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Reforming the Body: Religion, Community, and Modernity by Philip A. Mellor and Chris Shilling Author(s): Ann W.

Ramsey Source: The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 104, No. 6 (May 1999), pp. 1893-1894 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/210263 . Accessed: 05/02/2011 20:11
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Book Reviews
Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. By James C. Scott. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998. Pp. xiv 445. $35.00. Michael Mann University of California, Los Angeles The power and pleasure of this polemical book come from its case studies, 90% of the text. The rst describes 18th-century Prussian forestry, imposing regimented reforesting plans, riding roughshod over existing complex ecologies, producing environmental degradation followed by reduced timber yields. The last case study is of high modernist agricultural methods imposed during 194575, regardless of terrain, ignoring the practical knowledge of local farmers. This led to overreliance on fertilizers, sterile hybrid plant strains, and vulnerable monoculture, ultimately worsening the farmers lot. The other case studies attack modernist city planners, from Haussmann to Le Corbusier, and scientic socialists, from the Leninist vanguard party through Soviet collective farms and the Chinese Great Leap Forward to compulsory village resettlements in Tanzania. James Scott detects four causes of disaster in these schemes: forcing administrative order on a nature and society that are highly variegated, relying on state coercive power to effect innovation, a civil society too weak to resist, and high modernist Enlightenment ideology seeing scientic rationality as the only source of truth. The main villain is the modern state, falsely believing it exists above society, able to perceive and make legible the contours of nature and society laid out beneath it and able to grandly reorganize them with its standardized formulas. So the book is part of the global reaction against early and mid-20thcentury theories, seeing the state as the bringer of social, economic, and moral improvement to the world. Yet, it is not written from the political Right. Scotts sympathies lie with the poor farmers of the global South, the true purveyors of practical rationality, their experiments strongly disciplined by their need to survive by respecting their small piece of nature. Their practical reason is thus a superior form of knowledge to that of high modernist science. Scotts scholarship is formidable, his insights many, his rich detail usually stilling criticism. I did groan at poor old Diderot and his 18th-century Parisian friends being blamed yet again for the follies of the 20th century. I groaned again as Jane Jacobss city of spontaneous self-diversication was lauded yet again over Le Corbusiers city as a machine for living
Permission to reprint a book review printed in this section may be obtained only from the author.

AJS Volume 104 Number 6

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American Journal of Sociology and as Rosa Luxemburgs working-class spontaneity was again lauded over Lenins vanguard partyboth being given a feminist slant here, good gal versus bad guy. Actually, when Lenin thought the workers were supporting him, he reversed his position. Lenin was more opportunist than high modernist. And when modernist city planning included gardens and generous living space, as in the British Garden Cities and New Towns movements (denigrated by Scott), it improved the quality of life for large numbers of peopleas did welfare states in general. But these are empirical quibbles. Yet, I also have more theoretical doubts. Scott exaggerates the independence of the state. Like the states he criticizes, his state seems to oat above society (as in simpler elite theories of the state). Who actually runs such states so that modernist plans can be implemented? He does mention that the market, large-scale bureaucratic capitalism, and the prot motive may also be instruments of high modernist folly. But he presents no case studies on their role, and to do so might force revision of his title and his four main arguments. In all the non-Communist case studies, though capitalism looms in the background, it is absent from the foreground. His Third World peasants and laborers seem exploited by state elites but not by landlord classes. He blames not large capitalist farmers but agricultural engineers (i.e., modernist technocrats) for the fetish of industrial farming taking hold of American agriculture during the period 191030. He discusses urban planning as if it was run by state elites. But sociologists like Castells and Molotch have shown that planning is dominated by city growth machines centrally involving developers, corporations, and banks. We learn about legibility tools of the state (like censuses and maps) but not about those of capitalism (like the organization chart or accountancy). Nor are states as coherent as Scott (or, indeed, class theory of the state) believes. Scott emphasizes the inuence of German planning during World War I, especially on Lenin. Yet it coordinated three distinct groups, of which state bureaucrats were less signicant than generals and the heads of large capitalist enterprises. Scott names Walter Rathenau as the prototype of the rational bureaucrat of this planning system. But Rathenau was a capitalist, not a bureaucrat. His family owned the electrical giant AEG, of which he was chairman. The generals, Ludendorff above all, were indeed technocrats, formally employed by the state and in the military realm modernists. Yet otherwise they were reactionaries, drawn from the Prussian landowning nobility. Their modernist goal (as with many of the Red Army and PLO elites important in communist statist disasters) was less to improve humanity than to kill people more efciently. Militarism has been a distinctive form of disastrous modernism yet makes no explicit appearance in this book. Nor does nationalism, which (far more than modernism) has been focused on the state. And Scotts exposes often depend heavily on citations from critical government scien-

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Book Reviews tic reportseven opponents of high modernism inhabit states. States have many rooms and many constituencies. Of course, when disasters are driven not by singular states but by markets or complex congeries of dominant elites or classes exerting diffuse political inuence, they are generally less visible. The inefciency and inequity of the U.S. corporate market system of health care, when compared to the statist heath care systems of Europe, is not often seen as a disaster comparable to Scotts case studies. Yet, it systematically results in the earlier death of poorer and minority Americans, and we may reasonably attribute it more to class and ethnic exploitation than to American government. Consider the more obvious disaster of the extermination of the native peoples of North America, legitimated by some of the modernist rationality noted by Scott. The declaration that the land was empty (terra nullis)and so could be cleared of its peoplesenabled surveyors to lay out the rational grid system that still dominates the entire land surface of the United States. But here genocide was mainly the responsibility of a white settler society rather than a state. Thus, the sources and forms of anything we might wish to call high modernism, and its attendant disasters, were more plural than in Scotts narrative. High modernist disasters have involved states, armed forces, markets, corporations, classes, nationalist movements, and so on, all interacting in complex, confused, and often unanticipated ways. Perhaps it is not states in general but particular types of states that are implicated in modernist folly. One type is visible in Scotts most terrible case studies: states in backward countries where elites believed that the future could be plannedsince it was visible in more modern countries abroad. State-centered late development projects preceded the Enlightenment proper, as in Peter the Greats reforms (his rebuilding of St. Petersburg is here cited as part of modernist architecture). Late development inspired the industrializing plans of Marxists in Russia, China, and Tanzania and of nationalists elsewhere. Thus, elites in developing countries like Brazil sought to build Le Corbusier high modernist capital cities. Perhaps neither statism nor modernism per se but subtypes might be the main culprits. This is a book of powerful case studies and weaker theory. The case studies allow Scott to attribute many appalling disasters to modernism overdosing on statism. But the attribution really requires a better theory of modern states than he possesses.

