By SAGE Publishing
Bite-sized interviews with top social scientists
Michael Burawoy is a practitioner of what we might call 'extreme ethnography.' Since earning his first degree -- in mathematics -- from Cambridge University in 1968, his CV has been studded with academic postings but also jobs in manufacturing, often with...
There is a school of thought that groups often bring out the worst in humankind. Think only of the Charles Mackay book on “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,” the U.S. Founding fathers’ visceral fear of ‘mob rule,’...
The study of kinship, long the bread and butter of the anthropologist, has lost a bit of its centrality in the discipline, in large part, suggests Janet Carsten, because it became dry and fusty and associated mostly with the nuclear...
The concept of “community cohesion” rose to prominence in the detritus of Bradford and Harehills, Burnley and Oldham, Northern English towns where 14 years ago rioting broke out between Asian and white communities. Called on by the Home Office to...
Happiness, says sociologist Will Davies, is “all the rage” right now. Not actually being happy, by the way, but offering to provide happiness, or to measure it, or to study it, to legislate it, or even to exploit it. If that...
Unlike the character in the movie The Sixth Sense, we actually don’t see dead people. Westerners go to great lengths to excise thoughts about death (real death, that is, not movie death) or being in the presence of death. Sheldon...
If anyone can lay claim to be the father of sociology, it’s Émile Durkheim. By the time of the French academic’s death in 1917, he’d produced an extraordinary body of work on an eclectic range of topics, and had become...
The late sociologist C. Wright Mills is in the eyes of many best summed up by one incredibly influential book, The Sociological Imagination, in which he famously urges the academy to "translate private troubles into public issues." The native of...
Erving Goffman has been called the most influential American sociologist of the 20th century (although he was born and did his early studies in Canada) thanks to his study and writing centered on the social interactions of everyday life. In...
It’s an unusual approach for an academic: a hands-on approach. Literally a hands-on approach. Trevor Marchand is an anthropologist interested in how information about crafts is transferred from expert to novice. This has led him to Nigeria, Yemen, Mali, and...
Max Weber, the German-born sociologist and philosopher, is one of the canonical figures in the creation of social science. And like any canonical figure, his legacy lies in hands of his subsequent interpreters. Karl Emil Maximilian Weber’s current interpreter-in-chief, Oxford historian...
For years, social scientists who studied religion tended to see it as the study of something fated to decline and therefore the key, and almost only, question in their hymnbook was, "Do you still go to church?" But as societies...
Psephology, a word both charming and antiquated, is the study of elections. Ivor Crewe, also charming but not so antiquated, is a studier of elections. The current president of Britain's Academy of Social sciences and the master of Oxford's University...
Around the world, populations are growing older. But is that because people are living longer? Or could it be that there are fewer younger people to dilute the demographic pool? And what about aging itself -- when exactly is 'old'...
With the arrival of the quadrennial World Cup, the whole world turns to football fandom. And that alone, independent of what actually happens on the pitch, is exciting to David Goldblatt, the soccer sociologist. “The point is that absolutely no...
Remember the amazing, spoon-bending Uri Geller? Bruce Hood does. And while Geller is, well, to be kind, controversial, Hood is a quite recognized and reputable developmental psychologist at Bristol University. But he does share one trait with the self-described mystic...
Here's an idea: social scientists should reflect critically on the prevailing concepts and categories before launching into empirical work with an existing framework. In this episode of the Social Science Bites podcast, sociologist Saskia Sassen discusses that concept, called 'before method,'...
Surnames predict social status with surprising accuracy. In this episode of the Social Science Bites podcast Gregory Clark discusses this phenomenon with David Edmonds. Social Science Bites is made in association with SAGE. A transcript of this and other episodes is...
Social scientist Craig Calhoun, Director of the LSE, discusses protest movements including the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in this episode of the Social Science Bites podcast. The interviewer is Nigel Warburton. Social Science Bites is made in association with SAGE.
In this episode of the Social Science Bites podcast Harvard social theorist Roberto Mangabeira Unger claims that the social sciences need to reorient themselves away from retrospective rationalisation of what exists and focus instead on transformative opportunity. Social Science Bites...
