By Andrew King The context I’ve been reading and hearing a lot about the housing crisis in the UK in recent weeks. It’s been dubbed a ‘human disaster’ and as the General Election 2015 fast approaches there are suggestions that housing is moving up the political agenda; witness, for example, the Conservatives’ much debated extension […]
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By Karen Bullock For the police service, as for other public sector organisations, a primary question since 2010 has been how to maintain levels of service as deep funding cuts start to bite. The public sector union Unison has recently drawn attention to how police services across England and Wales are quietly retaining volunteers to […]
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By Jon Garland April 2014 marked the fifteenth anniversary of the London nailbombings: three separate attacks that occurred over two weeks in Brixton, Brick Lane and Soho in the spring of 1999. In total, three people were killed and over 120 were injured in blasts that targeted the capital’s black, Asian and gay communities. In […]
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By Christine Hine An important strand of sociological work in the 1990s focused on “invisible work”: the labour that was needed, in the background, to make things run smoothly. Susan Leigh Star (1999) was particularly influential in showing us that everywhere there was an infrastructure apparently standardizing, facilitating and automating, there would be people working […]
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crowd sourcing criminal justice and swearing as democracy By Mike McGuire Having recently been called to Jury service for the first time, the significance of the jury and its function as a feature of civil society is something which I had a fair amount of time to reflect upon. A very fair amount. I hadn’t […]
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By Graham Scambler One point of frustration for sociologists reading or listening to journalists opining on our changing world is their fixation on events. Sociologists, I have long argued, should delve beneath the surface in search of the mechanisms – ‘social structures’ – that help cause or shape events. If we can’t quite match the […]
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