FRAGMENT FOUR: COLLECTIVE AGENCY AND RESISTANCE When individuals come together to act in concert we can refer to collective agency. Collective agency can function to defend the status quo or to oppose it. At any given time and in any social formation there are forces for order, stability and the status quo and forces for… Read More »
FRAGMENT THREE: RENTIER CAPITALISM AND STRUCTURAL DIVISIONS There is a long-established argument that from its origins in the long 16th century capitalism has had an inbuilt tendency to contradiction and fracture. Left to its own devices, Adam Smith confessed, the rich will get richer and the poor poorer. The compelling way in which Karl Marx… Read More »
FRAGMENT TWO: THE SOCIOLOGICAL PROJECT Like other intellectual disciplines, sociology has over time developed a body of theories, concepts and programmes of research that can seem overly technical to others. And to complicate matters further, while we all accept that, say, physicists or biologists, possess expert knowledge that we do not, there is a widespread… Read More »
FRAGMENT ONE: THE STATE OF CONTEMPORARY BRITAIN I was born in 1948, and so became a baby boomer destined to live the formative years of my life protected by a largely stable cross-party political consensus on the moral worth and benefits of a cradle-to-grave welfare state. I was fortunate to be among the 20 per… Read More »
INTRODUCTION There exists a near consensus that people’s lives in Britain into the second decade of the twenty-first century are beset by a cluster of severe and exacting challenges. These range from very basic difficulties of providing shelter, clothing and food for children through a perceived political disenfranchisement to pressing fears of a geopolitically fragile… Read More »
It will be common knowledge for anyone who has dipped into my store of blogs that I like writing in cafes. They may even know that I edited a book called ‘Café Society’ with Norwegian colleague and friend Aksel Tjora. Well, after travelling around Dorking’s expanding repertoire of cafes over the last twenty years, I… Read More »
I have a hypothesis that may on a first reading seem obvious, even trite. Or it may indeed seem faulty. It is that we can only properly grasp what it is to be any age if we are living through it. But this escapes us through the early and middle of the life-course because our… Read More »
It has been a pleasure to coauthor a paper on stigma resistance in Social Science and Medicine with Italian sociologist Alice Scavarda. Fortunately, this is an open access contribution (SSM 376 (2025) 118097). It is not my intention here to offer a summary of the findings from Alice’s study of the parents of children with… Read More »
THE BEST MODE OF DEFENCE IS ATTACK: SOCIOLOGY IN 21ST CENTURY UK GRAHAM SCAMBLER EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY, UCL Introduction The sociological project can and does take many different forms, but I will argue here that it remains crucially indebted to a ‘reconstructed’ version of its Enlightenment origins. I will start this contribution by clarifying… Read More »
I have over a year or two ruminated on the need for a manifesto setting out what in current terminology is termed a ‘road map’ leading to a ‘better’, if not the proverbial ‘good’, society. Given that my own writings over the years – decades – have been oriented to fellow academics rather than to… Read More »