Margaret Archer

Over 40 years ago, the Executive Committee of the International Sociological Association (ISA), meeting in Poland, also met Izabela for the first time, standing dignified amid drifting snowflakes to welcome us. As the niece of Magdalena Sokołowska, I assumed this doctoral student was only helping with local arrangements. How wrong can one be? This was not one week off her thesis on Virginia Woolf but an introduction to four decades of working for the ISA...

There is no such thing as immaculate perception. From the beginning, my own vision came through UNESCO spectacles: the ISA was founded to help “knit together social science scholars of the world” to advance these disciplines. Given that its 65 years span the divide between “high” and “late” modernity – and crucially, what happens next – the ISA could have taken this as its brief. It did not. Instead, it was...

Margaret Archer was the first and only woman President of the ISA, 1986-1990. She has pioneered the study of social change as a process of “morphogenesis” by which she means the serial interaction of social structure and social agents – interaction made possible by cultural understandings. It all began with her studies of the French and English educational systems, showing how they structure responses which in turn...

With the death of Ulf Himmelstrand on June 8th 2011 world sociology has lost one of its gentlest and most dedicated of friends. To him ‘globalization’ was neither merely a concept nor a cause, it was something he lived. Never one to inflict his biography on others, evidence of his dedicated support has to be pieced together from the narratives of those who had experienced it at first hand. This was especially the case for his years at...