In the process of drafting a book on stigma I have expanded on my idea that in post-1970s rentier capitalism the concept stigma and the practice of stigmatising (enacted stigma), denoting shame and shaming, have often been ‘weaponised’ via an appending of the concept of deviance and the practise of sanctioning/punishing (enacted deviance), denoting blame… Read More »
FRAGMENT 6: WHERE DOES THIS LEAVE US, AND WHAT’S TO BE DONE? What, Lenin asked, is to be done? There are several problems in answering this totally reasonable question. What kind of society do we want? More fundamentally, what does a good society look like? Given the present dire and deteriorating state of affairs, how… Read More »
FRAGMENT 5: GOING GLOBAL Thus far the focus has been on the fractured society of England/UK. But what price a social transformation of society in England and the UK if this is accomplished at the price of worsening living conditions in other countries? It should be noted that most people in the world are very… Read More »
FRAGMENT FOUR: COLLECTIVE AGENCY AND RESISTANCE When individuals come together to act in concert we can refer to collective agency. Collective agency can function to defend the status quo or to oppose it. At any given time and in any social formation there are forces for order, stability and the status quo and forces for… Read More »
FRAGMENT THREE: RENTIER CAPITALISM AND STRUCTURAL DIVISIONS There is a long-established argument that from its origins in the long 16th century capitalism has had an inbuilt tendency to contradiction and fracture. Left to its own devices, Adam Smith confessed, the rich will get richer and the poor poorer. The compelling way in which Karl Marx… Read More »
FRAGMENT TWO: THE SOCIOLOGICAL PROJECT Like other intellectual disciplines, sociology has over time developed a body of theories, concepts and programmes of research that can seem overly technical to others. And to complicate matters further, while we all accept that, say, physicists or biologists, possess expert knowledge that we do not, there is a widespread… Read More »
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 »
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 »