Bob Carter
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 147131 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Bob Carter |
| NOMBRES | Bob |
| APELLIDO | Carter |
| FIRMA | CARTER B |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Leicester |
| ORCID | 0009-0006-1019-8227 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 54 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 503 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 52 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1984 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 14 |
Contested capital
Theories of class within sociology have, over several decades, increasingly marginalised work and employment as generators of social class. In place of this, there has been a growing emphasis on culture determining class, drawing especially on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and exemplified by the work of Mike Savage and his co-authors. Bourdieusian approaches extend a narrow economic conception of capital to the terrain of culture. This article sugg…
Unlocking the Tyranny of Modern Thinking
One barrier to mental health and a common focus of psychotherapy is the tendency to identify with relentless, often self-critical thinking that searches for faults, becomes easily distracted, and pulls individuals away from the present moment. Identifying with such thinking distances people from each other, the external world, and important aspects of internal experiences that have been pushed out of awareness and relegated to the unconscious. Th…
White Collar Workers
The animal challenge to sociology
In this article, we ask why is it that sociology has been slow to take up the animal challenge, and ask what would happen if it did. We argue that sociology's fraught relationship with biology, its assumptions about human exceptionalism and its emergence in the context of industrialization and urbanization are key to understanding its lack of attention to animals and contribute to a limited conceptualization of society. This can be remedied by vi…
The crisis of public sector trade unionism
This article contends that there is a growing, if uneven, crisis in public sector trade unionism masked by relatively high membership figures that obscure a weakening of trade unions in the workplace, leaving hollowed out organisation vulnerable to further legislative and employer-led onslaughts. The weakening is not inevitable but to overcome it requires a refocusing of organising efforts on the everyday concerns of members such as understaffing…
Against Sociology as a Wonder-Free Zone
Work, employment and society sans frontières
Work, employment and society (WES ) was launched in 1987 in a period in which a number of features of British society were changing rapidly. The vibrancy and the optimism of the 1960s looked increasingly remote and sociology and the study of work reflected the more straitened times that came with the social transformations wrought by Thatcherism. The early 1980s had seen savage deflation, a consequent sharp contraction of the manufacturing indust…
Racism
Actor network theory, agency and racism
Capitalism, Class Conflict and the New Middle Class (RLE Social Theory)
Non-manual workers are fast becoming the largest occupational category in Western capitalist countries. This is the first book to present a detailed socialist analysis of this much discussed change in the class structure of contemporary capitalism. Focusing on the class position of managerial and supervisory workers, Robert Carter takes as his starting-point the inadequacy of both orthodox Marxist and Weberian models of class relations. Rather, h…
They can't be the buffer any longer
This article reasserts the value of the examination of class relations. It does so via a case study of tax-processing sites within HM Revenue and Customs, focusing on the changes wrought by the alterations to labour and supervisory processes implemented under the banner of 'lean production'. It concentrates on the transformation of front-line managers, as their tasks moved from those that required tax knowledge and team support to those that narr…
Taxing Times
The prevailing economic and budgetary climate is intensifying the search for methods and practices aimed at generating efficiencies in public sector provision. This paper investigates the increasingly popular bundle of techniques operating under the generic descriptor of lean , which promises to improve operational quality processes while simultaneously reducing cost. It offers a critical appraisal of lean as a fashionable component of public sec…
Response to E lder‐ V ass
Given that explicitly realist perspectives are currently quite unfashionable in applied linguistics, we very much welcome your thorough and careful discussion of the various forms they might take. We find the various categories you identify quite persuasive, and we find much to agree with in your characterisation of several of the positions you outline, particularly in the earlier part of the paper. However, we do take issue with aspects of your …
Animals, Agency and Resistance
