I have just undertaken the annual pilgrimage to Trondheim for the St Aksel health sociology workshop (and am now, incidentally, chilling with Annette and Marianne Hedlund at out-of-the-way Sparbu, a guest of Bodil Landstad and her delightful family). My contribution to the workshop was a paper entitled ‘the virtues of dialectical critical realism in health… Read More »
When old friend Terry Boswell became chair of the Department of Sociology at Emory University I suspect life for his colleagues took a turn for … well, whatever! Even his family and closest friends would admit that Terry was a bull in a china shop. He personally decided on the original artwork that should adorn… Read More »
The election of a Labour government in 1997 would not have impinged on my mother’s world in any meaningful way had she been alive to witness it. As it happened Margaret died a few months before the election, in December of 1996. ‘She wouldn’t hurt a fly’, Ron muttered as we drove in procession to… Read More »
The boy who was to give the phrase ‘war games’ a cruel new resonance was born on 6 May 1953, the second son of Leo and Hazel Blair. His family background was modest but aspiring. Fettes and Oxford delivered him to party politics via a brief flirtation with the rock industry. He married Cherie Booth… Read More »
I have been silent on the concept of culture, not purposely but because I have made it my project for a while to address and redress sociology’s neglect of that of structure. Culture, like agency, I have suggested is structured but not structurally determined. And that’s just about the extent of my recent contribution. I’m… Read More »
Gray’s ‘Elegy’ above all else calls to mind the forgotten multitudes: Full many a gem of purest ray serene The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear; Full many a flow’r is born to blush unseen And waste its sweetness on the desert air. And the very next verse, only the second I can quote… Read More »
I here pull together a family of propositions, if with due caution. In a 1996 paper in Sociology I argued that the conduct of sociology is a logical and moral adjunct to a (Habermasian, ‘reconstructed’) project of modernity, or it is nothing. Sociology, I maintained, must be oriented to ‘lifeworld rationalisation’. What I meant by… Read More »
Ron’s favourite poem was Gray’s ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’. In his old, tattered edition of the Oxford Book of Verse his marker long rested here. From memory, the opening verse runs: The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd winds slowly o‘er the lea, The ploughman homeward plods his weary way… Read More »
From cars to trains and the London underground. From the days of my first full-time job in central London – at St Bartholomew’s, a stone’s throw from St Paul’s tube – I have been a commuter. Many people hate commuting: my parents, Ron and Margaret, could not wait to put safe distance between home and… Read More »
There is something of a conspiracy about conspiracies. ‘Conspiracy theory’ is self-evidently a device employed by the wealthy/powerful/privileged to rubbish critiques of the advantages they enjoy, critiques that – sometimes, not always – err on the side of simplicity. Of course simplicity can be a plus for polemics while being a minus for scholarship. But… Read More »