When the whole world has been opened to capital, there is nowhere to expand into. There are no more sources of cheap labour or raw materials, and no more ways to mechanise complex tasks. You can only expand inward, through every more fiendish financial engineering, engineered solutions to non-problems such …
Ontology (‘what is’) is a topic students often have difficulty grappling with in their work. It tends to end up being a set of buzzwords that people lay fealty to (interpretivist! Social constructionist!) rather than a set of thinking tools that should help you work through the research problem you …
As Olivia Rodrigo so wisely said ‘it’s brutal out there’. But we are never so brutal as with ourselves. Apply widely and be adaptable – you can fit into more posts and get something from them than you may realise. Recognise what they are looking for. Aim high and value …
In my quest to expose the writing process I have structured this paper using named paragraphs. Each paragraph has a title showing the purpose it performs as part of the overall paper structure. This should help putting the paper together as a coherent argument, showing how each bit adds to …
Cultural accounts of illicit markets and criminal activities are the best way to develop a feel for them. Here are my recommendations: Podcasts Some of the most insightful sociology is done in economics, so Planet Money is my go to for understanding how the economy shapes our lives. Episodes on …
I want to engage with a type of argument that is self-undermining. The months after Al-Qaeda’s attacks on New York and Washington in 2001 birthed an immoral decision. The USA at the highest level began publicly legitimising torture as a means to an end in the War on Terror. As …
One of the annoying things academic competition does is push us to develop elaborate ways of not quite saying what is staring us in the face. There is a tendency to produce theoretical solutions to problems that only exist because there is something we want to avoid saying, in this …
…really just one social fact Crime is behaviour that is intentional, measurable and directly harmful. The only reason to care about crime is that it gets in the way of the good life. Ignore anything about obeying the law for its own sake because otherwise our moral sphere will crumble. …
If you did not have imposter syndrome you would basically be living in your parents’ attic right now (apologies if you are in fact living there right now. I’m sure it’s nice). You cannot get rid of imposter syndrome but you can feel better about it and use some elements …
Never ask me ‘do you think this is fence electrified? Are these berries poisonous? Is this knife super-sharp?’ Or somesuch. I know only one path to knowledge and am the sort of person who likes to find out what something is by jabbing it with my finger/licking or eating it …