In this paper we develop a relational approach to the question of animal agency. We distinguish between agency and action and, using three examples of non‐human animal behaviour, explore how human‐other animal interactions might be understood in terms of action, agency and resistance. In order to do this we draw on the distinction between primary and corporate agency found in the work of M argaret A rcher, arguing that, while non‐human animals ar…
Stressed out of my box
Occupational health and safety (OHS) is under-researched in the sociology of work and employment. This deficit is most pronounced for white-collar occupations. Despite growing awareness of the significance of psychosocial conditions - notably stress - and musculoskeletal disorders, white-collar work is considered by conventional OHS discourse to be 'safe'. This study's locus is clerical processing in the UK public sector, specifically Her Majesty…
Teachers, workforce remodelling and the challenge to labour process analysis
Early attempts to examine the labour process of teaching concentrated on the processes of de-skilling and proletarianization and were largely ignored. Subsequent attempts to amend the approach have had similarly limited impact. This article examines the restructuring of teachers' work during the last Labour government under the auspices of 'workforce remodelling', a policy intended ostensibly to reduce workload pressures on teachers. Rather than …
Human-Animal Connections
It is often observed that there is an ambivalence at the heart of human relations with other animals. This ambivalence is aptly represented in the chapters making up this collection which range from an exploration of close and intimate relations with companion animals to an investigation of the relations of exploitation and domination characterizing much human-other animal interaction. In this introductory chapter we explore some of the themes ra…
All they lack is a chain’
The adaptation of lean techniques in public services is viewed as an innovative managerialist response to government demands for more efficient services amidst large reductions in public spending. This paper explores workers' experiences of the impact of lean on work organisation and control and provides new insights into developments within contemporary back office clerical work
Human and Other Animals
List of Tables, Figures and Photographs Acknowledgements Human-animal Connections: An Introduction B.Carter & N.Charles PART I The Eternal Return of Sociology's Repressed Biological Unconscious S.Fuller Animal Practices J.Law & M.Miele PART II My Family and Other Animals: Pets as Kin N.Charles & C.Davies Contested Meanings and Canine Bodies C.Molloy The Discursive Representation of Non-human Animals in a Culture of Denial K.Morgan & M.Cole Human …
Territory, Ancestry and Descent
Sociologists have long questioned the naturalness and stability of 'ethnic groups', suggesting that a concern with how they are socially constituted is more appropriate. However, the example of genetically based medical conditions appears to challenge this by suggesting that, in certain cases, ancestry, territorial affiliation and identity may be linked objectively by genetics. The article uses the example of sickle cell disease (SCD) to examine …
Reflexivity, Realism and the Process of Casing
Teachers and the State
Teachers in the English and Welsh State education system have experienced a changing and turbulent relationship with the State in recent decades. This article adopts a historical analysis and argues that the concept of ‘partnership’ is key to understanding the relationship between teachers and the State in the period since the Second World War. Initially a partnership based on a commitment to welfarist values, professional autonomy and collective…
Not Thinking Ethnicity
The many critical approaches to an ‘ethnicity framework’ have fallen short of a very possible conclusion—that the language of ethnicity provides, for the most part, a poor paradigm with which to work. In the present paper we seek not only to re‐state some key weaknesses of this paradigm but also to suggest that these weaknesses are more general in an over‐ethnicised sociology. There are numerous critiques of particular models or elements of ethni…
Society, Nature and Sociology
Racism and the sociological imagination
Our chief purpose in this article is to argue for a restoration of a strong notion of agency to sociological accounts of social relations, and particularly those concerned with group formation and conflict. We contend that much contemporary sociological writing on this topic continues to rely on the concepts of race and ethnicity as primary explanatory or descriptive devices. This has two important consequences: on the one hand it reproduces the …
Animals, Agency and Resistance
In this paper we develop a relational approach to the question of animal agency. We distinguish between agency and action and, using three examples of non‐human animal behaviour, explore how human‐other animal interactions might be understood in terms of action, agency and resistance. In order to do this we draw on the distinction between primary and corporate agency found in the work of M argaret A rcher, arguing that, while non‐human animals ar…
