sociologists-from-the-united-kingdom

"... most sociologists who would want to talk about wine for one reason or another probably have some personal interest in it. Why spend so much time building up a for something you cannot stand, or which—if you are an alcohol-abstainer—you are opposed to on moral or some other grounds? After all, if you publicly present yourself as an analyst of wine, you are publicly associating yourself with it, and audiences will read you as linked to wine in some way. (The hostile reception to wine talks I have given, by students who seemed to be of a religious fundamentalist persuasion, is a case in point.)"

"are marshalled in the service of satire against powerful individuals and s, to degrade and belittle them; excreta are not on the whole used as images of celebration and festivity ..."

"If someone was to ask us to describe our , we might be hard pressed to find anything to talk about that we might say was at all interesting, because daily life suggests routine, and routine by definition involves things that are not out of the ordinary."

"The fact that a group of more than 200 academics have branded a young scholar a racist and accused him of academic malpractice, without offering any evidence to back up these allegations, is a scandal. It is typical of the underhand tactics used by the Left to discredit those who don’t subscribe to progressive orthodoxy – particularly the ‘blank slate’ orthodoxy – and helps explain why there are so few conservatives in the social sciences and the humanities. St Edmund’s College should treat this smear campaign with the contempt it deserves."

"Contrary to the implications of the open letter, I have never actually done any original research on racial or population differences in intelligence. The only contribution I have made to this area of study is a research ethics paper arguing that “it cannot simply be taken for granted that, when in doubt, stifling debate around taboo topics is the ethical thing to do”. While this paper does not claim that genes do contribute to group differences in intelligence, it does entertain the possibility that they could contribute to such differences."

"Scholars from Sir William Jones by way of the brothers Grimm and Max Muller produced not merely the genealogy of the Indo-European languages but the atmosphere in which Aryan language could be identified with an Aryan culture and even an Aryan race in whose names crimes could be committed ... much mid - nineteenth century philological speculation is already tinged with racial ideology."

"It is in their ambience that racialism really emerged both as an ideology and a sociological theory. Scholars from Sir William Jones by way of the brothers Grimm and Max Muller produced not merely the genealogy of the Indo-European languages but the atmosphere in which Aryan language could be identified with an Aryan culture and even an Aryan race in whose names crimes could be committed ... much mid-nineteenth century philological speculation is already tinged with racial ideology."

"Capital, through philanthropic foundations, invests in the work of think tanks and advocacy networks and policy entrepreneurs with the intention and hope of exacting extensions to the commodification of the social, the creation of new markets and the deregulation of existing ones."

"Money is also important in getting neoliberalism, as a doctrine and as a set of policy ideas, into the public and political imagination. That is, funding for advocacy, ‘research’ and ‘influence’ activities in making neoliberalism thinkable, possible, obvious and necessary."

"Policy itself is now bought and sold, it is a commodity and a profit opportunity, and there is a growing global market in policy ideas. Policy work is also increasingly being out-sourced to profit-making organisations, which bring their skills, discourses and sensibilities to the policy table, for an hourly rate or on contract to the state."

"In most education policy research money is rarely mentioned and is overwritten by a focus on ideas and practices. Even when subjected to the arcane mercies of the economics of education, issues of funding are dealt with as abstractions. However, in the interface between education policy and neoliberalism money is everywhere."

"The dissemination of his work doesn’t enrich the world; it impoverishes the public conversation with lies and poisons society with hate."

"David Miller's description of how the world works is a fantasy of Zionist conspiracy. In form it is similar to more explicitly anti-Jewish antisemitism. And when he talks about Israel's "time-honoured tactic", and in another article about an "age-old Israel lobby tactic" he inadvertently slips into a way of thinking that is much older than antizionism. David Miller is not articulating a worry that Jews may be over-sensitive about antisemitism or about criticism of Israel. His position is that Jews who allege that there is antisemitism on the left, or on campus, are acting as part of a deliberate and collective conspiracy to lie."

"The ruling starts to undermine the protections that the Equality Act claims to guard."

"The concept that an ideology needs protecting is totally ludicrous. What needs protecting are identities, not ideologies ... The same logic could be applied to a white supremacist."

"It is therefore important to underline that this ruling does not change the fact that while academics have the right to express views, they cannot behave in a way which amounts to harassment of Jewish students."

