John Holmwood

• Professor (Full) at University of Nottingham

El ensayo de Loïc Wacquant, “La trampa del ‘capitalismo racial’”, pregunta si el término ‘capitalismo racial’ “es una solución o un problema conceptual”. Su respuesta es directa. Argumenta que el capitalismo racial no tiene lugar en una ciencia social cabalmente definida y entendida. En este artículo establecemos las limitaciones, según las entende...

Loïc Wacquant’s essay, “The Trap of ‘Racial Capitalism’”, asks whether the term is “a conceptual solution or a conceptual problem”. His answer is forthright. He argues that racial capitalism has no place in a properly defined and understood social science. In this contribution, we set out the limitations, as we perceive them, of Wacquant’s own anal...

This collection of essays follows on from the 2021 RACE.ED event “Racial Equity Work in the University and Beyond: The Race Equality Charter in Context”, which explored what racial equality means in higher education and was organized following publication of the report of a largescale review of the Race Equality Charter. Advance HE’s Race Equality...

In 2014 the 'Trojan Horse' affair, an alleged plot to 'Islamify' several state schools in Birmingham, caused a previously highly successful school to be vilified. Holmwood and O'Toole challenge the accepted narrative and show how it was used to justify an intrusive counter extremism agenda.

This book goes beyond now-familiar analyses of ‘neoliberal governmentality’ which tend to characterise academics as passive subjects or as ‘strategic actors’, drawing on and cynically exploiting metrics as a form of capital exchangeable across different fields. Instead, Universities in Crisis draws on newer paradigms by drawing on processual, post-...

Herbert Adolphus Miller (1875–1951) is a neglected figure within North American sociology, yet he made a distinctive contribution to the sociology and politics of race relations. He was one of the first sociological critics of eugenics and developed a distinctive approach to race relations and the position of subject minorities derived from a criti...

This article addresses the sociological approach and political engagements of the early twentieth century sociologist, Herbert Adolphus Miller (1875–1951). He is now largely forgotten, but he had deep connections within the Chicago milieu of pragmatist sociology and social reform activities through both the Settlement movement and the Survey moveme...

Este artigo versa sobre as origens coloniais e raciais do estado de bem-estar social com uma ênfase particular no estado de bem-estar liberal do Reino Unido e dos Estados Unidos. Ambos são entendidos em termos da centralidade da condição mercantilizada da força de trabalho enquanto expressão da lógica das relações de mercado. Em contraste, argument...

A critical inquiry into the politics, practices, and infrastructures of open access and the reconfiguration of scholarly communication in digital societies. The Open Access Movement proposes to remove price and permission barriers for accessing peer-reviewed research work—to use the power of the internet to duplicate material at an infinitesimal co...

This article discusses issues of public communication. It does so in terms of the ethics of verbatim theatre and public sociology. The issues raised are exemplified through the ‘Birmingham Trojan Horse affair’ which has been subject to extensive media reporting, public inquiries of various kinds as well as legal processes. In that sense, there have...

Universities remain the most important organisations involved in developing knowledge and providing means of social mobility. However, they are facing challenges from new providers facilitated by new technologies. Here, we propose an analysis of three challenges to established understandings of higher education: Digitalisation, Commodification and...

This paper addresses a key moment in the development of sociology when its status as a science was criticised from within by ethnomethodologists (Harvey Sacks and Harold Garfinkel), post‐Althusserian Marxists (Barry Hindess) and Michel Foucault. These criticisms seemed to come from different sides, but they converged in arguing their positions from...

This article addresses the colonial and racial origins of the welfare state with a particular emphasis on the liberal welfare state of the USA and UK. Both are understood in terms of the centrality of the commodified status of labour power expressing a logic of market relations. In contrast, we argue that with a proper understanding of the relation...

In 2014 an investigation into an alleged plot to 'Islamify' several state schools in Birmingham began. Known as the 'Trojan Horse' affair, this caused a previously highly successful school to be vilified. Holmwood, an expert witness in the professional misconduct cases brought against the teachers, and O'Toole, who researches the government's count...

This concluding chapter explores alternative lessons that can be drawn up from the Trojan Horse affair, presenting two tragedies that are bound up together in the affair. One tragedy is the disruption of the lives of teachers and governors in Birmingham, who made such a difference to the prospects of the pupils under their care, and were unjustly a...

