Sociology's malaise
David Walker is right to argue that sociology has lost its way . The subject has become the victim of its own embourgoisement. Chairs of sociology and new journals proliferate; a comfortable niche...
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Masters of many universes
Students now need to be expert in more than one subject in order to answer the major questions posed by modern society, argues Colin MacCabe. The call to interdisciplinarity is almost as old as the...
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Don's Diary
MONDAY. Wake up in a hotel room in Canton at 4am for fear of missing my flight to Zhengzhou. Having researched foot-binding in China for five years, this field trip is to be the culmination of my...
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Dialogue with disease
Lucy Hodges meets Julie Theriot, a biologist who listens to bacteria talk. In her lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Julie Theriot is busy growing nasty strains of bacteria. She nurtures listeria and...
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Olga Wojtas
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Off-the-self sociology
Communitarianism has caught the imagination of politicians across the political spectrum. But can its founding father, Amitai Etzioni (above), be all things to all men - and, more importantly, women...
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Beware sloppy sloganeering
Poorly understood free market principles applied to science funding pose a threat to long-term research, says Derek Roberts. I am disappointed, but not surprised to see (THES, March 10) that the...
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Running on a losing FE ticket
Fawzi Ibrahim does his colleagues in further education no favours by referring to slave contracts and slave-owning employers (THES, March 3). He insults the suffering of millions of people worldwide...
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Complete teacher in a divided world
Akbar Ahmed on the provocative social scientist Ernest Gellner. I first met Ernest Gellner 20 years ago. Based at the London School of Economics, he already had a formidable academic reputation,...
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The entertainment industry
On this Comic Relief Day, Jean-Louis Barsoux looks at the peculiar use of humour in Britain's businesses. Managers up and down Britain today will strolled into work wearing red noses. They did this...
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Tiger's eyes
(Photograph) - Mahathir Mohamad, prime minister of Malaysia, one of the fast-growing so-called "tiger" economies of South-east Asia, this week launched the Malaysian Commonwealth Studies Centre at...
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Computer sciences come bottom of the quality class
Computer science departments have produced the lowest proportion of excellent ratings in any of the eight subjects so far assessed for teaching quality by the Higher Education Funding Council for...
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Battle with CBI on intellectual rights
Universities should have complete initial control of intellectual property rights on collaborative research projects, says the Higher Education Funding Council for England. By taking this line it is...
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Schools join in
Tim Boswell, further and higher education minister, said this week that schools as well as universities and colleges will be able to bid for money under the European Union's new Socrates programme...
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Dolly doldrums
(Photograph) - Dolly doldrums: a mysterious disease afflicting collectors' valuable dolls made in the 1940s and 1950s, which made them buckle, bloat and build up a brown sticky liquid, has been cured...