A response

Professor Sampson's paper offers a valuable snapshot of the professional sociologist's craft. His methodological innovations will prove influential and his focus on durable inequality and the social ranking of places is instructive even if those dynamics are gravely complicated – as they are in contemporary London – by increasing inequality, the after-effects of the privatization and adjustments in the inflated market for dwelling space. Sampson's concern to show where what he calls the prevailing ‘structuralist’ analyses of these matters might be productively supplemented by a greater concern with matters of culture is to be applauded. I take the fact that he has drawn his epigraph from the inspirational fiction of Ralph Ellison as a warrant allowing my response to roam…