Professor Gregor McLennan
BA (Bristol), MA (Birmingham), PhD (Birmingham)
Office: 2G4, 12 Woodland Road, Bristol, BS8 1UQ, UK
Tel: 0117 928 8214
Email: g.mclennan@bristol.ac.uk
Gregor McLennan holds the Established Chair of Sociology in the department, and was Head of Department, 2000-2003. He is also Director of the University's Institute for Advanced Studies. Following postgraduate work at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, he worked in the Open University 1979-1991. Prior to taking up his position at Bristol, Gregor was Established Chair of Sociology and Head of Department at Massey University, New Zealand, 1991-7. He is the author of Marxism and the Methodologies of History (1981), Marxism, Pluralism and Beyond (1989), Pluralism (1995), and Sociological Cultural Studies: Reflexivity and Positivity in the Human Sciences (2006), as well as being co-editor of five collective volumes, including The Idea of the Modern State (1984). The third edition of his co-authored sociology textbook for New Zealand students, Exploring Society, was published in late 2009. Gregor is an Academician of the Social Sciences.
Research Interests
- Social theory
- Politics and ideology
- Philosophy of social sciences
Current Research
- Evaluating 'post-secular' social theory
- The work of Ideas and Intellectuals
- Inter-, post-, and trans-disciplinarity
- The 'death of class' question
- Complexity, rhetoric and realism in sociological meta-theory
Current Teaching
Philosophy of social science (MSc); Contemporary social theory (MSc)
Recent Publications
- 'On Malevolence,' in New Left Review, 60, 2009.
- 'Progressivism Reinvigorated' in J. Pugh (ed) What is Radical Politics Today? Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
- 'Among the Unbelievers', in New Left Review (Size 75.4 kB - File type application/pdf) -review of Charles Taylor's 2007 book, 'A Secular Age'.
- 'Disinterested, Disengaged, Useless: conservative or progressive idea of the university?', in Globalisation, Societies & Education 6(2), 2008: 195-200.
- 'Progressive Pluralism?', Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, Vol 11 no. 1, 2008: pp. 89-105
- Sociological Cultural Studies: Reflexivity and Positivity in the Human Sciences, Palgrave, 2006. The introduction (pdf, 82kb), contents page (pdf, 66kb) and chapter one (pdf, 169kb) of this book are available to download.
- 'The University in the "Condition of Publicity": How LSE engages in the wider world' (with Thomas Osborne and Janet Vaux), Globalisation, Societies and Education, 3 (3), 2005: 241-260.
- 'The New American Cultural Sociology: An appraisal', Theory, Culture and Society 22 (6) 2005: 1-18.
- Essays on ‘Democracy’, ‘Power’, ‘Resistance’ in New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, eds. Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg and Meaghan Morris, Blackwell (2005).
- ‘Travelling with vehicular ideas: the case of the Third Way’, Economy & Society, 33 (4), 2004, pp. 484-99.
- ‘The Dynamics of Ideas’, Economy & Society 33(4), 2004 (Special issue edited with Tom Osborne and Judith Squires).
- ‘Rationalising Musicality: A Critique of Alexander’s “Strong Program” in Cultural Sociology’, Thesis Eleven: Critical Theory and Historical Sociology, 2004 (79), pp. 75 - 86.
- ‘Contemporary “Vehicularity” and “Romanticism”: Debating the Status of Ideas and Intellectuals’ (with Tom Osborne), Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 2003, 6(4), pp. 51-66.
- 'Sociology, Eurocentrism and Postcolonial Theory', European Journal of Social Theory, 6(1), 2003, 69-86.
- 'Sociology's Complexity', Sociology, 37(3), 2003, 547-64.
- 'Quandaries in Metatheory: Against Pluralism', Economy & Society, 31(3), 2002, 483-96.
- 'Sociological Cultural Studies: The Question of Explanation', Cultural Studies, 16(5), 2002, 631-49.
- 'Sustaining Sociology: An Interview with Gregor McLennan', New Zealand Sociology, 17(2), 2002, 322-37. This interview (pdf, 150kb) is available to download.
- 'Thus: Reflections on Loughborough Relativism', History of the Human Sciences, 14(3), 2001, 85-101.
- 'Can There Be A Critical Multiculturalism?', Ethnicities 1(3), 2001, 389-408.
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