Having never lost my fascination for sport, especially but by no means only rugby, cricket and track-and-field athletics, I returned to it as the subject matter of a new book in the noughties. As I write this I have – literally – just finished correcting the proofs on A Critical Realist Theory of Sport, which… Read More »
I will not rehearse yet again the genesis of the COVID pandemic, but rather precis what happened in the UK. Enough has been reliably established to affirm a series of propositions. I draw here on a paper I published in Frontiers in Sociology in 2022: the UK was ill-prepared for a pandemic, having paid too… Read More »
In terms of my theorising a good deal had happened during my protracted if somewhat threadbare tenure at Surrey University. One way of encapsulating this is by reference to a concept that I began to deploy to characterise contemporary British society. Chairing a meeting of critical realists in the British Library, I once heard Maggie… Read More »
When in 1998 I had been a visiting professor at Emory University in Atlanta I was slightly envious of Mike McQuaide’s post on Emory’s Oxford campus. This was because the Oxford campus was much like a village, affording Mike an opportunity to get to know a small and manageable number of undergraduate students well. The… Read More »
We had lived in Epsom since 1972, for no better reason than it happened to be the place we found a decent flat; subsequently, we bought our first house a few hundred yards away. My mother, Margaret, had died aged 84, spending her last days in Shoreham Hospital. My father, Ron, two years older than… Read More »
I was ambivalent about retiring but not worried at the prospect. Grieving occurs when something irrevocably ends, and for academics there is often a prospect of continuing to work, but in such a manner that it is no longer seen or experienced as ‘work’. In my case I was set on doing some more lecturing/teaching… Read More »
I retired on 1 October 2013, shortly before the deadline for being entered for the Research Excellence Framework (REF). The REF was introduced to satisfy a threefold purpose: to provide accountability for public investment in research and produce evidence of the benefits of this investment; to provide benchmarking information and establish reputational yardsticks, for use… Read More »
I have in this series of sketches of my academic life often referred to the important role of cafes and bars. They have become over the decades part and parcel not only of the transfer of thoughts to manuscripts but also of who I am. I’m no fan of the current displacement of structural theory… Read More »
One of the pleasures of working at the Middlesex and then UCL has been their locations in central London. Maybe this has even fuelled my career via the sheer number and variety of seductive cafes and bars available as unofficial workplaces. The Middlesex nestled on the edge of Fitzrovia, just north of Soho, while Bloomsbury,… Read More »
It came out of the blue! It was an initiative taken from within the office of the UCL’s Vice-Provost for Research, David Price, and I was contacted as a likely lead for an exciting proposal, namely, the establishment within UCL of a Virtual Institute of Sociological Studies. It had long been a grievance of mine… Read More »