FRAGMENT ONE: THE STATE OF CONTEMPORARY BRITAIN I was born in 1948, and so became a baby boomer destined to live the formative years of my life protected by a largely stable cross-party political consensus on the moral worth and benefits of a cradle-to-grave welfare state. I was fortunate to be among the 20 per… Read More »
INTRODUCTION There exists a near consensus that people’s lives in Britain into the second decade of the twenty-first century are beset by a cluster of severe and exacting challenges. These range from very basic difficulties of providing shelter, clothing and food for children through a perceived political disenfranchisement to pressing fears of a geopolitically fragile… Read More »
It will be common knowledge for anyone who has dipped into my store of blogs that I like writing in cafes. They may even know that I edited a book called ‘Café Society’ with Norwegian colleague and friend Aksel Tjora. Well, after travelling around Dorking’s expanding repertoire of cafes over the last twenty years, I… Read More »
I have a hypothesis that may on a first reading seem obvious, even trite. Or it may indeed seem faulty. It is that we can only properly grasp what it is to be any age if we are living through it. But this escapes us through the early and middle of the life-course because our… Read More »
It has been a pleasure to coauthor a paper on stigma resistance in Social Science and Medicine with Italian sociologist Alice Scavarda. Fortunately, this is an open access contribution (SSM 376 (2025) 118097). It is not my intention here to offer a summary of the findings from Alice’s study of the parents of children with… Read More »
THE BEST MODE OF DEFENCE IS ATTACK: SOCIOLOGY IN 21ST CENTURY UK GRAHAM SCAMBLER EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY, UCL Introduction The sociological project can and does take many different forms, but I will argue here that it remains crucially indebted to a ‘reconstructed’ version of its Enlightenment origins. I will start this contribution by clarifying… Read More »
I have over a year or two ruminated on the need for a manifesto setting out what in current terminology is termed a ‘road map’ leading to a ‘better’, if not the proverbial ‘good’, society. Given that my own writings over the years – decades – have been oriented to fellow academics rather than to… Read More »
I recall being taken off guard when a well-known and widely respected sociologist entering the third age seemed to be constantly fishing for compliments. I had considerable respect for him both personally and for his very real accomplishments within the discipline. But I quietly wished he’d desist. I didn’t want him to somehow diminish his… Read More »
Last year (16/6/23) I blogged about the fact, and dwelt on the ramifications of, the intrusion of private providers into the NHS, not least via general practice. I focused on Operose, formed in 2020 when its American parent company Centene Corporation brought together its UK subsidiaries, The Practice Group and Simply Health. In a nutshell,… Read More »
I have just read Wealth and Class Analysis: Exploitation, Closure and Exclusion by Nora Waitkus, Mike Savage and Maren Toft, newly published in Sociology in 2024. I was drawn to it by the authors’ central theme, namely, that class is a key factor in relation to wealth inequality but one that has been neglected, or… Read More »