In case a reminder is needed, my phrase ‘greedy bastards’ refers neither to a propensity to become obese nor to a readiness to pull the wings off butterflies or mug older and vulnerable citizens. Rather, it denotes the surfing, reflexive or otherwise, of a subset of social structures to one’s personal advantage. Chief among this… Read More »
I’d best open this likely ‘series’ with a word about the technical term ‘greedy bastards’. These comprise that subset of exceptionally wealthy accumulators of capital intent on further accumulation via donating, sponsoring, lobbying and otherwise cajoling favourable policymaking by the state’s power elite. The adjective ‘greed’ captures their all-consuming focus on personal wealth and influence… Read More »
In the second of this series of jottings I broached the issue of fictional data and their authenticity/lack of authenticity in sociology. What about Ken Loach’s I Daniel Blake, a film I’ve seen twice, the second time at UCL’s Institute of Global Health prior to my participation in a panel discussion and question-and-answer session on… Read More »
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 »