Sociology cannot be defined without causing offence to some at least of its practitioners, let alone to those outside the discipline; and it is one thing to respond positively to C Wright Mills’ injunction to be imaginative, quite another to agree on what this means or on exemplars. The orientation towards the sociology of sport… Read More »
Harold Wilson, who was born in 1916, managed to avoid Eton. He was educated instead in northern grammar schools prior to entering and winning a ‘first’ at Oxford. He excelled at statistics and a spell working as a research economist for Beveridge and a meeting with G D H Cole led to an interest… Read More »
My birth in 1948 fell into Atlee’s period of office and I have by the time of writing this witnessed a dozen Prime Ministers. To understand Thatcher’s 1980s, the decade we have reached, I have to add a few paragraphs on the five of the 12 who preceded her in the early stages of my… Read More »
I am reading Tony Benn’s latest, and last, diaries: A Blaze of Autumn Sunshine. They make poignant reading, charting his growing frailty and his focus on ageing as well as his extraordinary day-to-day commitment to his socialist causes. You feel he needs to stay engaged because it is extrinsically as well as intrinsically worthwhile; it… Read More »
Several students who intercalated a B.Sc en route to qualifying in medicine found their year away from laboratories and lecture theatres a relief, an opportunity to reflect on their futures. Inevitably, a few of them had deeper problems to confront. Because they comprised a small group we got to know them well and became sounding… Read More »
C Wright Mills had a way of articulating the sociological project. In this sense his writings remain ideal resources for teaching purposes. In the extracts from ‘The Power Elite’ (pp.321-2) below he offers an insight into the concept of social structure as well as into its ‘beneath-the-surface’ causal salience for our everyday ‘on-the-surface’ activities and… Read More »
The University of London’s inter-collegiate, intercalated B.Sc in ‘Basic Medical Sciences with Medical Sociology’ (I think) straddled the 1980s. I made its acquaintance very early on, in 1975, although I was not among its founders. It survived until 1997 and during that time afforded an exceptional teaching opportunity for we sociologists employed in London medical… Read More »
There are worse plights than being drawn back into the world of C Wright Mills. I have been re-reading The Power Elite, as some will be aware. On page 245 of my old edition from undergraduate days I chanced upon two statements on the sociological undertaking that like so much else in his output continue… Read More »
What I here call the ‘jigsaw model’ of logics, relations and configurations still makes sense to me. It is, however, easier to define than to illustrate via application. ‘Does it work?’ is the question. Just for a change I am going to introduce it by reference to the sociology of health and illness. Models in… Read More »
I have alluded to a publication or two issuing from the epilepsy research. Neither of these was my first, and therein lies a tale or two. Anthony Hopkins was keen that we give a joint talk to the neurology section of the Royal Society of Medicine. We had no results, but hey! They were his… Read More »