The other day I attended the launch of a two-volume ‘Encyclopaedia of Informality’ edited by Alena Ledeneva, an impressive and valued former colleague at UCL for whom I have a lot of time. I had hoped to get there early enough to participate in one or another small-group workshop sessions on selected topics, but I… Read More »
I’ve just started John Bargh’s Before You Know It: The Unconscious Reasons We Do What We Do, and it’s fascinating. I may grow less impressed as I get into it, but I doubt it. And he writes so clearly and well. I have the habit of folding the corner of pages containing passages I might… Read More »
In his Rules of the Sociological Method Durkheim offered a significant pioneering prescription for those wanting to study society empirically. Sociology, he insisted, is about understanding ‘social facts’. Such facts have distinctive characteristics: ‘they consist of ways of acting, thinking and feeling, external to the individual and endowed with a power of coercion, by reason… Read More »
Zygmunt Bauman (‘Ziggy’), like Bowie, was constantly reinventing himself, though I suspect he saw more continuity through his multiple publications (50+ books) than may be apparent to others. Starting from a firmly theoretical perspective, he wrote initially on stratification and social class and the likes of hermeneutics (understanding/interpreting) in social science, following up with a… Read More »
Ulrich Beck’s fortunes took off with the publication of his ‘Risk Society’. Widely translated, its key message was that contemporary society is not only characterised by enhanced risk, but that risk has become ubiquitous. There is no longer any escape route: risk’s ‘boomerang effect’ now ensures that a catastrophe in one part of the world… Read More »
I have for many years, but without good reason, jotted down the books I’ve read. Maybe it’s at least prevented me reading the same book more than once (though I once bought the same book four times, each of its predecesors having long been buried in cliff-hanging piles in my office or study). For many… Read More »
In an earlier autobiograhical posting I offered a ‘ledger’ for the 1990s, giving a tally of a very varied list of publications. 2006 was to prove a turning point in a number of ways. The threat to my job, expedient and unwarranted though it was in my view, now as well as then, had the… Read More »
I have attended my share of international conferences, though I suspect far fewer than my successors. This is partly my fault. For a while – in the easrly and mid- 1970s – I refused to travel abroad unless I had something to say. The consultant neurologist who oversaw my study at the time, if not… Read More »
I was a while ago asked to contribute an item to the Wiley Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/book/10.1002/9781118663219). The topic was plastic sexuality. This blog summarizes what I had to say. Although the concept might be said to have a long pedigree, longer in fact than the term now conventionally deployed to… Read More »
Having just returned from an excellent two-day conference on stigma I cannot resist a short blog. It reflects both what I learned from others’ research and an attempt to further clarify my own thinking. In my own contribution I focused on what I call the ‘weaponising of stigma’ in line with neoliberal ideology, itself a… Read More »