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American Journal of Sociology The Therapeutic State: Justifying Government at Centurys End. By James L. Nolan, Jr. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Pp. xiv 395. $45.00 (cloth); $18.95 (paper). John R. Hall University of California, Davis Reading about therapeutic legitimations of the U.S. state, I felt a very strong emotional identication with James Nolans claim that in the latter part of the 20th century, a therapeutic ethos has seeped into the nexus of government and politics. How else could one explain that a family in Hawaii recovered $1,000 in compensation for the emotional distress incurred from the negligent death of their dog, Princess (p. 62)? On the other hand, evaluating The Therapeutic State rationally, I found certain methodological, theoretical, and substantive problems in the analysis. In his defense, Nolan can point to a parallel alternationbetween the emotional and the utilitarianin the state itself. My own reaction is anticipated by Nolans analysis of the discourse about which he writes. Nolan keys his inquiry to David Beethams decomposition of Max Webers concept of legitimate domination into three analytic components technical validity, justication of laws via cultural codes, and popular consent. In effect, Nolan narrows the problem of legitimation to the question of justication. He tackles that issue not by asking about some overarching justication, but by exploring the specic justications that state agents and politicians employ. Quibbles to one side, Nolan convinces that there has been a fundamental shift in how government justies certain activities and, concomitantly, carries them out. The transformative code is the therapeutic ethoscentered in the victim pathologies of the emotivist self interpreted for us by the priestly practitioners of the therapeutic vocations (p. 17). The state becomes the therapist of last (or sometimes rst) resort. Convicted drug users, for instance, no longer simply receive punishment; they often become the targets of counseling, rehabilitation, and emotional support by people who care. Even courtroom trials become therapeutic encounters. And in prison, inmates are encouraged to voice their feelings about parents who jacked you around and screwed you up (p. 122). The core of the book is a set of case studies exploring justications of state action in civil law, criminal justice, public education, welfare policy, and the rhetoric of political debates. For each venue, Nolan examines how the therapeutic ethos develops historically and how it articulates with utilitarianism and three classically important strands of justication in the United Statescivic republicanism, natural-law liberalism, and Protestant Christianity. Thus, for child welfare policy, The Therapeutic State contrasts religious rhetorics of the early 20th century (e.g., about the sacredness of the home) with contemporary emphases on the childs identity, self-esteem, and quality of interpersonal relations (p. 213). In his conclusion, Nolan contemplates the admixtures by which a ther1816

Book Reviews apeutic ethos and a utilitarian ethos become conjoined and how these admixtures mediate the relationships between a Giddensian high modern state and an increasingly postmodern culture. Given countertendencies such as the backlash among religious fundamentalists against therapeutic intrusions, Nolan is no doubt wise to hedge his conclusions about how long therapeutic justications of the state will endure. Instead, he closes by invoking Michel Foucault and expressing concern about a postmodern padded cage (p. 306). Nolan writes well and within a distinguished tradition of analysts who have sought to discern the basic cultural contours of American life, from Tocqueville to Daniel Bell, Philip Rieff, and Robert Bellah and his colleagues. Yet readers will want to reect carefully on how far his analysis shows the therapeutic ethos to have infused the modern American state, thus offering the state an alternative source of legitimation (p. 21). Nolan rightly poses this as a question, not a claim. Yet The Therapeutic State sometimes portrays the therapeutic ethos as an almost free-oating geist, to be discerned in various discourses that invoke it, but having an autonomous telos of its own. Though Nolan shows the agency of people who employ therapeutic discourse, he does not much explore the kinds of power gained (and by whom) when it is invoked (for this question, bringing in Foucault more strongly and much earlier would have been useful). Moreover, justication is a slippery concept that can slide away from legitimation: therapeutic discourse within government programs is different from the rhetorics of justication for those programs, and these local rhetorics of government do not always work as proxies for justicatory legitimation of the nation state as a whole. On this front, the choice of sites in which to examine legitimating discourse loads the analysis in favor of demonstrating the rise of therapeutic discourse. The book gives scant attention to state legitimations in commerce, geopolitics, national security, environmental pollution credits, and corporate antitrust law arenas that do not seem especially prone to therapeutic justications. But these considerations should not overshadow the substantial contribution of Nolans book. The Therapeutic State documents an important emergent underpinning of legitimation in emotions talk. Anyone interested in state power today ought to read it. The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State. By Zeev Sternhell. Translated by David Maisel. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998. Pp. xiii 419. $29.95. Nachman Ben-Yehuda Hebrew University Sternhells book presents a passionate (he does not shy from expressing his views or from grading politicians) and sympathetic yet critical history of the ideological and political disputes that have accompanied the cre1817

American Journal of Sociology ation, and shaping, of Israel. The analysis focuses on how the newly emerging state blended socialism with nationalism, thus creating an interesting ideological concoction in which nationalism quickly gained ascendancy over everything else. This meant that both socialism and capitalism were manipulated into playing a role in the main drama that was the national revival of the Jewish state. Sternhell reveals that while those I call the Totemic Fathers of the state used an external rhetoric of equality and socialism (but not freedom), the translation of this rhetoric into reality culminated in at least two contradictory directions. First, an unequal distribution of resources (and a limited form of capitalism) and a replacement of socialist ideas with nationalistic concepts took place. The name of the book reects these astute observations: the rhetoric used (the myth) versus the reality that was as far from the rhetoric as one could possibly imagine (Sternhell even shows how Israels famous sociologist S. N. Eisenstadt accepted the myth [p. 288]). In this respect, Sternhells book presents a powerful and successful debunking of popular misconceptions about Israels ideological and political past. Still, one must remember that most of those Totemic Fathers were not philosophers or university professors; they were people of action, deeply immersed in the act of creating a new state with new national and personal identities. Nationalism may have been the only route to statehood. Second, Sternhell provides a penetrating and sobering look at the personal practices of some of the early Totemic Fathers (e.g., Ben-Gurion), showing not only that genuine democracy and tolerance never gained priority on their main agenda but that they were personally corrupt and cynical in their abuse of public funds. Chapter 6 is utterly fascinating and amazing. For example: In the best traditions of nationalist socialism, the lowest sector of society received psychological compensation. Its exalted status was supposed to compensate for difcult living conditions, low income, exploitation . . . and its lack of social mobility (p. 296). Thus, while preaching equality, purity, and modesty for and above all, emphasizing the supremacy of agricultural work and downplaying the role of good quality education, Ben-Gurion never saw any inconsistency in the fact that his apartment . . . with its four large, attractive rooms . . . cost him two or three times the monthly salary of an agricultural worker. . . . His children attended the prestigious Gymnasia Herzliya where fees were [very high] . . . and took piano lessons (p. 295). This, at a time when very few could afford any of the above and when the ofcial ideology preached exactly against the lifestyle Ben-Gurion was practicing. Sternhell denitely mastered the relevant history. His view is impressively informative, and this meticulous book is packed with information, anecdotes, insights, and quotations, almost to the point of creating an effect of fatigue and exasperation on the part of the reader. Moreover, appreciating this book certainly requires prior (and reasonably good) knowledge of (not to mention interest in) Israels ideological history. Sternhells contextualization of Israels ideological and political history within major ideologists and movements in Europe integrates its argu1818

