SPA Seminar Series: Professor Graham Scrambler (UCL)

This paper builds on a programme of inquiry into the fracturing of contemporary society. In the first part I will offer a characterisation of this process, referring in particular to environmental threat; the nomadic proletariat; the new inequality; class and precarity; post-national 'othering'; gender dissolution; cultural disorientation; and disconnected fatalism. In the second part of the paper a suggest that there are discernible 'causal' mechanisms behind this process of fracturing and I focus on a particular quartet: the class/command dynamic; the stigma/deviance dynamic; the insider/outsider dynamic; and party/populist dynamic. I end with a few notes on sociology's role in the fractured society.

The paper builds on discussions in two recent books: 'Sociology, Health and the Fractured Society: A Critical Realist Account' (Routledge, 2018), and 'A Sociology of Shame and Blame: Insiders Versus Outsiders' (Palgrave, 2019).