John Offer

Career

Research

• "Bringing It Home? Sociological Practice and the Practice of Sociology", Sociology
• "Christian political economics, Richard Whately and Irish poor law theory", Journal of Social Policy
• "A new reading of Spencer on 'society', 'organicism' and 'spontaneous order'", Journal of Classical Sociology
• "From 'natural selection' to 'survival of the fittest': on Spencer's refashioning of Darwin in the 1860s", Journal of Classical Sociology
• "Robert Pinker, the idea of welfare and the study of social policy: on unitarism and pluralism", Journal of Social Policy
• "Social change and selectionist thought: on Spencer, Darwin and Runciman", The Sociological Review
• Herbert Spencer and Social Theory.
• An Intellectual History of British Social Policy: Idealism versus Non-idealism
• "'Virtue', 'citizen character' and 'social environment': social theory and agency in social policy since 1830", Journal of Social Policy, vol. 35, no. 2, pp. 282–302.
• "Dead theorists and older people: Spencer, Idealist social thought and divergent prescriptions for care", Sociology, vol. 3, no. 5. pp. 903–919.
• "Free agent or 'conscious automaton'? Contrasting interpretations of the individual in Spencer's writing on social and moral life", The Sociological Review, vol. 51, no. 1. pp. 1–19.
• Herbert Spencer: Critical Assessments, 4 vols.
• "Idealist thought, social policy and the rediscovery of informal care", British Journal of Sociology, vol. 50, no. 3, pp. 467–488.
• Social Workers, the Community and Social Interaction: Intervention and the Sociology of Welfare
• Herbert Spencer: Political Writings.
• "Social administration and its relationship to the sociology of welfare", International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 15–26.
• "'Desert', 'need', the social theory of the Poor Law report of 1834, and John Stuart Mill", International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, vol. 9, no. 1. pp. 63-75
• Informal Welfare: A Sociological Study of Care in Northern Ireland
• "A Spencer trio recalled: Social Statics, First Principles and The Man Versus the State", Sociology, vol. 19, no. 4, pp. 655–659.
• "Dissonance over harmony: a Spencer oddity", Sociology, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 274–277.
• "Spencer's sociology of welfare", Sociological Review, vol. 31, no. 4, pp. 719–752.
• "Interpreting Spencer", Sociology, vol. 14, pp. 131–140.