Book Reviews ments within a larger global view. Along the way, we have to master a decent amount of terms (e.g., nationalist socialism, romantic nationalism, constructive socialism, democratic socialism, experiential socialism, tribal nationalism, integral nationalism, etc.). Eventually, I found this conceptual forest too distracting. Sociologically speaking, I missed the translation of the political/ideological dimension to other dimensions. Since the book is focused on the ideological and political history of an emerging state, it turned a blind eye to many other important developments that may have been inuenced by the disputes in the ideological dimension. For example, the military, police, higher education, crystallizing personal and collective identities outside the ideological/political complexities, authentic music, poetry, literature, ethnicity, sport, popular culture, gender, and the worst internal conict facing Israel nowthat between religious and seculars. Moreover, the translation of the nationalistic ideology to such everyday practices as living accommodations, marriage, divorce, food, transportation, and dress and to institution building (e.g., political, the law, civil service) or to social construction (and substitution) of elites is missing altogether. While Sternhell uses the term myth as a central device, his only reference to theories of myths in the political context is to ancient Sorel. This innocently blithe disregard for the rich (and relevant) scholarly literature about myth (and collective memory) since Sorels work is irritating (e.g., Henry Tudors Political Myth [Macmillan, 1972]). Knowledgeable students of Israel, interested in its political and ideological history, will nd Sternhells book both highly useful and indispensable. While reading the book requires time and patience, it is a rewarding experience. At Israels ftieth birthday, ending with a quote from Sternhells sobering introduction seems highly appropriate: Those who wish Israel to be a truly liberal state or Israeli society to be open must recognize the fact that liberalism derives . . . [from separating] . . . religion from politics. A liberal state can be only a secular state, a state in which the concept of citizenship lies at the center of collective existence (p. xiii). Governing with the News: The News Media as a Political Institution. By Timothy E. Cook. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Pp. xi 289. $48.00 (cloth); $17.97 (paper). John Zaller University of California, Los Angeles Journalists view themselves as members of an autonomous profession that serves the public by reporting information impartially and by providing an independent check on government. In Governing with the News, Tim Cook argues that the news media are a political institution that relies on government subsidies for much of the information it reports and is an integral part of the process of governance. For these and other 1819

American Journal of Sociology reasons, Cook maintains that news is biased in ways that often make for bad public policy. Cooks purpose, however, is not to disparage journalism. It is to establish the political character of the news media as a basis for new and, as he believes, more sensible government policies toward them. In Cooks view, these would-be policies encourage journalists to be more open to alternative sources of news and the media to be more accessible to ordinary citizens. The rst of the books three main sections traces interactions between press and government from prerevolutionary times to the present. The key argument here is that American journalism has never been as independent of government and governing elites as it would like to believe. In the 20th century, Washington has, as a favor to the big players, consistently used regulation to hold down the level of competition among news providers. Most important, government has developed a public relations infrastructure in the form of press ofces and media events that, in effect, subsidize journalists efforts to ll their daily quotas for the production of news. The second section of the book works its way (somewhat tediously) through the elements of a standard denition of political institution to make the point that the news media qualify as one. It also makes the case that the news values of journaliststimeliness, drama, conict, among otherslead to biased news. The production values of the news direct [reporters]and ustoward particular political values and policies: not so much pushing politics either consistently left or right as toward ofcialdom and toward standards of good stories that do not make for equally good political outcomes (p. 91). The third section of the book, Government by Publicity, shows how each of the major institutions of national government attempts to achieve its goals by using the news media to convey its story to the public. The theoretical point is how deeply journalism is implicated in the normal process of governance. Even the Supreme Court, according to Cook, has a media strategy, since how decisions are communicated matters for the impact of the court (p. 160). This section ventures the hypothesis that media strategies become increasingly useful means for political actors to pursue governance . . . as the disjuncture between the power of those actors and the expectations placed on them grows (p. 119). If the news media are a political institution sustained in signicant part through government policy, and if media performance is problematic, it is, as Cook argues in his concluding chapter, both legitimate and prudent to consider adopting new policies that promise better performance. One suggestion is that subsidies to the news media should be continued, but increasingly expanded and targeted toward more economically vulnerable news outlets and news organizations (p. 187). For example, he argues that the federal government should auction off access to the new digital TV frequencies to the big media players and use the proceeds to subsidize smaller ones, especially ones that promise to empower ordinary citizens. 1820

Book Reviews Because politicians regard news policy as a hot potato, and because they want to keep big media around for their own purposes, I would be surprised if Cooks argument leads policymakers to promote further fragmentation of the mass audience than is already occurring. But I would not be surprised to nd scholars of mass communication, many of whom are as critical of big media as anyone, to take up Cooks general argument. Citizen access to the media is the tame child of the 1960s slogan of power to the people, and academics are ocking to it. I would like to mention one dissent from Cooks argument. Cook is not the rst to argue that the news values of journalists lead to bias, and he is one of a vast legion of critics decrying the inuence of the prot motive on news. Yet he also wants journalists to be more responsive to what the public wants. I see a contradiction here. What Cook and others pejoratively call journalistic values or production values are, in many cases, barely disguised rationalizations for giving the public what it wants out of the news. Similarly, the pressure to maximize prots is not so different from pressure to make the news interesting to as many people as possible. Cook closes by writing that it is now time to work toward getting the kind of news, and the kind of politics, that we want and that we deserve. But it seems quite possible that much of what Cook sees as wrong with the news is precisely that the public already is getting what it wants and deserves from the news. Language Policy and Social Reproduction: Ireland, 18931993. By Pad raig O Riagain. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. xv 297. $80.00. Monica Heller University of Toronto This is an interesting, challenging contribution to studies of language policy and language planning in general, as well as to our understanding of Irish-English bilingualism in Ireland. O Riagain sets out explicitly to challenge some of the prevailing models in studies of bilingualism, specically those based on the concepts of domain and of network, both of which currently inform language policy in a number of countries. He argues, in essence, that both suppose a degree of homogeneity of language practices that cannot be empirically supported, and that both suffer from being essentially descriptive, rather than explanatory, concepts. He proposes instead to examine the relationship between Irish-English bilingualism and Irish language policy historically, from a political economic perspective based on Pierre Bourdieus concepts of capital and market. This means asking what kinds of political economic conditions give what kinds of value to Irish and English and for whom. The book focuses mainly on the period 192693 (with a briefer account of the period 18931926). It is exclusively based on a consideration of 1821

