Although affiliated with sociology, he has affinities with other disciplines, particularly philosophy, human geography, urban and regional studies and political economy, and defines himself as 'post-disciplinary'.
These interests are reflected in his Why Things Matter to People: Social Science, Values and Ethical Life (2011), and his Why we can't afford the rich (2014).
[6] He tends, however, to reject treatments of normativity as self-interested responses to systems of sanctions and instead sees it as driven at least in part by our ethical commitments to caring for the flourishing of others.
Because social scientists themselves are also ethical beings, “in paying close attention to how economic arrangements affect well-being, [we] can hardly avoid normative implications”.
[6] He argues that our evaluative stances are influenced by our cultural context, but also by transcultural understandings of what human beings need in order to flourish or indeed what causes them to suffer.
[8] Having formulated these variants of the concept in a series of papers, Sayer went on to apply them in a number of the books discussed elsewhere in this article, notably The Moral Significance of Class (2005), Why Things Matter to People (2011), and Why We Can't Afford the Rich (2014).