Simon Clarke (26 March 1946 – 27 December 2022) was a British sociologist who specialised in social theory, political economy, labour relations, and the history of sociology.

He was head of the Russian Research Programme at Warwick[3] and director of the Institute for Comparative Labour Relations in Moscow.

In 1990 Simon Clarke gave a series of lectures to a group of young Soviet sociologists at the Institute of Youth in Moscow.

[5] In conversation with Sarah Ashwin and Valary Yakubovich, Clarke notes that the data generated by ISITO provided rigorous, scientific proof of a number of existing hypotheses which had been proposed by past experience.

One striking discovery was the degree to which entities in post-socialist Russia, including trade unions and industrial management, continued to reproduce the culture and practices of the Soviet period.

For me, as a one-time economist, these are among our most satisfying findings because I think that the principal responsibility of the social sciences today is to challenge and undermine the scientific pretensions of neoclassical economics, to show it up as the vacuous and pernicious ideology that it is.