By chance I came across Roy Bhaskar’s A Realist theory of Science soon after Harvester Wheatsheaf added it to their list in 1978. Unlike some others of those who sampled it early I found it rigorous and clear. If Roy’s terminology was demanding, (a) his innovative analysis and style justified a certain dexterity and inventiveness,… Read More »
I have over time arrived at a number of what might be called ‘basic premises’ for studying the human condition, whether from the vantage point of sociology or many other natural, life, behavioural or social sciences. They will be contentious, but I cannot for the life of me see why or how. I will broach… Read More »
In this second decade of the twenty-first century we have reached a crossroads. The end of the cold war has not led to a new and more stable world order but instead to widespread disorder and human suffering. Our global world is fragmenting and life is becoming less predictable not only for people in poorer… Read More »
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 »