I’m in a hotel bar in Glasgow, having fled the disco that ritually follows the conference meal at MedSoc. This is the province of the ageless Rose Barbour and Richard Compton, and long may it continue. For decades I’ve kept my own dancing under wraps (in fact it comprises a nostalgic and postmodern admix of… Read More »
It is sometimes difficult to get one’s voice heard above the background noise of today’s news outlets, whether TV or printed press. So I thought it might be timely to outline Labour’s ethos and plans even as another general election looms. The polls, always to be taken with a pinch of salt, suggest high rates… Read More »
I have just finished what I regard as an excellent volume of analyses and reflections on capitalism and its future by a group of sociology’s big hitters, namely, Immanual Wallerstein, Rndall Collins, Michael Mann, Georgi Derluguian and Craig Calhoun. It’s called Does Capitalism Have a Future? Ok, so theyre all ageing white males, but as… Read More »
A little over a week ago I asked a question on twitter, curious as to how people would respond. I gave people a week to respond. The question and responses were as follows: ‘If a sociologist set out to study whether those identifying as Jewish are under- or over-represented among British elites, would this be… Read More »
Surprisingly often ideas advance, theses refined, by serendipitous means. So it is in this case. I have just finished Michiko Kakutani’s excellent The Death of Truth, a discourse on our present era, one which has been understandably characterized as ‘post-truth’. In most of my publications, and blogs too, I have short-changed culture, so keen have… Read More »
I have to date blogged some 70+ fragments of ‘sociological autobiography’. They are, as my father would have said, ‘mixed pickles’. The rationale for the rubric was that I intended from the outset to temper chronology and events with bouts of introspection and reflection, and given that I have long been a sociologist, these would… Read More »
Every now and again – most recently in the excellent Does Capitalism Have a Future?, featuring a star casting of Wallerstein, Collins, Mann, Derluguian and Calhoun – I come across references to Kondratiev waves. Maybe it’s age but I often forget its detail. So I thought a blog to remind myself, and possibly others, might… Read More »
In February 2007 I received an unexpected email from Selwyn College Cambridge inviting me to attend a formal, black-tie dinner and give an after-dinner speech. I had at it happens spoken at an array of Cambridge Colleges, including a formal lecture at St John’s, but only to deliver standard sociological fare. This was different. I… Read More »
Blogs to my mind allow for an interlude of ‘thinking out loud’, so it is perhaps not so surprising that the blog I intended to write when I turned on my laptop has already been superceded. The reason for this is sheer frustration at the level of ineptitude and, far more seriously, of corruption in… Read More »
The point I’ve reached in this ‘sociological autobiography’ was one of flux and change. I had managed to work my way around what had been presented to me by Stan Newman as an attempt to get me out of UCL – though all was later mired in confusion – and Graham Hart had welcomed me… Read More »