This chapter discusses the National College for Teaching and Leadership (NCTL) professional misconduct hearings to which the Clarke Report gave rise. The NCTL hearings represented the first opportunity for the individuals who had been named in the investigation reports and in the media as part of a plot to Islamicise schools to respond, yet they ha...

This chapter focuses on the Trojan Horse affair. The puzzle in the Trojan Horse affair is to understand how a successful school could become the centre of a moral panic. Events unfolded quickly from the first media report in the Times on 2 March 2014, followed by Ofsted inspections of 21 schools ordered by the Secretary of State for Education, Mich...

This chapter looks at the changing governance of English schools. The discussion of the policy context pointed to the ‘heterarchic’ nature of school governance in Birmingham, and elsewhere, as a consequence of the emergence of new arrangements for school management and governance associated with the government's academies programme, which occurred...

This chapter examines the government's Prevent strategy for addressing extremism and radicalisation. The Prevent strategy that was launched by the Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG) under the New Labour government in 2007 sets out a ‘hearts and minds’ approach to counterterrorism, in which engagement and partnership with British...

This introductory chapter provides an overview on the events in Birmingham that came to the public attention in March 2014 involving an alleged plot by conservative and hardline Sunnis to Islamicise a number of state-funded schools where there were significant numbers of Muslim pupils. Attention was focused on one particular school, Park View Acade...

In 2014 the UK government launched an investigation into the “Trojan Horse” affair: an alleged plot to “Islamify” several state schools in Birmingham. Twenty-one schools in Birmingham were subjected to snap Ofsted inspections and included in the various inquiries into the affair. The book's authors — one who was an expert witness in the professiona...

This chapter evaluates how the debate on ‘British values’ and the security agenda associated with Prevent have been translated into policies for schools, and how those policies have been implemented. One of the immediate consequences of the publicity surrounding the Trojan Horse affair was that the Department for Education (DfE) reinforced the requ...

This chapter details the specific requirements of religious education and collective worship in non-faith schools and the nature of the agreed syllabus for religious education in Birmingham. The main difference between faith and non-faith schools concerns the recruitment of teachers and other staff — for example, whether a particular faith-backgrou...

This chapter addresses the Clarke and Kershaw reports. In each report, much stands or falls on the idea that an ‘Islamic ethos’ is, in itself, problematic. This is a misunderstanding, one that is allowed to arise because neither report systematically addresses the issue of the nature of the religious requirements on schools. Indeed, notwithstanding...

This chapter discusses the importance of promoting ‘British values’. The Trojan Horse affair has shaped subsequent debates on community cohesion and the counter-extremism agenda, but it was, in its turn, shaped by preceding events. These earlier events — urban disturbances, claims that communities are self-segregating, perceived threats of terroris...

This chapter studies the Ofsted inspections and reports. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the main criticism of Park View Academy was that it was overly ‘Islamic’ and that this, in turn, was associated with a ‘plot’ to ‘Islamise’ other schools. Yet the ‘takeover’ of other schools was itself the normal process associated with the academies pr...

In advance of Emerald’s Academic Book Week event on January 23rd, two of our key speakers – John Holmwood and Martin Paul Eve – discuss some of the key questions around academic publishing and the research ecosystem.

Lisa Lowe’s book addresses the colonial relationships that connect the continents of Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas. These relationships of appropriation and dispossession are integral to liberal thought and, no matter how much it seeks to present itself as transcending these contexts, liberal thought is continually fractured by them. The bo...

This article takes a historical approach to the rise and fall of the public university, relating its fate to specific developments in public policy. Particular attention will be paid to the United Kingdom since it has developed an explicit drive towards the marketization of higher education in the context of an earlier commitment to public higher e...

This theoretically focused chapter by John Holmwood adopts a strategy of conceptual ‘provincializing’ and thereby reveals race as a lacuna in Polanyian and neo-Polanyian scholarship. Alongside its wide-ranging theoretical engagement, including innovative postcolonial reflections, Holmwood’s discussion is extraordinarily timely, engaging with US ‘ra...

The present Conservative Government, like the Coalition Government that preceded it, has an ideological predisposition towards the market and its supposed benefits to consumers, but appears to have no vision of Higher Education and its benefits to students and to the whole of society. These wider societal benefits can be summarised under three asp...

