The Sociology Post

Some of the most powerful approaches in sociology are those that analyse the interactions of individuals. These are often seen as in opposition to more abstract views of social structure. I want to argue that this is not the case and that the two approaches are complementary and imply each other. I will develop this argument in this post and will take the argument further in a later post. Interaction is the result of ongoing mutual constructions of the situation and of the attitudes and actions of its participants. Each participant constructs a representation and account and so negotiates a shared understanding that is sufficient to justify their actions as appropriate and so to ensure that the actions of the participants mesh or coordinate. Participants mutually—simultaneously and interdependently, but always imperfectly—legitimate their own actions and shape the actions of others by attempting to define limits to the options open to them. Each participant holds to an understanding...

Politicians and commentators often talk about the importance of British values and the need for migrants and refugees to respect British values. Such arguments have emerged strongly in debates over terrorism. Claims of this kind often, perhaps typically, mask a more or less deep-rooted prejudice towards outsiders and an assumption of the inherent superiority of Britons. Proponents of these views look back to an imperial past when Britannia ruled not only the waves but also much of the land and when it seemed natural to divide the people of the world into distinct ‘races’. We are rightly sceptical of such arguments, but is any meaning to be found in the argument that a society such as Britain is indeed marked by values that are subscribed to by a majority of its members and that help to define a shared sense of identity? Under what conditions can we talk about any kinds of national values? These ideas are best understood through the arguments that I have developed on social conscio...

So, the results are in (originally posted June 2017): a huge surge in Labour support—almost 40 per cent of the vote—destroyed the slim Conservative majority and the authority of the Prime Minister. What light can sociology throw on the results? Sociological debate on British politics over the last 40 years has traced a process of ‘dealignment’ in which class-based voting decayed to be replaced by issue-voting politics and increased volatility in electoral outcomes. Class-based Labour voting had been rooted in the traditional solidarities of ethnically homogeneous working class communities, and a strong occupationally grounded and gendered trade union movement. Social change had swept away many of these communities and the forms of association linked to them. The growing importance of television and other media as means of socialisation and sources of information weakened traditional identities and commitments. These social changes were the basis for the rise of Thatcherite Conser...

In an earlier posting I discussed the idea of the ‘social mind’ and the way in which such a collective consciousness’ must be understood as dispersed to and contained in the minds of the individual members of a society. This provides us with a way of understanding social structures, seen by Durkheim as external and constraining factors in social life. In my work on social structure I showed that the institutions and relations that comprise a social structure must be seen as ‘embodied structures’, but I did not properly specify how such individual phenomena relate to collective structures. In this posting I want to try to show that the structures of everyday life—Goffman’s ‘interaction order’—and the ‘macro’ structures of specialised economic and political activities can be understood as rooted in individual subjectivity yet act as real forces in shaping individual activity. The world of everyday life—the backdrop to all our activity—comprises the myriad locales and persons that ar...

Sociologists of a certain age will recall the courses on ‘The Social Structure of Modern Britain’ that many of us followed as students or taught as lecturers. Most such courses have now disappeared. However, there are distinct advantages in pursuing a course that is focused on the key structures constituting a particular national society- and, of course, its global context.  Perhaps such courses are now taught mainly in those places where national identity has become a critical political issue. Scotland is a society in which these issues of national identity have always been strong and where they have acquired a particular salience in recent years. Devolution, the independence referendum, and Brexit have all ensured that the autonomy of Scotland and Scottish institutions have been important matters of political debate. It is not surprising, therefore, that Scottish society has been an important focus for teaching within Sociology Departments in Scotland.  David McCrone ha...

In his  Division of Labour in Society , Durkheim introduced the idea of ‘social consciousness’, which he developed through his narrower idea of the ‘collective consciousness’ as the moral binding force in social life. The more general idea of social consciousness, however, has much wider relevance to the ways in which actions give rise to social structures with real,  sui generis , properties capable of constraining individual thoughts, feelings, and actions. This approach to ‘social facts’, however, was subsequently developed without any specification of the ontology of social facts: ‘social structures’ were seen simply as unexplicated frameworks for social action. Other than the work of writers such as Maurice Halbwachs on ‘collective memory’, there was little recognition of the ‘mental’ character of social facts to which Durkheim had alluded in his concept of the social consciousness. These issues were almost forgotten in sociology until the work of Peter Berger and Thomas ...

It is often remarked that you can have a sociology of anything. It is not so often said that you can have a sociology of nothing, but this is exactly what Susie Scott of Sussex University is trying to develop. We are familiar with ideas about non-places since the work of Marc Augé and Rob Shields, and George Ritzer has elaborated ideas of non-things and non-people in his book on  The Globalization of Nothing , but Susie aims at a far more general approach to nothing at all.  As part of her project on the Sociology of Nothing, extending her interactionist work on everyday life, she is collecting personal stories of non-doing, non-being, and non-having, exploring ideas and feelings about those things that are lost, missing, or have never happened. Details on the project can be found at  https://nothingnarratives.wordpress.com/about     Stories submitted to the website on Narratives of Nothing include:  a mother wanting space to ‘do nothi...