The animal challenge to sociology
In this article, we ask why is it that sociology has been slow to take up the animal challenge, and ask what would happen if it did. We argue that sociology's fraught relationship with biology, its assumptions about human exceptionalism and its emergence in the context of industrialization and urbanization are key to understanding its lack of attention to animals and contribute to a limited conceptualization of society. This can be remedied by vi…
Adoption of the Organising Model in British Trade Unions
There is increasing evidence of a widespread recognition within the British trade union movement of the need to change. Amongst the directions of change being considered is adoption of the ‘organising model’ borrowed from the United States. MSF was probably the first major British union to go down this path, thereby promising to transform itself from an organisation that had pioneered the conservative ‘servicing model’ to one in the forefront of …
Immigration policy and the racialization of migrant labour
This article is a comparative study of the racialization of migrant labour. Taking the USA 1900-1925 and Britain 1948-1962 as case-studies, we examine the role of the state in constructing migration in 'race' terms and shaping the conditions under which certain categories of migrant workers participate in the labour market. We focus on debates over immigration and citizenship policy because these are key moments in the 'race making' process and t…
All they lack is a chain’
The adaptation of lean techniques in public services is viewed as an innovative managerialist response to government demands for more efficient services amidst large reductions in public spending. This paper explores workers' experiences of the impact of lean on work organisation and control and provides new insights into developments within contemporary back office clerical work
Stressed out of my box
Occupational health and safety (OHS) is under-researched in the sociology of work and employment. This deficit is most pronounced for white-collar occupations. Despite growing awareness of the significance of psychosocial conditions - notably stress - and musculoskeletal disorders, white-collar work is considered by conventional OHS discourse to be 'safe'. This study's locus is clerical processing in the UK public sector, specifically Her Majesty…
The role of Labour in the creation of a racist Britain
Teachers, workforce remodelling and the challenge to labour process analysis
Early attempts to examine the labour process of teaching concentrated on the processes of de-skilling and proletarianization and were largely ignored. Subsequent attempts to amend the approach have had similarly limited impact. This article examines the restructuring of teachers' work during the last Labour government under the auspices of 'workforce remodelling', a policy intended ostensibly to reduce workload pressures on teachers. Rather than …
Language, structure and agency
The sociolinguistic enterprise raises fundamental questions about the nature of the relationships between social phenomena (such as social class or gender) and linguistic variation, while within social theory a persistent concern is the nature of the relationship between structure and agency. Sociolinguistics can draw on social theory for analysis of the relationship between speaker and system, the role of language in the creation, maintenance an…
The 1951–55 conservative government and the racialization of black immigration
‘The problem of colonial immigration has not yet aroused public anxiety, although there was some concern, mainly due to the housing difficulties in a few localities where most of the immigrants were concentrated. On the other hand, if immigration from the colonies, and, for that matter, from India and Pakistan, were allowed to continue unchecked, there was a real danger that over the years there would be a significant change in the racial charact…
Realism and Racism
There are continuing difficulties within social science surrounding concepts of race. This book suggests that these difficulties stem from the uncertain ontological and epistemological status of ideas about race, itself a consequence of the recognition that concepts of race have all but lost their relevance as sociologically significant descriptions. This book surveys ways in which social scientists have attempted to come to terms with this situa…
Not Thinking Ethnicity
The many critical approaches to an ‘ethnicity framework’ have fallen short of a very possible conclusion—that the language of ethnicity provides, for the most part, a poor paradigm with which to work. In the present paper we seek not only to re‐state some key weaknesses of this paradigm but also to suggest that these weaknesses are more general in an over‐ethnicised sociology. There are numerous critiques of particular models or elements of ethni…