There have been substantial gains in life expectancy in the last two hundred years or so, partly because of improved public health policy. In this episode of the Social Science Bites podcast Angus Deaton, whose recent research has focussed on...
Is there a maximum number of friendships that we can maintain? Does this number apply universally? Robin Dunbar believes there are discoverable patterns in the numbers of close and less close relationships human beings can cope with and that this...
Maggots, vomit, faeces, sores oozing with pus, putrid meat - these evoke universal reactions of disgust. But why do we have this Yuk! reaction and how did it evolve? Valerie Curtis of the London School of Hygeine and Tropical Medicine,...
You might assume that deaths increase in a recession, but that doesn't necessarily happen. What is clear, however, is the relation between government austerity responses to recession and an increase in rates of death. David Stuckler explains in this episode...
Social epidemiologist Kate Pickett, co-author (with Richard Wilkinson) of The Spirit Level: why equality is better for everyone, argues that inequality has bad social effects. She discusses her ideas with Nigel Warburton in this episode of the Social Science Bites...
Has equality for women been achieved? Feminism has apparently achieved many of its aims. Some of the obvious inequalities between men and women seem to have been removed in recent decades. But have they? Angela McRobbie from the Department of...
Lawrence Sherman is a Professor of Criminology at Cambridge University and a keen advocate of experimental criminology. In this episode of the Social Science Bites podcast he outlines his approach and gives some examples of its successes. Social Science Bites...
In this episode of the Social Science Bitespodcast sociologist Ann Oakley discusses her research into a range of questions about women's experience of childbirth based on detailed interviews with 55 women that she conducted in 1975. She has since, with a team of...
New technologies have opened up new possibilities in the area of reproduction. Sarah Franklin, Professor of Sociology at the University of Cambridge discusses this from a sociological perspective in this episode of the Social Science Bites podcast. Social Science Bites...
Geographer Doreen Massey wants us to rethink our assumptions about space. In this episode of the Social Science Bites podcast she explains why. Social Science Bites is made in association with SAGE.
Thinking is hard, and most of the time we rely on simple psychological mechanisms that can lead us astray. In this episode of the Social Science Bites podcast, the Nobel-prizewinning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, talks...
Cultural Studies sometimes gets a bad press. In this episode of the Social Science Bites podcast Toby Miller, author and editor of over 30 books on interdisciplinary topics within the Social Sciences, discusses Cultural Studies in relation to his work on...
Is the world getting less violent? It seems unlikely. But Steven Pinker has amassed empirical evidence to show that it is. In this interview with Nigel Warburton for the Social Science Bites podcast he explains some of the possible causes...
What can psychology tell us about morality? Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind, discusses the place of rationality in our moral judgements in this episode of the Social Science Bites podcast. Social Science Bites is made in assocation with...
There is still a great deal of inequality between the sexes in the workplace. In this episode of the Social Science Bites podcast Paul Seabright combines insights from economics and evolutionary theory to shed light on why this might be...
Economists have in the past often treated human beings as ideally rational. But they aren't. In this episode of the Social Science Bitespodcast Robert J. Shiller discusses how behavioural economics, drawing on psychology and even neuroscience, is transforming the nature of the subject...
How are children using the Internet? How is it affecting them? Sonia Livingstone, who has overseen a major study of children's behaviour online discusses these issues with Nigel Warburton in this episode of the Social Science Bites podcast. Social Science...
Can a city have a spirit? Avner de-Shalit believes that it can. In this episode of the Social Science Bites podcast he explains in conversation with Nigel Warburton why he believes that the identity of cities matters in a global...
We all need to co-operate to some degree. According to the eminent sociologist Richard Sennett, author of a recent book on the topic, complex co-operation is a craft. Listen to him discussing co-operation with Nigel Warburton on this episode of the...
How do the social sciences resemble and differ from history and the physical sciences? Can the social sciences be impersonal? Polymath Rom Harré discusses these questions with Nigel Warburton in this episode of the Social Science Bites podcast. Social Science...
We live in an age of economic inequality. The rich are growing richer relative to the poor. Does this matter? In this episode of the Social Science Bites podcast Danny Dorling, a human geographer, discusses this question with Nigel Warburton....