American Journal of Sociology census and survey data. The author rst examines census results, which in Ireland, as in many other multilingual countries (notably the United States and Canada), are usually the basis of language policy. By comparing census and survey data, he shows that the picture of the depth and breadth of use of Irish looks quite different depending on what questions you ask. He argues that the census gives a skewed picture, portraying Irish as being too concentrated and too geographically restricted. The reality, he claims, is much more heterogeneous and diffuse, both within the so-called Gaeltacht and without. The rest of the book is devoted to an analysis of the relationship between Irish-English bilingualism, language policy, and socioeconomic change. The author claims that in 1926, the use of Irish was mainly linked to a regionally concentrated small-farm-based economy. By 1993, the use of Irish is spread more evenly across Ireland, but there are fewer monolingual Irish speakers; that is, most Irish speakers also speak English. Also, these bilinguals are mainly found among schoolchildren or families with school-age children. What happened? The author sees an explanation in a combination of socieconomic and political changes. On the economic side, it is necessary to take into account the shift from a rural to an urban economy and the growth of an Irish middle class. The political dimension of Irish nationalism is clearly linked to these processes; the state was able to clear the way for a growing urban middle class. Its pro-Irish language policies not only legitimized its actions but created a protected economic space for the middle class. Irish language policies, according to O Riagain, had in this respect a real effect, through the creation of a linguistic market. For him, 1973, the year the state repealed its language legislation, is a watershed. He argues that the state gave up in the face of the growth of the importance of private sector corporate capitalism and globalization. It is interesting in this regard that Ireland now seems to be the major European locus of international call centers. Yet at the same time, it is necessary to account for the persistence of Irish, albeit in a new mode. The author seems to retain a modernist, nationalist perspective, according major importance to home and community as the only real sources of language reproduction. He discounts the power of school and work, the sites where Irish is actually used these days, to accomplish the reproduction of Irish. Of course, the Irish that is reproduced is not the Irish that was once spoken on small farms in western Ireland, but only the modernist nationalist perspective requires that nostalgia as a basis of legitimization. O Riagains own data show that what is important now is some form of credentialization of knowledge of Irish, for a certain, mainly middleclass, segment of Irish society. What we need to understand is why this is so and what implications it has for relations of power within Irish society and between Ireland and the rest of the world. In order to accomplish this, it is necessary to move beyond the use of surveys and to engage in more anthropologically informed research based on ethnography and analysis of situated language practices. It is also useful to compare this 1822

Book Reviews case to that of other linguistic minorities; O Riagains account converges with some recent research on French in Canada, for example, and probably would nd echoes in other linguistic minority areas of Europe. The book thus contributes to the development of hypotheses about the fate of linguistic minorities in the modern world; their oft-announced disappearance seems not to be imminent, and yet their transformation poses serious challenges to the nationalist ideologies that, in some sense, spawned them. This is a rst glimmer of the rethinking that needs to be done. Durable Inequality. By Charles Tilly. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998. Pp. xi 299. $29.95. David B. Grusky Stanford University In the postwar period, sociologists of the Parsonian persuasion assumed that inequalities of race, gender, and class background were all forms of ascription that would together wither away under the market pressures of capitalism and the rationalizing logic of modernity. The obvious effect of such theorizing, and not an altogether unintended one, was to reduce class analysis to the study of background effects, thereby subsuming it under a putatively more general theory of ascription. The subsequent rise of neo-Marxian scholarship restored class analysis to a central position; indeed, by treating categorical forms of inequality as mere hindrances to the grand showdown between competing classes, it was effectively assumed that class-based loyalties were in the end fundamental. In recent decades, the discipline has clearly turned full circle, with the class-centered stories of the neo-Marxian past giving way to new multidimensionalist accounts emphasizing the distinct interests and subcultures formed by the intersection of race, class, and gender categories. Against this intellectual backdrop, Charles Tilly has sought to provide a unied framework with which to understand all forms of inequality, thus sharing with Talcott Parsons and other postwar theorists the conviction that ascriptive processes must be studied of a piece but breaking with the complementary view that they are mere residues of our gemeinschaftlich past. The core claim of Tilly is that categorical forms of inequality assist in solving common organizational problems and are therefore durable and entrenched rather than functionless vestiges. There are four related processes at work here: 1. The extraction of surplus value from subordinate workers within a rm is rendered more legitimate and defensible insofar as these workers are drawn from subpopulations that, in the wider social system, are correspondingly subordinate (e.g., females, blacks, immigrants). In effect, such stafng practices press preexisting relational structures with wider institutional backing into service for the organization, thereby avoiding the 1823

American Journal of Sociology potentially high cost of developing new structures and legitimating ideologies from scratch. 2. The same line of argumentation accounts for the well-known tendency of immigrants, women, and other categorically dened groups to dominate particular occupational niches in rms or the labor market more broadly. This form of social closure, which Tilly dubs opportunity hoarding, emerges because (a) information about job openings travels through networks that are categorically segregated and (b) managers choose to rely on such informal networks because it is cheaper to harness preexisting organization than to devise it afresh. 3. There is good reason to doubt that managers have independently discovered in rm after rm the efciency of deploying categorical inequality for the purposes of exploitation and recruitment. To the contrary, Tilly argues that such organizational isomorphism proceeds in part from simple emulation, whereby rms end up defaulting to widely disseminated routines and models (e.g., the female sex-typing of secretarial work) rather than experimenting with new ones. 4. The durability of the resulting arrangements can be understood, nally, as arising from the elaboration of social routines and relations (e.g., on-the-job friendships) that most workers, even those who are exploited, come to value and hence strive to maintain. Although the preceding processes are perhaps revealed most obviously in work organizations, the great contribution of Tilly is to demonstrate that categorical inequality operates under similar principles in all organizational contexts. We are thus treated to masterful interpretations of the South African system of exploitation, the Catholic Emancipation in Great Britain, the development of market niches for Italian emigrants, and the emergence and maintenance of occupational sex segregation in the United States. The resulting book is a tour de force that works equally as a general treatise on the sources of inequality and a substantive study of the more spectacular forms of existing inequality. It is nonetheless possible to manufacture the requisite criticism. In this regard, stylistic problems loom large, most notably the decision by Tilly to position his work as yet another attack on individualistic approaches to inequality. While the rhetoric of anti-individualism is a tried and true formula, it would have been intellectually more valuable had Tilly sought to defend his approach against other relational approaches that emerged either before or after the heyday of methodological individualism. As hinted above, closure theory may be the most obvious competitor here, emphasizing as it does precisely those Weberian forms of monopoly control that Tilly relabels as opportunity hoarding. The principal distinction, it would seem, is that closure theorists conventionally emphasize the simple facts of exclusive control over property and occupational niches (equating these with exploitation per se), whereas Tilly suggests that exploitation is often best realized by coupling such control with categorical forms of inequality. It is unclear, however, why an entirely new language is needed to represent this elaboration, all the more so because it appeared 1824