Trade union organizing and renewal
A Growing Divide
In an extensive survey, Carter examines the changing emphasis within Marxist class and labour process theory, arguing that the explicit and implicit movements towards an orthodox Marxist two class model fails to identify the significance of workplace changes, rendering Marxism formal and abstract. Conversely, a reintegration of class and labour process theory, within a framework which acknowledges the role and functions of the new middle class, p…
Racism and the sociological imagination
Our chief purpose in this article is to argue for a restoration of a strong notion of agency to sociological accounts of social relations, and particularly those concerned with group formation and conflict. We contend that much contemporary sociological writing on this topic continues to rely on the concepts of race and ethnicity as primary explanatory or descriptive devices. This has two important consequences: on the one hand it reproduces the …
Territory, Ancestry and Descent
Sociologists have long questioned the naturalness and stability of 'ethnic groups', suggesting that a concern with how they are socially constituted is more appropriate. However, the example of genetically based medical conditions appears to challenge this by suggesting that, in certain cases, ancestry, territorial affiliation and identity may be linked objectively by genetics. The article uses the example of sickle cell disease (SCD) to examine …
Work, employment and society sans frontières
Work, employment and society (WES ) was launched in 1987 in a period in which a number of features of British society were changing rapidly. The vibrancy and the optimism of the 1960s looked increasingly remote and sociology and the study of work reflected the more straitened times that came with the social transformations wrought by Thatcherism. The early 1980s had seen savage deflation, a consequent sharp contraction of the manufacturing indust…
The Restructuring of Teaching and the Restructuring of Class
Growing pressure on educational resources and the intensification of the work of teachers has strengthened claims that teaching is a labour process and that teachers are being proletarianised. At the same time, the education system is being subjected to concerted attempts to subordinate it to the interests of capital and national competitiveness, appearing to reinforce those perspectives viewing education as part of the capitalist state apparatus…
State Restructuring and Union Renewal
All sections of state employment have undergone radical restructuring since the 1980s, giving rise to a debate about the actual and necessary responses of public sector unions. Much of this debate has concerned the possibility of union renewal prompted by the tendency of New Public Management to decentralize employment relations. This article combines an examination of secondary works with a case study to evaluate the extent to which the largest …
They can't be the buffer any longer
This article reasserts the value of the examination of class relations. It does so via a case study of tax-processing sites within HM Revenue and Customs, focusing on the changes wrought by the alterations to labour and supervisory processes implemented under the banner of 'lean production'. It concentrates on the transformation of front-line managers, as their tasks moved from those that required tax knowledge and team support to those that narr…
Institutional Racism and Civil Justice
This article investigates the utility of the term 'institutional racism', using a study of the experiences of Black and Minority Ethnic [BME] people within the civil justice 'system' in England and Wales. The study is based on the results of the Legal Services Research Centre's Periodic Survey of Justiciable Problems, detailing 5,611 respondents' experiences of civil justice problems over a four-year period. The article concludes that although di…
Restructuring State Employment
Changes in the organization of the state, and labour within it, are giving new urgency to the need for a Marxist account of state labour. Traditionally, Marxist theory concerning the capitalist state and the labour process have remained disconnected. The article examines both these areas and attempts to extract elements from each to present a coherent account of state labour. The perspective developed argues for a strategy which connects state la…
Politics and Process in the making of Manufacturing, Science and Finance (MSF)
Carter discusses the origins of and processes involved in the making of MSF. The politics of the merger between ASTMS and TASS which created MSF have had a lasting influence on the new union
Bringing Out the Best in People’
This paper explores the ways in which student teachers position themselves as teachers in primary classrooms. It focuses upon one discourse in primary teaching, which we have called the ‘real teacher’ discourse, and argues that it is mainly in terms of this that students come to understand ‘being a teacher’
Taxing Times
