50 years, 50 ideas
Top 20 from our blog
Well, we’ve really enjoyed looking back over 50 years of Sociology at the University of Manchester on our blog this year, and we hope you have too. We’ve collected together a Top 20 list of our most popular posts, pages and videos which we’ve been counting down in December. Here […]
50. Gender and work
Equal treatment legislation was introduced in the 1970s – are there still gender inequalities in work and employment? The short answer is yes, gender imbalances in the types of jobs that men and women do (horizontal and vertical gender segregation), and how their work is valued and rewarded, remains a […]
49. Understanding ‘the sacred’ and the secular in society
It’s the time of year in Britain to traditionally start talking about how Christmas has become taken over by capitalism and lost its spirituality, but it’s worth thinking about what we mean by spirituality. In Sociology, debates about ‘the sacred’ are often framed in terms of a binary opposition between […]
48. Sheila Rowbotham: Manchester’s Dreamer
Sheila Rowbotham, the renowned socialist feminist historian, writer, and campaigner, joined the Sociology department at Manchester in 1993 and left upon retirement in 2009. As a student of the famous historians E. P Thompson and Dorothy Thompson, Rowbotham’s work takes up the task of unearthing and documenting the ‘hidden histories’ […]
47. Family practices and David Morgan
Professor David Morgan, in honour of whom the Morgan Centre for Research into Everyday Lives has been named, was one of the original staff members of the Sociology department at the University of Manchester in 1964. David is now Professor Emeritus in Sociology and continues to be actively involved in […]
46. Purifying ‘the social’
There has been a longstanding tendency in sociology either to think of society as a certain kind of ‘thing’ or to think of ‘the social’ as a domain made up of uniquely ‘social’ stuff. This traces back to the origins of the discipline and its attempts to define itself vis-à -vis […]
Win a copy of Social Networks and Music Worlds
Social Networks and Music Worlds edited by Nick Crossley, Siobhan McAndrew and Paul Widdop Social networks are critical for the creation and consumption of music. This edited collection introduces students and scholars of music in society to the core concepts and tools of social network analysis. The collection showcases the use of […]
45. Kinship
For many years, sociologists were more interested in studying households, marriage and ‘the family’ than kinship. Despite some important ‘community’ studies that looked at informal and kinship ties in the 1950s,1960s and early 1970s, for the most part ‘kinship’ was seen as the domain of anthropologists documenting kinship systems. However, […]
44. Social movements
Social movements consist of organisations, groups or individuals engaged in collective action with common social or political aims designed to challenge, resist or facilitate social change. Social movements have a long and proud tradition in Greater Manchester with both Marx and Engels writing some of their most significant works here […]
43. Carol Smart and researching personal life
The Sociology of Personal Life deals with a cluster of loosely related and overlapping themes such as, family, kinship, friendship, sexualities, acquaintanceship, generations and consumption. It develops earlier sociological research on ‘the family’, which tended to focus on traditional, and narrow, ideas of who counts as ‘family. And it adds […]