ProfessorRobert Van Krieken

Robert van Krieken is Visiting Professor of Sociology at University Collee Dublin and Professor of Sociology at the University of Sydney. His research interests include the sociology of organisations, law, criminology, childhood, processes of civilization and decivilization, cultural genocide, and the history and sociology of celebrity, as well as contributing to the theoretical debates around the work of Elias, Foucault, Luhmann and Latour. In addition to journal articles in Sociological Review, Sociology, British Journal of Sociology, Economy & Society, Journal of Sociology, and Theory & Society, his books include Norbert Elias (1998), Celebrity and the Law (2010, co-authored), Celebrity Society (2012) and Sociology 5th edition (2014, co-authored). The second edition of Celebrity Society: The Struggle for Attention, is due in December 2018. He is especially interested in drawing on Weber, Foucault, and Elias in understanding the ways in which social structures and dynamics are underpinned by particular organisational or institutional forms, how those forms of organisation interweave with particular psychological dispositions, and how that interlinking of structure and habitus changes over time, using Weber’s concepts of discipline and rationalisation, Foucault’s account of discipline and government, and Elias’s concepts of civilization and decivilization. His most recent work has been on the application of Elias's 'process-figurational theory' in organizational analysis and its utility in socio-legal studies, in the fields of criminology, regulation, and family law.