"In light of some of the commentary around the employment tribunal's judgment in the case of Professor Miller and Bristol University, I want to clarify that antisemitism must continue to be challenged wherever it arises. We have seen people in this country use their views on Israel as an excuse to display antisemitism."

"The anti-Zionist theories he taught in seminars may not have envisaged this but Hamas has just demonstrated what trying to defeat the Zionist enemy entails: mass murder, rape, kidnapping, babies slaughtered in unspeakable ways. Anti-Zionism has a very different meaning this week from whatever it may have meant in the past."

"Miller claims he suffered discrimination when he was fired two years ago because his anti-Zionism counts as a philosophical belief under the Equality Act. This is no mere critique of Israeli policy. Miller believes that Israel should disappear completely. "Our cause is not to establish a Palestinian state but to dismantle Israel", is how he put it. It feels like an appropriate moment to be asking whether such a belief can ever be, as the law states, "worthy of respect in a democratic society, compatible with human dignity and not conflict with the fundamental rights of others"."

"[On Miller's sacking as a professor] Bristol [University] has shockingly colluded in another Israeli-run witch hunt."

"There is a minor character in Shakespeare's Henry IV Pt. 2, Francis Feeble, a woman's tailor and country soldier. Falstaff praises him, "most forcible Feeble." Let me ask: What is feeble in Miller's presentation, and what forcible? The feeble? Everything that should matter to an academic: methodology; research; evidence; history. The forcible? Everything that an academic should shun: extravagant claims, unmoored from evidence; the antisemitic premises of the work; the verbal assaults on Jewish students - assaults which are the inevitable outcome of his writing and speech-making. But of course the feebleness of the analysis does not matter to people who are already convinced of the malign existence of the Lobby. Miller does not have to prove anything to them – still less, anything new. Just to write or speak the word "Lobby" is enough: the sought-after effect is achieved. This is writing as evocation. He reminds his audience of what it already knows. That's why to complain that (as seems likely) many of his supporters haven't actually read his stuff misses the point. All they need to know is that he writes about the "Israel Lobby"."

"It's disappointing that anyone takes Miller seriously when his hateful rhetoric is replete with so many overt and ugly stereotypes about inordinate Jewish power and our supposed malign influence."

"David Miller is a textbook case of a toxic antisemite dressed up as an anti-Israel activist."

"[The university] cannot, however, allow some 18-year-old student who comes up from [the Hertfordshire village of] Radlett to study, say, botany and joins the Jewish society to be characterised by one of its own professors as having signed up to a foreign-backed conspiracy to subvert the country's politics."

"Miller has chosen to attack the Bristol University Jewish Society — proper, actual students at his own university — as being part of a co-ordinated campaign of censorship directed by the state of Israel."

"Incredibly, according to Miller, Zionist power is so overbearing that former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and Jennie Formby, the party's General Secretary under Corbyn, did its bidding."

"[The Attorney General should] reflect and come up with a solution [...] There will be a consensus in Parliament that this needs ironing out."

"This is straightforward antisemitism. Here is the problem with those who treated any accusation of antisemitism as a witch hunt: they ended up defending people like this, blinding themselves to glaringly obvious red flags."

"The Zionist movement prioritises the radicalisation of Jews outside occupied Palestine, so they become enthusiasts for, promotors of, and participants in, genocide."

"In the Salisbury case, as Craig Murray, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan has shown, the government initially relied on a phrase that they thought could be defended as true but which was intended to cultivate a deception. This is that the nerve agent involved in the case is of "a type developed by Russia" ... The deception was spectacularly successful. The entire mainstream media went along with it. Embarrassingly, many mainstream journalists deluged Craig Murray with abuse and ridicule for raising modest questions about the government narrative."

"It's a question of how we defeat the ideology of Zionism in practice. How do we make sure Zionism is ended essentially. There's no other way of saying that."

"Of course Israel have sent people in to target that, to deal with that. Particularly through interfaith work … pretending Jews and Muslims working together will be an apolitical way of countering racism. No, it’s a Trojan horse for normalising Zionism in the Muslim community. We saw it in East London Mosque for example, where East London Mosque unknowingly held this project of making chicken soup with Jewish and Muslim communities coming together. This is an Israel-backed project for normalising Zionism in the Muslim communities."

"The Zionist movement, and the Israeli government, are the enemy of the left, the enemy of world peace, and they must be directly targeted."

"[The Labour party is] a mere detail of the Israelis' attempt to impose their will all over the world."