Book Reviews long ago in simpler form in the neofunctionalist work of Leon Mayhew (Ascription in Modern Societies, in The Logic of Social Hierarchies, edited by Edward O. Laumann, Paul M. Siegel, and Robert W. Hodge [Markham, 1970]). That is, Mayhew argues that the staying power of ascription is attributable to its cheapness, with rms thus saving much in organizational costs by opting for existent pre-established structure . . . rather than creating a new specialized structure for the same purpose (p. 313). If Tilly is thus anticipated by Mayhew, he also parts way in assuming that the savings generated by ascription are captured by organizational elites rather than more broadly distributed; and, in this limited sense, Durable Inequality may be seen as a case of Mayhew meeting Marxism. The key question is, of course, whether this synthesis is empirically sustainable, since it is at least plausible that subordinate workers will themselves prot from their own subordination. Indeed, if a great many organizations nd it advantageous to hire categorically subordinate workers, then the accordingly heavy demand should drive up wages and allow these workers to recapture some of the exploitative transfer. The foregoing all goes to show that, in characteristic fashion, Tilly has opened up fascinating new lines of inquiry. It is always cause for celebration when Tilly publishes a book, but the present one is especially important because it outlines a general theory of inequality that may well reshape the eld. This is classic Tilly, and surely we can ask for nothing more. Just Institutions Matter: The Moral and Political Logic of the Universal Welfare State. By Bo Rothstein. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xv 254. $59.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper). Duane Swank Marquette University Bo Rothsteins new book is both a strong defense and an excellent empirical analysis of the universal welfare state. Rothsteins principal aim is to provide a constructive theory of the welfare state where normative theory about what the state should do is combined with an appreciation of what the state can do. As to normative theory, Rothstein draws heavily on John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, and others to articulate a rights-based liberalism in which a neutral state adheres to the principles of equal concern for all citizens and equal respect for the preferences and choices of rational and autonomous individuals to pursue their life projects. To realize these values, the state must also provide basic capabilities through social protections and services that enable all to fully and equally act on their preferences and participate. Rothstein argues that this liberal moral base of the universal welfare state is not only normatively desirable but, contrary to many claims about the universal welfare state, 1825

American Journal of Sociology is also empirically important in the development of (Swedish) social policy. As to what the state can do, Rothstein offers a highly useful critique and synthesis of the implementation literature, concluding that most difculties in implementation involve problems of substance or process in the areas of policy design, organization, and legitimacy. Crucial to this analysis is the argument that broadly targeted policies that address static problems (e.g., at-rate pensions) are much less prone to failure during implementation than interventionist policies that target dynamic problems (social services for specic needy groups); universal programs are simply easier to implement. However, even in the case of dynamic interventionism, successful implementation is possible with careful attention to the structure and process of the organization of public services (i.e., selecting the right organizational form and technique) and to program legitimacy (e.g., incorporating citizen participation and choice). The relative success and legitimacy of Swedish health care and active labor market policies attest to what the state can accomplish. Rothstein blends normative and empirical concerns in an analysis of the political and moral logic of the (Swedish) universal welfare state. According to Rothstein, support for the welfare state hinges on the contingent consent of strategically self-interested and moral citizens. In turn, this consent is dependent on citizens appraisals of the substantive, procedural, and distributional fairness of the welfare state. The political logic of the universal welfare state weds the self-interest of the poor, working class, and middle class through universal social insurance and services. The electorally crucial middle class receives substantial benets and insurance against risks in return for signicant tax payments. The situation is just the opposite in selective (predominately means-tested) welfare states: the political logic of the residual welfare state is division and distrust and, in turn, a highly vulnerable welfare state. However, for Rothstein, the explanatory power of models grounded in self-interest falls short. Indeed, a substantial part of the book is devoted to highlighting howcontra rational choice and cultural theorydemocratic institutions generally, and welfare state structures specically, cultivate values and norms in society. As to the universal welfare state, the moral basis of equal respect and concern, broadly targeted universal benets, carefully adapted delivery organizations, and participatory administrative processes achieve relatively high levels of contingent consent. Solidarity, trust, and condence in state intervention are promoted. In selective welfare states, problems related to substantive justice (e.g., conicts over dening the deserving poor), procedural justice (perceptions of bureaucratic aggrandizement and waste), and a fair distribution of burdens (e.g., constituency fraud) are endemic. Overall, the book makes the best case for universal social policy I have seen; it is also an insightful analysis of the politics of universal welfare states. However, I believe the book could have been improved on three counts. First, systematic material on levels and trends in income replace1826

Book Reviews ment rates, eligibility standards, social service spending, and the like is missing. This omission leads to some errors in generalization. For instance, Rothstein (p. 155) claims that even during Scandinavian bourgeois governments of the last 20 years, one cannot discern a reduction in welfare expenditures or a change to a more selective social policy. However, to give just one example, in Denmark, the early 1980s bourgeois coalition reduced spending for social services (relative to GDP) and pursued a variety of neoliberal policies (see my Social Democratic Welfare States in a Global Economy: Scandinavia in Comparative Perspective, in Globalization, Europeanization, and the End of Scandinavian Social Democracy? edited by Robert Geyer, Christine Ingrebritsen, and Jonathon Moses [Macmillan, 1998]). While Rothstein is certainly right in emphasizing the resiliency of these welfare states, there have been more neoliberal reforms than the book suggests or documents. Second, it is surprising that there is little about the formation (as opposed to the persistence) of the universal welfare state other than brief reference to the well-known work of Esping-Andersen on the formative role of social democracy. Rothstein could have drawn from recent comparative historical and contemporary quantitative analyses to provide readers with a better understanding of the causal roles of social democracy, trade unions and corporatist institutions, and strategic working- and middle-class alliances. Third, while Rothstein does a good job assessing the welfare state consequences of the rise in demands for individual autonomy, he has little to say about the welfare state pressures of demography, economic crises, or internationalization. Integration of the burgeoning work on these issues would have been useful. Despite these criticisms, this is an excellent book and can be highly recommended to scholars of social welfare policy, Scandinavia, and comparative politics. It is appropriate for advanced courses in the areas of social theory, public policy, and European and comparative politics. Bold Relief: Institutional Politics and the Origins of Modern American Social Policy. By Edwin Amenta. Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998. pp. xiii 343. $39.50. Jeff Manza Northwestern University Many readers will be surprised by Edwin Amentas title. New Deal social policy would seem to have been neither bold nor to have provided much relief. The subtitle also gives pause. Was it institutional or political factors that were primarily responsible for the shape of social policy outcomes during the New Deal? But the book delivers compelling replies to each set of questions, accompanied by a generous set of Depression-era photographs by Works Progress Administration artists such as Ben Shahn and Dorothea Lange. 1827

