A few years back, in 2012, I published a paper (in ‘Medical Sociology Online’, Vol 6 Issue 3) with an old mate, Aksel Tjora, on what we called ‘familiarity bonds’. I liked it perhaps more than I should. But then I still like it! Our central hypothesis was that associations of the familiar have more… Read More »
Perhaps the paramount research question confronting sociologists today is: why is it that those being exploited and oppressed are not rising up? And as a follow-up: what are the most likely drivers of social change? In this blog I focus on the second question and consider and comment on several possible ‘drivers’. The primary characteristics… Read More »
I have sought to make the case that for all that agency has causal power it is always structured. It is hardly a novel thesis. Over the past months, however, I have been asked two interesting questions. The first, posed by Mark Carrigan somewhere is cyberspace, is that surely my ‘greedy bastards hypothesis’ (GBH) in… Read More »
There are two queries that have been put to me regarding the health of those ‘greedy bastards’ that feature in my greedy bastards hypothesis (GBH). The first was posed back in the early ‘noughties’. ‘Is your argument’, my interrogator enquired, ‘that the greedy bastards live longer than the rest of us?’ It made me question… Read More »
I was asked in passing the other day about my notion of ‘asset flows’ and in consequence I felt another blog coming on. The aim here is to show how and why I think it a useful as well as a credible ‘meta-sociological’ concept. First of all, what do I mean by asset flows (with… Read More »
I have been silent on the concept of culture, not purposely but because I have made it my project for a while to address and redress sociology’s neglect of that of structure. Culture, like agency, I have suggested is structured but not structurally determined. And that’s just about the extent of my recent contribution. I’m… Read More »
I here pull together a family of propositions, if with due caution. In a 1996 paper in Sociology I argued that the conduct of sociology is a logical and moral adjunct to a (Habermasian, ‘reconstructed’) project of modernity, or it is nothing. Sociology, I maintained, must be oriented to ‘lifeworld rationalisation’. What I meant by… Read More »
There is something of a conspiracy about conspiracies. ‘Conspiracy theory’ is self-evidently a device employed by the wealthy/powerful/privileged to rubbish critiques of the advantages they enjoy, critiques that – sometimes, not always – err on the side of simplicity. Of course simplicity can be a plus for polemics while being a minus for scholarship. But… Read More »
I have now posted two blogs – ‘taking social class seriously’ and ‘Scambler’s social class classification’ – in which I have posited a breakdown of social class at odds with extant ‘socio-economic schema’. In the second blog I ventured my own schema, re-fashioned from the class analyses of Clement and Myles. In this third blog… Read More »
I recently posted a blog – ‘taking social class seriously’ – in which I posited a (neo-Marxist) breakdown of social class at odds with extant ‘socio-economic schema’. If all such breakdowns are, as has been claimed, research-oriented horses for courses, then the phenomena of prime interest to me, namely, the structural prerequisites and practices and… Read More »