I walk down to the Post Office – we still have one – to buy a 'Guardian'. It's tinselled up inside the shop and I catch a glimpse of some Santas. What gets me down most, though, is the low background Xmas glitter.

As usual, this time of the year depresses me. I’m a media studies lecturer with an interest in popular culture. So theoretically I should like Christmas because millions of other people do. After all, you don’t even need to be a Christian. The big Xmas festival is above all a secular celebration of shininess, warm mouthfuls and giddying technology that just might keep away the mid-winter blues.

As it happens, though, I hate the whole thing. And I find myself for a few weeks each year almost agreeing with that doyen of cultural elitists, Theodor Adorno. Adorno condemned popular taste in the strongest possible terms, on the grounds that working class people enslave themselves through their obsessive consumption of media and the grotesque pleasures dished out by the ‘culture industry’.

Yet glancing at the ‘Guardian’ as I walk back from the Post Office it strikes me there’s nothing particularly working class about the Christmas consumption spree. A 16 page section clearly designed to appeal to that paper’s middle class readership announces itself as, ‘The green gift guide: Gorgeous! And ethical too’. There isn’t a shred of irony that I can detect. Instead the images of objects, each with a little ethical rationale and price tag, roll on for page after gushing page.

What was intermediate depression now switches to mild nausea. It’s just awful - the very idea that we can consume our way to a just and sustainable world. Preposterous! Surely the consumption on offer here is worse than the non-green norm. At least straightforward consumption isn’t about consuming people’s souls.

Then, quite suddenly, I start to laugh as I look at one of the featured products more closely. It’s a wooden elephant with bristles growing out if its side. ‘These elephant nail brushes make excellent stocking fillers. Made in India under fair trade conditions from wood found on the jungle floor; no trees are felled’. Well isn’t that convenient. Not only green raw materials but the workers are treated with dignity and paid … ? Well, they’re paid something.

As I look again it’s the sheer absurdity that strikes home. The mouse, ‘handmade in the UK and, crucially, stuffed with organic catnip’; some ‘babies’ doughnut rattles’ that ‘are fairly traded and handknitted’; and a pincushion made from old sweaters going for £21.95. Maybe the journalist is having a laugh after all. In any event I feel slightly better for giggling.

Ethical consumption isn’t really a joke of course. And I recognise the sincerity and good faith of the growing band of people who engage in it. But in my view it is an irrelevance at best, and a dangerous distraction at worst, given the major political task that we’re now faced with of building a fair and sustainable world for all.

Still, that’s probably enough finger wagging for one blog. There’s a limit to what people will tolerate in the way of a lecture at this time of year. Now where’s my box of baubles – I want that silver plastic pig with the pink satin bow. That’s what I call a Christmas decoration. It really gets you in the mood.

About the author

Jason Toynbee is Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at The Open University. His research interests are in creativity, copyright, and ethnicity - mainly through music - and his new book, Bob Marley: Herald of a Postcolonial World? is just out.

Sport often dominates the popular media and not just the sports pages, especially when it comes to the activities of sports celebrities. It is clearly big business too, but sport is often dismissed as ‘just a game’; something we do for fun and in leisure time. However, sometimes we need to be reminded that we could take sport more seriously, because, as Nelson Mandela has said; 'sport has the power to change the world'.

News of a film, More Than Just a Game, about how jailed African National Congress leaders used the discipline of football  to survive the trauma of imprisonment on Robben Island, which is shortly to be released in South Africa, demonstrates just how powerful sport can be. The heroes of this film are not sports celebrities but political heroes who fought apartheid. Those who followed this football team in prison included Mandela himself, Walter Sisulu and the South African president Thabo Mbeki’s father, Govan Mbeki. The news that ANC members used football as a means of coping with being imprisoned without trial for their political beliefs supports Mandela’s claim about sport’s potential power. Football in this instance offered discipline, not only on the pitch but in organisation skills which promoted self-respect in such difficult circumstances. Sport is much more than play and much more than competition and physical exercise; it is also about dignity and identity. Fifa, soccer’s international governing body, has recognised the club, the Makana Football Association, which prisoners formed 40 years ago in the Robben Island prison, reflecting the more recent acknowledgement that sport matters and that sport is also politically and socially important.

Although they don’t get the media coverage of the Premiership clubs and their superstars, organisations such as Kick it Out, Football Against Racism in Europe and Football Unites Racism Dividesare all currently working to foreground the social and political potential of sport, for example, to combat racism and social exclusion. Sometimes, rather than drowning in a sea of celebrity details, or even the successes and failures of our own team, we need to remember the broader picture and we need a reminder that sport can be about heroes as well as celebrities and about political struggle as well as winning and losing on the pitch; not that these things are not what matters too, especially in playing and following sport.

About the author

Kath Woodward is senior lecturer in sociology at the Open University, focusing on gendered identities. She has recently completed research into anti-racist organisations in sport.

I first came across Anthony Giddens when I was an undergraduate at Bath, some time in what a six year old of my acquaintance insists were ‘the olden days’. It’s interesting the way in which we parcel up time – periodising both our personal biographies and societies as a whole. For me time and place stand for whole webs of social and cultural connections. The Bath years – when Ian Dury and the Blockheads were asserting that sex ‘n’ drugs ‘n’ rock and roll were all your brain and body needed and pleasant as they all were I found that actually studying for my degree also gave another kind of pleasure and freedom.

So I came to Giddens at some point in late, high or possibly reflexive modernity; mature capitalism, the zenith of the post-war settlement or the apogee and its collapse. Which is another way of saying that I was lucky as the first from a ‘respectable working class’ family which had maybe just clawed its way into the ‘lower middle class’ to benefit from a welfare sate which had educated me for free and was now sending me off to University with no thought of paying fees and with a grant which – topped up by £50 a term by my parents – was just enough with a little bit of waitressing and office temping through the holidays to get by.

My first Giddens was The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies and the second  Capitalism and Modern Social Theory: an analysis of the writings of Marx, Durkheim and Weber. For my generation of sociologists these are the Big Three, the trinity of my discipline’s foundational myth. The short introductory account would go that Marx offers us the historical, determinist account, man (yes, I do mean man) as product of his social conditions, subject of and to a history not of our own making; Durkheim the proto –functionalist concerned not with subjective experience but with the thing-like quality of social facts enduring and predictable regardless of which individuals occupy them; Weber who in the early years of the century struggled with the concerns of structure and meaning whilst, we were told, locked in a debate with Marx’s ghost - but then in the mid 70s who wasn’t.

The books have moved from house to house with me but probably haven’t been used for over a decade. Looking today at books which proceed from Marx’s contribution is like visiting another time, a time before post-structuralism, post-modernism and the cultural turn. Equally striking though is the extent to which some very contemporary concerns figure - the narrative of sociology’s development as a modernist account of modernity, debates around structure and agency , the future of social democracy, structuration and the critique of totalising thought are all here.

Both books deal with the interpretation, reinterpretation, misunderstanding, appropriation and misappropriation of ideas from an earlier time. Reading them again today I am very aware of how books can change over time. On the one hand I am taken back to an original reading from a different time and place whilst on the other very aware of how differently I am viewing them through older eyes in the context of a changed social world.

Related links:

• Anthony Giddens gives the 2007 Pavis Lecture - you can listen online
• For a guide to Giddens' work, explore our brief biography

About the author

Sue Hemmings is a Social Science Staff Tutor, based in the Cambridge office of the Open University. She spends a lot of time encouraging students to explore issues of social structure, social change, identity and globalisation.