The present Conservative Government, like the Coalition Government that preceded it, has an ideological predisposition towards the market and its supposed benefits to consumers, but appears to have no vision of Higher Education and its benefits to students and to the whole of society. These wider societal benefits can be summarised under three aspe...

What sociology is to me is best understood in terms of my biography and career in sociology. I have come to see sociology as an expression of democratic citizenship and as centrally concerned with facilitating public debate over pressing social issues. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, given my involvement in forming the Campaign for the Public University,...

Sociologists’ Tales presents the narratives of 33 UK sociologists from different generations, many internationally recognised, writing about what sociology means to them. The different tales together reveal the changing context of sociology and how this has shaped the authors’ practice. Providing a valuable insight into why sociology is so fascinat...

This article offers a 'local', British, reading of Piketty's landmark book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, suggesting that the challenge it offers to sociological approaches to inequality is more fundamental than hitherto recognized. The variations in 'national trajectories' exposed by Piketty reveal Britain to be anomalous in terms of standa...

Book reviews 405 sociologist to count as a social theorist and, therefore, to merit inclusion? Is rational choice theory not a social theory, hence its exclusion? Why are the nineteenth-century authors who can plausibly be described as social theorists not given at least a chapter to themselves? Why is there a chapter on globalization but not on th...

This paper will address neo-liberalism not as a theory of public policy, but as a theory of knowledge. It will argue that neo-liberalism favours the market as a mechanism for the generation of knowledge. In favouring knowledge under contract, neo-liberalism is explicitly hostile to those forms of social science that provide expertise precisely beca...

Recent developments in sociological theory have addressed the linkage between structure and agency via a conception of reflexivity and the agent's internal conversation as a means of understanding the (variable) contribution that the self and its powers contribute to social outcomes. In this paper, I present a sociological realism utilising the app...

Public higher education has a long history, with its growth associated with mass higher education and the extension of a social right to education from secondary schooling to university education. Following the rise in student numbers since the 1970s, the aspiration to higher education has been universalized, although opportunities remain structure...

The immediate context of this chapter is the radical reforms to higher education in England that were initiated after the Browne Review (2010). It recommended that undergraduate degree programmes in social sciences, arts and humanities should be wholly financed by student fees supported by a publicly underwritten system of income-contingent loans....

Leading sociologists outline the historical development of the discipline in Britain and document its continuing influence in this essential and comprehensive reference work. Spanning the Scottish enlightenment of the 18th century to the present day this Handbook maps the discipline and the British contribution.

Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach to social justice has helped to form UN millennium goals as well as other policy expressions of both national and international political agencies. It has had a major influence on many researchers across a range of disciplines, from economics, politics and philosophy to development studies and social policy. Howe...

This paper addresses moderation in the context of an immoderate populist politics and claims that social integration requires inculcation in the values of a dominant culture, especially by those perceived as originating from outside the political community. The paper argues, instead, for a deep pluralism and for the idea of multiculturalism as frie...

What does moderation mean in the twenty-first century? And what might a reasoned project of moderation look like, intellectually, politically and in practice? This paper argues for a sociological reappraisal of the historical origins, intellectual foundations and contemporary salience of moderation. Too often wrongly defined by a sense of what it i...

Structure/agency theories presuppose that there is a unity to structure that distinguishes it from the (potential) diversity of agents' responses. In doing so they formally divide the robust social processes shaping the social world (structure) from contingent agential variation (agency). In this article we question this division by critically eval...

The essay addresses recent government proposals for higher education in England. It argues that they represent a neoliberal attack on the idea of public higher education. Where public higher education had previously been widely accepted as a social right and a condition of liberal citizenship, higher education is now to be understood as a private r...

A number of commentators have suggested that the shift from a Fordist to a post-Fordist regime of political economy has had positive consequences for sociology, including the reinforcement of critical sociologies (Burawoy, 2005; Steinmetz, 2005). This article argues that, although disciplinary hierarchies have been destabilized, what is emerging is...

The paper addresses the recent turn to pragmatism within sociological theory, arguing that, in crucial respects, the ‘new’ pragmatism is at odds with the animating thrust of the ‘old’ pragmatism associated with James, Dewey and Mead. Two tendencies in the new pragmatism are discussed, namely ‘the universal pragmatics’ associated with general theory...