American Journal of Sociology Bold relief? In his opening chapter, Amenta nicely reconstructs the logic behind the patchwork of social programs that dened the domestic New Deal. Reformers envisioned a combination of programs in which there would be something for everyone, hence, cumulatively universal. At the heart of this agenda were the job creation programs of the WPA and other New Deal agencies. A variety of other programs were designed to provide income support for the rest of the (nonworking) population. The entire lot were known as relief programs, without any intentional separation of social security and welfare programs. This would come only later, as the New Deal stalled in the 1940s. The advance of the core New Deal agenda in the 1930s was startling, all the more so given the well-known limitations of social provision in the United States up to that time. Spending levels provide at least one useful comparative measure of welfare effort. Amenta shows that by 1938, amazingly enough, the United States was spending more than any other country in the world on social programs. Reformers hoped that such state-building successes in the 1930s were merely a prelude to their further development in the 1940s. But it was not to be. Why? Here Amenta advances what he characterizes as an institutional politics model to explain social policy outcomes in the United States at the national and state levels and (in a brief comparative chapter) in Great Britain. The model has three legs: the constraints and opportunities provided by political institutions and previous policy legacies; the size and strength of proreform forces in Congress and state legislatures; and pressures for reform from social movements from below and from bureaucratic actors from above. Amentas institutional politics model places at its center an analysis of the political power of reform forces (in this case, northern Democrats). Program expansion occurred when the Democratic advantage was enormous (e.g., 193538) and rarely at other times. This is a simple point, and it is almost tautological. Yet much of the recent debates over the New Deal and other episodes of state building had centered on controversies about the relative inuence of business, social, and labor movements from below and the reform initiatives of professional policy experts from above. The causal importance of party strength is often ignored. Another contribution of the institutional politics model lies in its determination to make sense of the contexts under which social movements do or do not inuence policy outcomes. Here, Amentas articulation of the interaction between institutions and political struggles is especially helpful. When movements made demands that were consistent with those of previous programmatic initiatives in the context of a large proreform group in Congress, they were able to exert some leverage. In other contexts, their inuence was more muted. At best, in hostile climates, even powerful movements typically achieve little more than altering the distribution of spending patterns in those regions where they had strength. This pattern generally appears to hold across the states as well as at the

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Book Reviews national level. Amentas empirical tests of his model are unusual in historical sociology and generally convincing. I have only a few concerns. Amenta conclusively rejects two sources of New Deal state building that other analysts have emphasized: the Depression and business inuence. But it is hard to completely accept either of these claims. The Depression certainly was a necessary, if not sufcient, condition for the New Deal to have happened, if for no other reason than its contribution to the election of an overwhelmingly proreform Congress in the 193236 period. New evidence of business inuence on one crucial program, the old-age insurance (OAI) provisions of the Social Security Act, has been developed in recent scholarship by Steven Sass, G. William Domhoff, Colin Gordon, Peter Swenson, and others. In particular, it is almost impossible to believe that the successful expansion of the OAI program after 1935 could have been achieved in the absence of considerable business support and only modest opposition. Amenta does not challenge any of this newer evidence directly, merely restating (or citing) previously published work. I wish he had explored these issues more systematically here. The New Deal vortex was complicated, and the prospect of unraveling it has excited many sociological imaginations. Not all issues are (or indeed could be) convincingly treated in a single volume. Still, this elegantly written study delivers more than enough insights to serve one-stop consumers of the political sociology of the New Deal well. Whose Welfare? AFDC and Elite Politics. By Steven M. Teles. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1996. Pp. x 226. $29.95. Alexander Hicks Emory University This book tells the story of U.S. Aid for Dependent Children (ADC) and Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) policy from the formers 1939 normalization (or sharpened differentiation from old-age and survivors insurance and its widow benets) through mid-1996. It adds, in my estimation, more to our understanding of AFDCs troubled history than any recent work, and it provides a compelling and comprehensive interpretation of that history. Teless core thesis is that politically fueled elite ideological polarization and deadlock brought U.S. poverty-reduction policy to its present nearly ruinous (but not entirely hopeless) state (chap. 1). Elite political dissensus did so despite a popular consensus on individual work requirements and federal work guarantees that provided potential grounds for reform. Teles frames his discussion of elite and mass ideological dissensus in terms of three cultural types (intermingled for two centuries in the United States) that he draws from work by Mary Douglas and collaborators (see

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American Journal of Sociology chap. 1). The types are hierarchists, who are high on group (or ingroup identication) and grid (or interpersonal connectedness and interdependence); individualists (low on both group and grid); and egalitarians (high group, low grid). This theoretical framing of, in effect, social conservative, libertarian and left-liberal ideological groupings is almost as elliptically presented by Teles in Whose Welfare? as it is by me (for want of space) here. Indeed, the Douglas framework is rather unsystematically applied to Teless otherwise superb historical account. Teless 1939 normalization of AFDC (chap. 2, p. 34) refers foremostly to the 1939 transformation of old age insurance into old-age and survivors insurance (and secondarily to the 1950 congressional prohibition of ADC funds for any recipients of old-age assistance). These legislative turns signicantly weakened AFDC (actually still ADC) as a program for general widows relief and largely sealed AFDCs eventual labeling as a program for the undeserving, and African-American, poor (pp. 3436). By the 1962 metamorphosis of ADC into AFDC, black Americans counted for nearly one-half of AFDC beneciaries, and the programs political marginalization was complete. Teles convincingly documents that popular opinion shifted after the early 1960s from a consensus favoring income maintenance for female household heads to one favoring governmentally assisted work (chap. 3). He argues that development of a popular jobs policy consensus was accompanied throughout the 1970s and 1980s by three trends (chap. 4). First, hierarchist/conservative criticism of AFDC for undermining the two-parent family (and the social order more generally) proliferated, gaining popular exposure. Second, individualist/libertarian criticisms of AFDC as a labor market distortion (and federal intrusion) did likewise. Third, egalitarian/left-liberals, increasingly oriented toward litigative struggles for entitlements, championed the principle of income maintenanceand income rights (chap. 5). Both AFDC criticisms converged contra AFDC, though hierarchist ones often pointed to program reform needs, while libertarian ones tended toward laissez-faire (i.e., welfare policys revocation). Conicting communal, free-market, and entitlement goals lost a rare chance for legislative reconciliation with the 1969 legislative deadlock and death of Nixons (negative income tax) Family Assistance Plan by an unlikely legislative alliance of social conservatives and left-liberals (Dixiecrats and the National Work Relief Organization in particular). Throughout the 1970s, continued elite (and legislative) deadlock drove pro-welfare activist in search of looser benets, eligibility, and monitoringgoals that never gained popular support and that suffered some Reagan-era legislative reversals (chap. 6). Throughout the Reagan-Bush years, while benets continued a slow post-Nixon decline, conservative structural programs emerged in the form of federal waivers of AFDC guidelines to states that convincingly proposed experimental revisions, under constant funding, of AFDC. According to Teles, extra-legislative waivers swamped federal workfare proposal and legislation (e.g., the 1830

