I have long had a bee in my bonnet about ideology. When I learned my sociology its meaning was unambiguous: it referred to a way of seeing and understanding the world that reflected a particular set of vested interests. Nowadays its meaning has shifted, becoming etiolated in the process: it merely denotes the worldview of… Read More »
I am enjoying Piketty’s Capital, which is extremely carefully and well written. This is my second blog on aspects of his argument, and the focus here is on ways of representing inequalities of wealth (capital) and income. Piketty is respectful but critical of some commonly used measures, two of which – the Gini coefficient and… Read More »
I was reared on the Daily Telegraph and began my undergraduate life at Surrey University considerably misinformed. I recall in the early weeks of year one term one defending this Worthing stalwart and arbiter of common sense when confronted by Pete Kirby, a patient if querulous mature student and member of the Communist Party. But… Read More »
If my new life within UCL required adjustment, other more intellectual matters offered succour. I have mentioned my use of Habermas’ theories in my edited collection Sociological Theory and Medical Sociology, published in 1987. We academics in particular learn from others all the time, whether we realize it or not; but Jurgen Habermas and Roy… Read More »
So the Sunday Times now treats us to a separate analysis of the ‘super rich’, offered a week in advance of its well-established annual ‘Rich List’. This blog is a brief response to its listing and portrayal of Britain’s billionaires. Some basic facts: there are 104 billionaires in the 2014 Rich List, worth a total… Read More »
Like many others I purchased a copy of Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-first Century early on. One of Heffers sales people mentioned in passing that a Yale rep had told him it was the most significant book they have published in a generation. That was enough for me. But it is a big fat book… Read More »
On 24 and 25 April this year I attended the 10th Norwegian Health Sociology Workshop at Trondheim. It was actually my eighth visit, during each of which I have been asked to give one of the keynote addresses. Organized by Aksel Tjora, these are wonderful events, a mix of festival and conference, and a chance… Read More »
I have come to the fourth of an indefinite series of blogs on Roy Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realism. You could open a book on how many more might follow. This effort dips deeper into Bhaskar’s attempts to resolve or, in his words, to ‘generalize, dialecticise and substantialise the transformational model of social action’. He wants… Read More »
There is a dearth of information on the composition of what I have called governing oligarchies in countries like the UK and the USA. This includes data on top income earners. In his The Killing Fields of Inequality (Cambridge; Polity Press, 2014), however, Goran Therborn cites data from the US Congressional Budget Office (2011) on the composition… Read More »
I have alluded to UCL’s ingestion of the Middlesex Hospital Medical School in 1987 without dwelling on it. It was an abrupt and disconcerting experience. Sold to us under the rubric of a ‘merger’, it was clear from the outset that the nomenclature of the University College and Middlesex Hospital Medical School would be temporary.… Read More »