Born an only child and much taken with solitary endeavours I have now and again reflected on the implications of this for forming friendships. Maybe there’s a genetic element too. My father, not an only child but brought up with a brother nine years younger, was similarly attracted to solitude and to ‘standing and staring’.… Read More »
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 revised the political economy of Smith and… Read More »
This blog address three issues that I think have attracted too little attention in sociological and political circles. The first involves the tension between Habermas’ ‘communicative’ and ‘strategic action’. Academic sociologists tend to be professionally socialised into an engagement with communicative action, or discussions and writings that look to produce evidence en route to a… Read More »
My presence at a conference in Trondheim organised by old friend Aksel Tjora has given me much pause for thought. In 2013 we published a co-edited book called ‘Café Society’, and ever since we have been thinking about a companion volume of ‘Bar Society’. It is my turn to take the lead on this and… Read More »
I have over the years visited Norway many times, in the process making a number of good colleagues and friends. February 2026 is no exception. Invited by Aksel Tjora to give a plenary presentation at a two-day conference on the topic of community, Annette and I travelled to Trondheim via Bergen for a bout of… Read More »
When Aksel Tjora asked me to read through a draft of a methods paper he was writing, I readily agreed. Its main focus was on the role of intuition in ethnographic and qualitative research in sociology. It made for fascinating reading. On the one hand, many researchers would doubtless equivocate about any role being ascribed… Read More »
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 »