Book Reviews 1988 Family Support Act) in importance during the 1980s, much as court battles had swamped legislative action during the 1970s. The waiver process created a taste for increased autonomy among state-level policy reformers, right and left (chap. 7). The new elite inclination for state autonomy put Clintons welfare reform proposals at risk: calls for the end to national welfare could look forward to political cover from the ag of state autonomy. (Indeed, Clinton milked waivers for reform ideas and support, inadvertently strengthening the state-level reform alternative.) In the wake of Clintons troopergate- and health-careinduced collapses of support (and Clintons indiscriminately rousing end welfare as we know it), Clintons serious workfare (plus day care) initiative came to be easy prey to a defederalization of U.S. policy. Clinton had helped prepare the state-level understudies for AFDC. In short, Whose Welfare? concludes that poverty reduction policy in the United States fell victim to the ideal (i.e., ideological) interests of the U.S. political elites and to the potent symbolic uses that welfare policy rhetoric had for these elites electoral contests. Clinton made efforts to mobilize the centrist, work-centered consensus, which had fallen victim to political gaffes and bad timing. However, the opportunity for a coherent federal policy solution to the welfare mess was lost. Teles culturally turned democratic-elitist perspective should be highly suggestive to political sociologists, sociologists of the welfare state, sociologists of culture and public opinion, as well as to political scientists and historians specializing in American public policy. Its timely historical account of AFDC should interest the entire reading public of persons interested in U.S. social policy. Through My Own Eyes: Single Mothers and the Cultures of Poverty. By Susan D. Holloway, Bruce Fuller, Marylee F. Rambaud, and Costanza Eggers-Pierola. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997. Pp. x 245. $35.00. Judith Stacey University of Southern California Cultural stereotypes about the pathological dependency of poor single mothers permeated the outburst of hand wringing over declining family values that fueled the national backlash against welfare. Through My Own Eyes hopes that conveying the perspectives of actual poor mothers to ensure that mothers and their young children living at the edge of poverty will no longer be faceless strangers (p. 2) will help to diminish public hostility to welfare recipients. Positioning themselves between what they regard as structural economism on the left and individualistic moralism on the right, the authors seek to integrate cultural and structural analyses of poverty. A team of psychologists and sociologists collaborated on this qualita1831

American Journal of Sociology tive study of the values and meanings of parenting and work among poor mothers living in deprived neighborhoods in Boston. During a three-year period, three authors conducted extensive semistructured interviews with 14 Latina, Anglo, and African-American mothers of young children who had received some AFDC support. The fourth author studied corresponding views held by teachers in neighborhood preschools. Honoring the popular humanist commitment to give voice and agency to research subjects, the book portrays these women as self-conscious actors whose culture is neither completely determined by structural constraints nor the product of mindless replication of tradition. Rather, mothers coconstruct childrearing values and strategies with those educators and social service workers who gain their condence and treat them respectfully. The authors creatively supplant that disparaged concept, the culture of poverty, with a pluralistic understanding of competing cultures of poverty (p. 5). They nd signicant variations in childrearing and work attitudes among poor mothers from even similar ethnic origins. Some mothers are sterner disciplinarians, others are more child centered; some have strong attachments to the labor force, others wish they could be home with their children. There is no single culture of poverty. There are many, (p. 6) the book argues, and no one best way to raise children or to foster upward mobility. To succeed, antipoverty programs should aim to strengthen the indigenous social foundations of womens lives (p. 207). The book offers some creative policy recommendations to this end, such as tax incentives to reward valuable forms of intergenerational kin support. Along with cultural diversity, the study does nd important common values among the women. For example, the mothers consider it culturally legitimate to resort to welfare for brief periods but share the publics disapproval of long-term dependency. In fact, the majority found paid employment crucial for self-esteem as well as for income. Likewise, because the mothers view respect and respectability as entwined, they have both moral and instrumental motives for making teaching children respect one of their central childrearing goals. Although this book makes argument against the formidable opinions of a hostile political climate, one can hope that its sympathetic rendering of low-income mothers will help to chip away at meanspirited images of welfare recipients. Unfortunately, moralists on the right will be able to nd sufcient aws in the study to rationalize dismissing its humanist message. Most serious are aws in the denition of the studys sample. The book never makes clear whether its subject is poor mothers or poor, single mothers, as the subtitle proclaims. In fact, not all of the mothers were single; four of the 14 were cohabiting with their childrens fathers when the study began. Moreover, the sample is skewed toward the working poor, most of whom came from, and remained embedded within, strong extended families (p. 103). Indeed, these mothers relied extensively on their network of families and friends to augment their own efforts (p. 103). Such a sample builds in its comparatively positive outcomes, because as researchers like Elaine Bell Kaplan (Not Our Kind of 1832

Book Reviews Girl [University of California Press, 1996]) demonstrate, such networks are both especially valuable and much rarer among young black single mothers than was reported earlier. Many on the left, in contrast, will take exception to the books unwittingly patronizing stance. At root, this is a work of cultural translation written by and to some of us about and for some of them. Inherent in the effort to give voice to the women, paradoxically, is the presumption that it is theirs (ours) to give. At moments, the authors democratic veneer slips revealing an allegiance to the social engineering prerogatives of the professional middle classes: If we are to improve the odds that these women will rise out of poverty, . . . we must devise more effective ways to guide them along preferred paths (p. 204; my emphasis). Thus, although one could use this book in undergraduate sociology courses on social welfare or poverty, it will likely nd more receptive audiences among communitarian politicians and in courses offered by social work, public policy, and education schools. A more accurate title might be Their Words through Our Own Eyes. Culture Moves: Ideas, Activism, and Changing Values. By Thomas R. Rochon. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998. Pp. xix 282. $39.50. Leo dAnjou Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam Social and political changes are natural to modern life. One only need compare, as Thomas Rochon does, todays society with that of ones youth to realize how much it has changed and how rapidly these changes have come about. In his well-written book on cultural change, Rochon takes on the difcult task of nding some answers to the question of where these tidal waves of change come from. In his view, many social and political transformations are responses to the recurring changes in the cultural values typical of modern society. And so he probes the origins of these cultural changes and the processes by which the altered values are diffused. His study is organized into three parts and contains an attractive mix of theory and empirical ndings throughout. The theoretical elements come from a variety of books and papers on culture, cultural change, and social/political movements and from the data of important case studies such as the ERA campaign, the Civil Rights movement, and the Hill-Thomas hearings. Rochons basic argument rests on his assessment that political and social transformations come about because people are no longer satised with the situation in which they live and that they would like to have that situation changed. This demand for change proceeds from the fact that people have come to view things in life differently or, as Rochon puts it, because their cultural values have changed. This change of val1833

