To most people reading thus far it will be apparent that my lasting attractions to the works of Habermas and Bhaskar suggests a sympathy with ‘left-of-centre’ thinking. After all, Habermas was once a Marxist, and Bhaskar remained one. Sketch 1 traced my ancestry and established that my parents, Ron and Margaret, were not politically motivated… Read More »
My theoretical deliberations didn’t play out in an institutional vacuum. In 1997 I was appointed a Reader at UCL, and in 2001 a Professor. True to form for one of Margaret Archer’s meta-reflexives, I had rarely shown myself to be proactive in my own interests. My idea of ‘getting on’ was, and remains, largely confined… Read More »
I remarked in passing that I had read and relished Roy Bhaskar’s Realist Theory of Science soon after it was published in the mid-1970s, and indeed that it was prescribed reading on my ‘conceptual foundations of modern sociological thought’ unit on the Intercalated B.Sc for medical students from London University well before the end of… Read More »
From the 1990s and through the ‘noughties and beyond the main focus of my writing switched from long-term illness and stigma to health inequalities. There was a short interlude, however, during which I conducted or oversaw a few short projects on the sex industry, and these can be briefly summarised before the bulk of this… Read More »
During old friend Terry Boswell’s time as chair of the Department of Sociology at Emory University in Atlanta, he came up with the notion that Annette and I might be invited to be Visiting Professors of Sociology for a semester, putting on hold their replacements for two permanent posts. Knowing Terry as we did, we… Read More »
In 1972 our family had moved into a spacious unfurnished flat in Epsom, 45 Sandown Lodge. Unbeknown to me before the event, Anthony Hopkins had exaggerated my income to satisfy our new landlords, Freshwater. Freshwater symbolised greed and we were to be subject to repeated attempts over the next twenty years to raise our rents,… Read More »
As my original attraction to philosophy and my decision to teach an intercalated B.Sc unit on the conceptual foundations of modern sociological thought might suggest, I have always been drawn to abstruse matters. It was in the 1980s during my tenure at the Middlesex that I first expressed this in print. I was busy enough… Read More »
Accepting the post at St Barts established and confirmed my work and my social ‘status’ as a medical sociologist. Within the academic community I had just tentatively set foot in this rapidly became a ‘master status’: in other words, any other components of what American sociologist Robert Merton in his Social Structure and Science termed… Read More »
Worthing High School for Boys was founded in 1924, was enlarged three times before 1929 and again in 1934 and became a grammar school following the Education Act of 1944. It was a financial challenge for my parents to furnish me with the innumerable items of uniform and kit required and they shopped diligently around… Read More »
We are none of us born into circumstances we have chosen. Instead, we enter a readymade society and culture that fashions us before we have had any opportunity to react, let alone to leave our mark. So it was that I arrived in Finchley in North London on 8th October 1948, the first, and as… Read More »