Bertrand Russell once told a story with a purpose behind it. Imagine, he wrote, that a turkey wakes up each morning to a rising sun, a feed and, well, the prospect of a mundane but decent enough day. As the days pile up his sense of security and comfort grows. Then, out of the blue… Read More »
Pierre Bourdieu has become very fashionable in 21st century sociology. He was committed to overcoming the agency/structure and subjectivism/objectivism binaries throughout a long and varied career. He favoured acknowledging the force of structure without losing sight of agency (that is, real-life actors). He focused too on the dialectical relationship between objective structures and subjective phenomena.… Read More »
2002 saw the publication of a single-authored effort, Health and Social Change, a contribution to Tim Mays’ excellent series on ‘issues in society’. I have it in front of me now. What do I think of it? I am a little embarrassed to say that I quite like it. Why embarrassed? Because I’m not sure… Read More »
My father, Ron, had an indoor fall in early 2002. He was admitted to hospital. He was mistakenly given a double dose of the prescribed medication by an over-tired junior doc (which is maybe why he thought he was in Belgium). I am inclined to think all this irrelevant to the advice I was given… Read More »
I had always assumed that being awarded a chair heralded the opportunity to give an inaugural lecture, but apparently this is not so. Nor does every body invited want to give one. I was quite keen though. But who to ask if they wanted to attend? I settled on a composite gathering, comprising my immediate… Read More »
Yet another diversionary fragment, though this is not the first time I have written about teaching. Can I teach, give lectures and papers? I have often wondered. What are the pluses and the minuses? There’s style and there’s content of course. The obvious answer is: ‘it’s not for me to judge’. Nor is the evidence… Read More »
A few years back, in 2012, I published a paper (in ‘Medical Sociology Online’, Vol 6 Issue 3) with an old mate, Aksel Tjora, on what we called ‘familiarity bonds’. I liked it perhaps more than I should. But then I still like it! Our central hypothesis was that associations of the familiar have more… Read More »
In his recently published The Health Gap, Michael Marmot reports on two lists of ‘top ten tips’ for health. The first was published by England’s Chief Medical Officer in 1999 and contains the following items: 1 Don’t smoke. If you can stop, stop. If you can’t, cut down. 2 Follow a balanced diet with plenty… Read More »
When asked if I am ambitious I have always replied: ‘only to write a half-way decent book or two’. My institutional ambition was even more vague, at least as far as promotion was concerned. This was in part due to my personal experience as an undergraduate at Surrey University and of studying when only 7%… Read More »
In a co-authored piece in the early 1990s the phrase location paradox was introduced. It may appear a slightly clumsy phrase, but the point was: (a) to distinguish between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, and (b) to assert that insiders are listened to insofar as they advocate ineffective policies, while outsiders are hushed or ignored insofar as… Read More »