"Do you think that Palestine can be liberated without the Islamic Republic of Iran? Of course it can't. It's absurd – an absurd position."

"[Asked if women in Iran should be able to dress as they please] Are you asking me about sex work and the status of sex workers?"

"If you are not Jewish, do not be cowed by racial supremacists who want to hector you into political subservience."

"The university dismissing me has effectively ended my career in academia [...] I can never get a job at another university because of what she refuses to say here — that I am an antisemite. If I had been given a warning it would have been possible for me to get another job and I would have been out of the University of Bristol’s hair, and we wouldn't be here."

"Zionist forces killed their own people on October 7. Zionist propaganda (also known as Hasbara) has suggested that Palestinian resistance forces were responsible for their deaths, but the narrative doesn't add up."

"Protests are not enough... Those who are interested in ending this genocide must begin by targeting those responsible near them: the entire Zionist movement globally must live in fear of accountability until it is dismantled and its ideology eradicated. And let's be clear, there are Zionists everywhere. In every town and city. Find out where they are..."

"David Miller writes about conspiracy. Some academics analyze conspiracy theories and explain how they become a force in the world. Miller is not among them. He doesn't scrutinize conspiracies, he builds them."

"In the brave old days, I used to know Ralph Miliband, father of David and Edward and one of Britain’s leading Marxist intellectuals. There was a European for you: part Polish, part Belgian, and part Jewish, arriving in England on forged papers as an illegal immigrant refugee from Hitler. His best-known book was Parliamentary Socialism, in which he analyzed Labor’s attempt to transform society through the ballot box. His conclusion was that a party too wedded to pragmatism and compromise would in the end sacrifice its principles, but in doing so it would also cease to work as an electoral machine. Perhaps I’ll take this book down from the dusty old shelf on which I have preserved it."

"The Left is rather prone to a perspective according to which the class struggle is something waged by the workers and the subordinate classes against the dominant ones.It is of course that. But class struggle also means, and often means first of all, the struggle waged by the dominant class, and the state acting on its behalf, against the workers and the subordinate classes. By definition, struggle is not a one way process; but it is just as well to emphasize that it is actively waged by the dominant class or classes, and in many ways much more effectively waged by them than the struggle waged by the subordinate classes."

"A may exercise power over B by getting him to do what he does not want to do, in quick succession, but he may also exercise power over him by shaping or determining his very wants. Indeed, is it not the supreme exercise of power to get another or others to have the desires you want them to have – that is, to secure their compliance by controlling their thoughts and desires?"

"Critics of structural contingency theory sometimes argue that it is not sensible for organizations to move into fit with their contingencies, because while the organization is changing its structure to fit the contingencies, the contingencies themselves change, so that the organizational structural change does not produce fit. Nevertheless, by moving towards the fit, the organization is decreasing misfit, and thereby increasing its performance relative to what it would be if it were to make no structural change."

"The aim [of positivism in organization studies] is to reveal causal regularities that underlie surface reality."

"Within organization studies, contingency theory has provided a coherent paradigm for the analysis of the structure of organizations. The paradigm has constituted a framework in which research progressed leading to the construction of a scientific body of knowledge... Contingency theory states that there is no single organizational structure that is highly effective for all organizations. It sees the structure that is optimal as varying according to certain factors such as organizational strategy or size. Thus the optimal structure is contingent upon these factors which are termed the contingency factors. For example, a small-sized organization, one that has few employees, is optimally structured by a centralized structure in which decision-making authority is concentrated at the top of the hierarchy, whereas a large organization, one that has many employees, is optimally structured by a decentralized structure in which decision-making authority is dispersed down to lower levels of the hierarchy."

"Some scholars have argued strenuously against the idea that the organization is determined by its situation and have instead asserted that managers have free choice and are thereby to be held morally accountable (Bourgeois 1984; Whittington 1989). Contingency theory appears to some critics to be a managerially convenient ideology that justifies as inevitable organizational characteristics that are not really inevitable, because they are not really required for organizational effectiveness, and that injure the interests of employees *Schreyogg, 1980). Thus contingency theory is opposed by free choice."

"Donaldson [is] a leading proponent of ‘sociological positivism’ in the field of organisation studies."

"Those responsible for marketing had to sell, not a product, but the idea that their firm was able to produce what the customer required. The product was developed after the order had been secured, the design being, in many cases, modified to suit the requirements of the customer. In mass production firms, the sequence is quite different: product development came first, then production, and finally marketing."