As sociology has drifted further and further from any conservative touchstones, argues Robert Dingwall, it has become less and less able to understand the society that provides its subsistence.

Sociology today, argues our Daniek Nehring, is defined by a fundamental contradiction between its everyday labor practices and its imaginary ethos.

The incoming and the outgoing editors of Britain’s oldest sociology journal discuss what the future holds for the journal and what challenges face sociology in current times.

Our Robert Dingwall reflects on Tinder’s in-house sociologist and on the just-announced New Year’s Honours list to question just how diverse are current understandings of diversity.

Public conversations about Britain’s EU membership could have involved wide-ranging discussions of British and European politics, economics and society, argues our Daniel Nehring. They did not. Instead, they were dominated by oversimplifications, stereotypes and lies.

Rebutting Daniel Nehring’s recent post asking if sociology still matters in Britain, Robert Dingwall responds that sociology does have a good story to tell about itself, even in the age of austerity.

Daniel Nehring sees a fundamental contradiction between the critically engaged scholarship on social inequalities and power structures that British sociologists still produce and the thoroughly financialized, individualistic, and highly competitive organisational logics of the universities in which they work.

Social Science Space is presenting 10 shortlisted essays written by young social scientists in an ESRC competition looking at how social science might change the world in the next half century. This week we present Kristin Hübner’s discussion on how feminist theory may erase socially constructed ideas about what gender is and how it functions.