The prevailing economic and budgetary climate is intensifying the search for methods and practices aimed at generating efficiencies in public sector provision. This paper investigates the increasingly popular bundle of techniques operating under the generic descriptor of lean , which promises to improve operational quality processes while simultaneously reducing cost. It offers a critical appraisal of lean as a fashionable component of public sec…
The role of Labour in the creation of a racist Britain
The 1951–55 conservative government and the racialization of black immigration
‘The problem of colonial immigration has not yet aroused public anxiety, although there was some concern, mainly due to the housing difficulties in a few localities where most of the immigrants were concentrated. On the other hand, if immigration from the colonies, and, for that matter, from India and Pakistan, were allowed to continue unchecked, there was a real danger that over the years there would be a significant change in the racial charact…
No military solution
Bob Carter's account of the miner's strike in South Derbyshire locates it in relation to the broader debates about the character of the strike. He argues that the events in Derbyshire suggest a modification to existing pictures of the dispute
Books
Philip E. Ogden and Paul E. White (eds), Migrants in Modern France: Population Mobility in the Later 19th and 20th Centuries London: Unwin Hyman, 1989, 320 pp., £45.00 h.b. Hastings Donnan, Marriage among Muslims: Preference and Choice in Northern Pakistan Delhi: Hindustan Publishing Corporation, 1988, 231 pp, $38.25 p.b. Malcolm Cross and Gad Heuman (eds), Labour in the Caribbean: from Emancipation To Independence Basingstoke: Macmillan Caribbea…
Politics and Process in the making of Manufacturing, Science and Finance (MSF)
Carter discusses the origins of and processes involved in the making of MSF. The politics of the merger between ASTMS and TASS which created MSF have had a lasting influence on the new union
Bringing Out the Best in People’
This paper explores the ways in which student teachers position themselves as teachers in primary classrooms. It focuses upon one discourse in primary teaching, which we have called the ‘real teacher’ discourse, and argues that it is mainly in terms of this that students come to understand ‘being a teacher’
Testing, Regulation and Control
This paper explores the impact of the 1988 Education Reform Act in England Wales on education ideologies. In particular it considers the changing narratives of the pupil being brought about through profiling, testing and streaming. Using Foucault's notion of ‘moral technologies’, the paper examines the regulation of pupil behaviour and the construction of pupil identity through systems of classification and grading. This argument is supported by …
Losing the Common Touch
This paper traces writing by middle‐class women involved in organising and teaching kindergartens in the USA and Canada from about 1860 to 1910. It is suggested that it is possible to construct several stories from these texts, and that post‐structuralist strategies for textual analysis are invaluable in doing so. In order to write feminist accounts of kindergarten work, however, historians need also to attend to the social relations and historic…
A Growing Divide
In an extensive survey, Carter examines the changing emphasis within Marxist class and labour process theory, arguing that the explicit and implicit movements towards an orthodox Marxist two class model fails to identify the significance of workplace changes, rendering Marxism formal and abstract. Conversely, a reintegration of class and labour process theory, within a framework which acknowledges the role and functions of the new middle class, p…
Narratives of Schooling and the Construction of Pupilhood
(1996). Narratives of Schooling and the Construction of Pupilhood. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education: Vol. 17, No. 1, pp. 15-24
Immigration policy and the racialization of migrant labour
This article is a comparative study of the racialization of migrant labour. Taking the USA 1900-1925 and Britain 1948-1962 as case-studies, we examine the role of the state in constructing migration in 'race' terms and shaping the conditions under which certain categories of migrant workers participate in the labour market. We focus on debates over immigration and citizenship policy because these are key moments in the 'race making' process and t…
The Restructuring of Teaching and the Restructuring of Class
Growing pressure on educational resources and the intensification of the work of teachers has strengthened claims that teaching is a labour process and that teachers are being proletarianised. At the same time, the education system is being subjected to concerted attempts to subordinate it to the interests of capital and national competitiveness, appearing to reinforce those perspectives viewing education as part of the capitalist state apparatus…
Adversity and Opportunity
