Do financial capitalism and its accoutrements, extending to a distinctively postmodern culture, warrant a revision of the characterization of modern sport? Have things moved on? It will be remembered that modern sport was thought to justify unambiguously positive responses to each of Guttman’s original criteria of: secularism, equality, specialization, rationalization, bureaucratization, quantification and records. It… Read More »
The early or mid-1970 have commonly been regarded as transitional. The period since has been variously described as the era of high or late modernity, second modernity, postmodernity or dis- or re-organized capitalism; more graphic choices include predatory, casino and crony capitalism. The label of preference here is the less prejudicial and more evidence-based financial… Read More »
Sport as play, performance, work or fitness, or skilful preparation for inter-community competition or war has been around as long as humans, and conceivably before. But this has not always been sport that ‘we’ identify as such. This blog’s author’s and likely readers’ starting point for defining sport is in all probability the second decade… Read More »
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 »