personal experience; and (d) focus on innovation, theoretical or conceptual. But what about another possible offspring of ethnography which might be called fictional… Read More »
Browsing in a Cambridge bookshop I have come across the first published volume of Camus’ notebooks or journals (1942-1951). It comprises a collection of ‘thoughts’ as and when they occurred to him. I have since retirement taken to blogging, a form of ‘thinking aloud’, but I wonder now if I might help myself also by… Read More »
I’m hitting 70 as I’m writing this, though I’ve only actually reached my late 50s in my ‘sociological autobiography’. But I can please myself what I write when: no publisher to satisfy. So in this fragment I’m drawing on Schutz plus some thinking of my own (in a continuing collaboration with Aksel Tjora) on familiarity.… Read More »
There was once a time when I could reasonably be defined as ‘religious’, if in a vague protestant/CofE way: I held my hand up in an earlier fragment. With a degree of embarrassment I suspect it coincided with a phase of my life during which I was a more or less decent human being (though… Read More »
There is a real risk that the transition to ‘senior’ – let alone retired – academic is accompanied by a shift in output towards: (a) quasi-magesterial overviews of literatures, and/or (b) sheer, unadulterated repetition. I may show signs of such shifts but fortunately that’s for others to ascertain (I’m a babyboomer touching 70 after all).… Read More »