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Finally finished sorting out my dad's wikipedia entry today. I'd been meaning to do for a while, but it was only when we were reading about the death of John Urry that I noticed that while his contemporaries had pages, he didn't. Perhaps that says something about his lack of ego. Or maybe it says something about the technical prowess of his former students!
The post-Soviet stuff was pretty easy to do, partly because of Sarah and Valera's excellent interview in the ISA's Global Dialogue and partly because events are more recent, I know so many of the people involved, and because the research work, along with the various other ins and outs of ISITO, were perennial party topics.
The theoretical stuff from the 70s and 80s was much harder to deal with. Dating from the days before the web, I found there wasn't a great deal to crib from. When I asked my dad what he'd worked on for the first two decades of his career, he rather breezily replied, "Mainly social theory and political economy. It's all there on my publications page..." And it was indeed. In book form.
Skimming through some of it, I was surprised to discover just how readable the books are. (Having made exactly the same observation when I read parts of Marxism, Marginalism and Modern Sociology during my MA, it wasn't actually all that surprising) Yes, they all feature a great deal of technical jargon, but once you're past that, they're actually very clearly written and argued.
I was also surprised to discover quite how much I'd absorbed through osmosis over the years. I remember discussions about monetarism over the supper table, probably from around the period the books were being written. I also remember a much more recent conversation about crisis theory, during which I was given the potted summary, which I seem to remember as being: that Marx didn't systematise the theory, that the interpretation of what Marx had written was tangled up in history, and that the key thing to focus on was the inevitability of crisis, not the proximate causes of a particular crisis.
I'm not sure I did the wikipedia page justice. It would've been far better if someone with a proper background in this stuff had done it, instead of an armchair philosopher like me. But all the people with the right expertise are all busy trying to get themselves published, whereas I've got enough free time to tinker around with the wikipedia entry of an obscure academic and enough working knowledge to cobble something together...
The post-Soviet stuff was pretty easy to do, partly because of Sarah and Valera's excellent interview in the ISA's Global Dialogue and partly because events are more recent, I know so many of the people involved, and because the research work, along with the various other ins and outs of ISITO, were perennial party topics.
The theoretical stuff from the 70s and 80s was much harder to deal with. Dating from the days before the web, I found there wasn't a great deal to crib from. When I asked my dad what he'd worked on for the first two decades of his career, he rather breezily replied, "Mainly social theory and political economy. It's all there on my publications page..." And it was indeed. In book form.
Skimming through some of it, I was surprised to discover just how readable the books are. (Having made exactly the same observation when I read parts of Marxism, Marginalism and Modern Sociology during my MA, it wasn't actually all that surprising) Yes, they all feature a great deal of technical jargon, but once you're past that, they're actually very clearly written and argued.
I was also surprised to discover quite how much I'd absorbed through osmosis over the years. I remember discussions about monetarism over the supper table, probably from around the period the books were being written. I also remember a much more recent conversation about crisis theory, during which I was given the potted summary, which I seem to remember as being: that Marx didn't systematise the theory, that the interpretation of what Marx had written was tangled up in history, and that the key thing to focus on was the inevitability of crisis, not the proximate causes of a particular crisis.
I'm not sure I did the wikipedia page justice. It would've been far better if someone with a proper background in this stuff had done it, instead of an armchair philosopher like me. But all the people with the right expertise are all busy trying to get themselves published, whereas I've got enough free time to tinker around with the wikipedia entry of an obscure academic and enough working knowledge to cobble something together...
