As the summer of 1996 approached, American friends Dick Levinson and Mike McQuaide suggested that we consider visiting Atlanta for the Olympic Games. Mike, in particular, was adamant that we should. The subtext was his desire to exit Atlanta even as we would enter it. We could stay in his house and he in ours,… Read More »
Buried deep in my laptop’s memory is a letter I wrote to the editor of the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine following the infamous London riots. It was intended as a corrective to a ‘biomedical’ examination by a Dr Misselbrook of the underlying causal mechanisms that shaped the young rioters’ behaviour. As a… Read More »
In 1995 I accepted an invitation to go to Munich to give a keynote address to the German Society for Neuropharmacology and Clinical Neuropsychology. I seem to recall that the invitation emanated from Michael Bruch, a clinical psychologist who had provided longstanding support on a popular Middlesex/UCL training course in behaviour therapy run jointly for… Read More »
As one of our early joint initiatives Paul Higgs and I got the paperwork for a new Masters in ‘Sociology, Health and Health Care’ through the UCL bureaucracy and approved. We had not wanted to tread on the toes of our colleagues at Royal Holloway, whose seminal and profoundly influential M.Sc dated back to the… Read More »
The mid-1990s brought with it a new kind of companionship at UCL. For many years I had soldiered on with my medical school teaching without much by way of support, seasonal peripatetic tutors apart that is. But in 1994 Stan Newman, inheritor of the headship of the Department of Psychiatry (and thenceforth also of) ‘Behavioural… Read More »
Erving Goffman may or may not have been a symbolic interactionist, but he was undoubtedly influenced by G.H.Mead. Mead distinguished between the I, or the spontaneous self, and the Me, or the socialized self, accenting the ongoing tension between the two. It was this tension – and in particular the discrepancy between our spontaneous and… Read More »
Chronology is not everything, especially in the context of the kind of disjointed fragments that comprise this ‘sociological autobiography’. So I am jumping ahead a few years, the rational being that it makes sense to build on my comments on sex work now rather than later. I have published two main papers since the early… Read More »
I gave a talk about sex work in New Orleans in 1991, flying to the ASA’s Southern Sociological Association meeting to propound my theories in eight minutes, the remaining two being reserved for questions; drop your notes and you were stuffed. The meals with the contingent from Emory, not just old friend Dick Levinson, but… Read More »
Norbert Elias argued for a developmental approach to the study of society, in contrast for example to Parsons’ static approach; but he was for many years neglected in Britain, none of his works being translated into English during his sojourn as a teacher at Leicester. Like the great French historian Braudel, Elias was interested in… Read More »
If Parsons became the unacceptable face of structural-functionalism, Merton grew into his role as its more subtle and acceptable interpreter. He was also more interested in Marx than Parsons (Alvin Gouldner was a student). He was critical of the claims that: (a) there is a functional unity to society; (b) all standardized social and cultural… Read More »