John O’Neill (1933– )

A distinguished research professor emeritus at York University, Canada, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, O’Neill developed a critical interpretation of sociology in his Sociology as a Skin Trade (1972) and Making Sense Together (1974). His work is characterized by an attempt to bridge the gap between the humanities and the social sciences, which is illustrated in his Essaying Montaigne. A Study of the Renaissance Institution of Writing and Reading (1982). He contributed to the development of the sociology of the body in his Five Bodies. The Human Shape of Modern Society (1985) and The Communicative Body (1989). He was critical of postmodernism in his The Poverty of Postmodernism. More recently, he has made two important contributions to the sociology of citizenship in which he has been concerned to examine the status of children in modern society in his The Missing Child in Liberal Theory (1994) and Civic Capitalism. The State of Childhood (2004). He is a founding editor of the Journal of Classical Sociology.

BRYAN S. TURNER

Oakley, Ann (1944– )

A British sociologist who has worked on diverse issues related to the specific condition and experience of women, Oakley's earliest work was a study of the politics and gender relations of housework (The Sociology of Housework, 1972, and Housewife, 1974). Informing both those texts was a concern with the isolation of women in the home and what was – at the time – a refusal of the social world to recognize the unpaid domestic work of women (see women and work). Oakley's later work has been concerned with medical aspects of women's lives, particularly childbirth and the transition to motherhood. In a number of studies (Becoming a Mother, 1979, and The Captured Womb, 1984), Oakley criticized the male control and medicalization of childbirth and the loss of an autonomous female voice in questions related to women and reproduction. Oakley's work has been widely influential in the management of childbirth in the United Kingdom.

In recent years, Oakley has written fiction (for example The Men's Room, 1991) and studies of the way in which gender informs global politics and the universal organization of social life (Gender on Planet Earth, 2003).