I have now posted two blogs – ‘taking social class seriously’ and ‘Scambler’s social class classification’ – in which I have posited a breakdown of social class at odds with extant ‘socio-economic schema’. In the second blog I ventured my own schema, re-fashioned from the class analyses of Clement and Myles. In this third blog… Read More »
I recently posted a blog – ‘taking social class seriously’ – in which I posited a (neo-Marxist) breakdown of social class at odds with extant ‘socio-economic schema’. If all such breakdowns are, as has been claimed, research-oriented horses for courses, then the phenomena of prime interest to me, namely, the structural prerequisites and practices and… Read More »
The key advantage of the device of the blog, it seems to me, is that you can think aloud, articulate views that are only partially formed, and circumnavigate peer review. Ok, so it is easier if (a) you are retired and off the roller coaster and/or (b) you are disinclined to be intimidated or constrained… Read More »
So what’s all this about ‘high net worth’ people? This is how it works, courtesy of Guardian journalism. If you are a wealthy person, tax-resident in the UK but with strong foreign links, then you are a ‘high net worth’ individual. The question for you is: do you want to share all your income with… Read More »
This short blog transcribes a thought perhaps more salient and pressing than original. There are those who believe that our post-1970s financial capitalist present is characterized above all by acceleration. For example, Giddens compares modernity to an out-of-control juggernaught; Archer now writes of the advent of ‘unbound morphogenetic society’; and so on. It is salutary… Read More »
The instructive story of the ‘Workers’ Olympics’ has been neglected, glossed over by many historians of sport. In this blog I draw in particular on the pioneering work of James Riordan (see below). In some ways it was less the idealism of de Coubertin, founder-in-chief of the ‘reconstructed’ modern Olympiad, than its institutional product that… Read More »
This is a quick one-off blog calling for a greater commitment to what I have called meta-reflection in sociology. Meta-reflection refers, first, to the putting aside of time to think things through. Much of life, and more of academic life, now consists in riding a roller-coaster to nowhere in particular in order to keep body… Read More »
Alienation is a pivotal notion in the writings of the young Marx, and one which is perhaps most accessible via an understanding of his views on human nature. Unlike other species, humans are endowed with consciousness and a facility to link consciousness to action. Human action has always and necessarily incorporated acting on nature to… Read More »
Alfred Schutz might be more philosopher than theorist but I recall my excitement on reading his Phenomenology of the Social World (first published in 1932) and my sense of its strikingly acute relevance for the conduct of sociological research. Schutz was inspired by Husserl without altogether buying into his radicalization of Descartes ‘Cartesian’ project. The… Read More »
As I commence this I have just bought a new car. Well, I say ‘new’. It is our first twenty-first century car, and I write at the fag end of 2014. We have actually never before this spent more than £1,400 on any vehicle. Cars are not what they were when my father, Ron, constructed… Read More »