ONE FACILE RESPONSE to the prospect of unemployment hasbeen the advice to individuals threatened by it to regard the experi-ence as a chance to change direction, not a problem, but a challenge and an opportunity. By this measure there is no shortage of challenge and opportunity in Britain. Similarly, to say that the restructuring of employ-ment relations and, in particular, the decentralisation of bargaining, offers the unions an opportunity to r…
Restructuring State Employment
Changes in the organization of the state, and labour within it, are giving new urgency to the need for a Marxist account of state labour. Traditionally, Marxist theory concerning the capitalist state and the labour process have remained disconnected. The article examines both these areas and attempts to extract elements from each to present a coherent account of state labour. The perspective developed argues for a strategy which connects state la…
Language, structure and agency
The sociolinguistic enterprise raises fundamental questions about the nature of the relationships between social phenomena (such as social class or gender) and linguistic variation, while within social theory a persistent concern is the nature of the relationship between structure and agency. Sociolinguistics can draw on social theory for analysis of the relationship between speaker and system, the role of language in the creation, maintenance an…
Adoption of the Organising Model in British Trade Unions
There is increasing evidence of a widespread recognition within the British trade union movement of the need to change. Amongst the directions of change being considered is adoption of the ‘organising model’ borrowed from the United States. MSF was probably the first major British union to go down this path, thereby promising to transform itself from an organisation that had pioneered the conservative ‘servicing model’ to one in the forefront of …
Social categories and sociolinguistics
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Lessons from America
S. Aronowitz, From the Ashes of the Old: American Labor and America's Future, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998, $25.00, 246 pp. K. Bronfenbrenner, S. Friedman, R. Hurd, R. Oswald and R. Seeber (eds.), Organizing To Win: New Research on Union Strategies, Ithaca: ILR Press, 1998, $19.95 xii+370 pp. Jo-Ann Mort (ed.) Not Your Father's Union Movement: Inside the AFL-CIO, London: Verso, 1998, £13.00, paper xii+237 pp. B. Nissen, (ed.) Unions and Workp…
Realism and Racism
There are continuing difficulties within social science surrounding concepts of race. This book suggests that these difficulties stem from the uncertain ontological and epistemological status of ideas about race, itself a consequence of the recognition that concepts of race have all but lost their relevance as sociologically significant descriptions. This book surveys ways in which social scientists have attempted to come to terms with this situa…
Rom Harré on Social Structure and Social Change
Still an Uncertain Future
Realism and Racism
There are continuing difficulties within social science surrounding concepts of race. This book suggests that these difficulties stem from the uncertain ontological and epistemological status of ideas about race, itself a consequence of the recognition that concepts of race have all but lost their relevance as sociologically significant descriptions. This book surveys ways in which social scientists have attempted to come to terms with this situa…
Methodological triangulation and realist research
Triangulation is widely recommended as a way of doing social research (Bryman 1996; Bryman, 2003; Denzin 1970; Flick 1992; Gilbert 1993). It involves looking at the research question from several viewpoints rather as mappers will place instruments on three hilltops to get overlapping data sets concerning the valley or plain below. The most well known form of triangulation, data triangulation, uses multiple data types (e.g. qualitative and quantit…
State Restructuring and Union Renewal
All sections of state employment have undergone radical restructuring since the 1980s, giving rise to a debate about the actual and necessary responses of public sector unions. Much of this debate has concerned the possibility of union renewal prompted by the tendency of New Public Management to decentralize employment relations. This article combines an examination of secondary works with a case study to evaluate the extent to which the largest …
Institutional Racism and Civil Justice
This article investigates the utility of the term 'institutional racism', using a study of the experiences of Black and Minority Ethnic [BME] people within the civil justice 'system' in England and Wales. The study is based on the results of the Legal Services Research Centre's Periodic Survey of Justiciable Problems, detailing 5,611 respondents' experiences of civil justice problems over a four-year period. The article concludes that although di…
Sociology (39 obras) · Political science (36 obras) · Law (25 obras) · Epistemology (19 obras) · Social science (17 obras) · Economics (16 obras) · Philosophy (16 obras) · Labor Movements and Unions (15 obras) · Politics (15 obras) · Law (14 obras)