American Journal of Sociology uesthe root of rapid social and political transformationdoes not come about automatically but is the product of a two-stage process of value generation and diffusion. This process is elaborated in the rst part of the book, which begins with the concept of cultural values. These are seen as temporally and spatially bound ways of thinking about what is right, what is natural, and what works. Changing such values does not mean merely adapting them to altered social conditions but fundamentally transforming the basic categories of thought and perception that make people think in a different way (p. 21). Such changes, however, will only occur if familiar patterns of thought are called into question. At this point, Rochon introduces a very valuable concept: the critical community. This term refers to a (primarily informal) network of critical and relatively independent thinkers who initiate discourses about situations they designate as problematic. In addition to problem identication, they analyze the sources and provide solutions, thus generating new ways of looking at familiar situations. Their ideas may become new cultural values if they are brought to a wider audience and become accepted as valid points of view. The diffusion of new values is the work of social and political movements as they attempt to bring about cultural as well as structural changes. Movements do not only confront established society with the ideas of the critical community, they also reformulate and repackage them in formats that are suited for mobilizing people into action. Movements make their own crucial contribution to change in society by modifying ideas into issues and, what is more, by transforming the particular discourse within the critical community into a public discourse about such issues. Rochon completes his theoretical perspective with an analysis of the different ways in which new cultural values become accepted in society. In the following parts of the book, Rochon develops in more detail his ideas on cultural change and the agential role of critical communities and movements therein. First, he examines how people are brought to participate in collective actions (i.e., by creating and strengthening group solidarities) and how these actions are made effective by instilling political will and the learning of political skills. Second, he analyzes how structural changes have altered the conditions in which critical communities and movements grow and prosper. Finally, in the closing chapter, Rochon unites these lines of reasoning and considers what his study reveals about the direction in which modern society is heading. By interweaving theory with empirical ndings, Rochon arrives at a rmly grounded theory on one of the most intriguing aspects of modern life. Moreover, the structure of his reasoning and his lucid style make such difcult subjects like culture and change widely accessible and almost simple to comprehend. On the other hand, the attraction of using broad denitions of concepts like values and movements hinders making sharp and precise distinctions. Another less favorable aspect is that structural change depends, by denition, on changes in cultural values. This

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Book Reviews would preclude nding that the causal sequence might run the other way around. Nevertheless, Rochon has written an important book that is a very welcome contribution to the scholarly discourse on movements and culture, particularly because it focuses on the cultural effects of movement activities, a topic that deserves more attention than it has received since the cultural turn of movement studies. This book is a must for scholars in the eld of cultural studies and social movements and will be very helpful to students of these subjects. The Art of Moral Protest: Culture, Biography, and Creativity in Social Movements. By James Jasper. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Pp. xv 514. $35.00. Robert D. Benford University of Nebraska, Lincoln Once in a great while a book comes along that fundamentally changes the ways we think about a topic. I am condent that James Jaspers deeply theoretical and richly illustrated The Art of Moral Protest will have such an impact on social movements scholars. Indeed, its impact could extend well beyond a single substantive area to inuence the way sociologists view structure, culture, and agency and the relationships among them. Few writers since C. Wright Mills have so cogently articulated the intersection of social forces and biography. Perhaps the greatest single contribution Jasper makes is to bring fulledged human actors back into the spotlight of social movement analysis. These are not the irrational and apprehensive individuals of the crowd theories who mill about mimicking one another or who are occasionally whipped into a collective frenzy by the vicissitudes of rapid social changes. Nor are they the hedonistic, mostly self-interested, prot maximizers of the rationalist and mobilization theorists. And Jaspers movement actors are certainly not relatively helpless pawns of their political and economic environments as the process theorists often imply. Nor are movement actors suffering, as some new social movement theorists suggest, from a postindustrial-induced identity crisis. And nally, they are not simply the dispassionate, strategic manipulators of public discourse and meanings, as often implied by framing theorists. While Jasper acknowledges that under some conditions movement actors may in fact respond in one or more of the foregoing ways, they tend to be much more complicated and multifaceted than classical and contemporary movement theorists depict them. Movement actors, according to Jasper, are thinking, artfully creating, feeling, moralizing human beings. They are thinking actors who behave strategically and artfully, aware of what they are doing, making plans,

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American Journal of Sociology developing projects, and innovating in trying to achieve new goals, all the while learning from their mistakes as well as from the mistakes of their opponents. But they are also feeling beings, whose protests are motivated by anger, fear, dread, suspicion, indignation, outrage, and hope, among other emotions. Far from rendering their actions irrational, emotions supply much of the motivational impetus for individual and collective action. And most of all, movement actors are moral beings. Their protests are frequently inspired by moral outrage sometimes from experiencing a moral shock such as news of the catastrophe at Three Mile Island. Protesters subsequent actions are typically predicated upon moral principles as are their critiques of the conditions they wish to alter and their visions and hopes for a better society. In one of many provocative passages, Jasper asserts that moral protest provides individuals with a rare chance to probe their moral intuitions and articulate their principles (p. 367). He observes that contemporary institutions provide few opportunities for exploring, voicing, and pursuing moral visions. Indeed, for Jasper, the importance of protesters . . . lies more in their moral visions than in their practical accomplishments (p. 379). The second signicant contribution Jasper makes is to synthesize various concepts associated with cultural/constructionist perspectives, while selectively drawing on constructs from the more established resource mobilization, political process, and new social movements perspectives as well as literature from psychology, philosophy, anthropology, history, political science, and communication studies to creatively fashion a holistic, compelling approach to analyzing protest dynamics. In constructing this synthesis, Jasper critically assesses the major theoretical approaches, beginning with classical theories and ending with various contemporary paradigms. This is not the ritualistic exercise in theory bashing consumers of social movement monographs and articles have grown accustomed to reading. Rather, for each theory, Jasper carefully identies not only the problematic dimensions but also its enduring contributions. A recurrent theme in this critique is the idea that many of the elds core concepts suffer from theoretical and empirical overextension (p. 41) due in part to the fact that our main paradigms are surprisingly metaphorical (p. 17). Resources, political opportunity structures, collective identities, and framing are all asked to do more work than is warranted. Jasper insightfully species each constructs limitations and the contexts in which each would seem to be applicable. Jasper then identies four basic, that is analytically autonomous, dimensions of protest: resources, strategies, culture, and biography. After demonstrating the essentiality of these four constructs, he explains why one contender, structure, is analytically reducible to culture and resources. Once the four dimensions are fused with artfulness (agency), they can be analyzed dynamically rather than statically. Most of the remainder of the book is an elaboration of the interrelationships among the basic dimensions, often richly illustrated from case studies of the anti 1836

Book Reviews nuclear power, animal rights, and environmental movements Jasper and various collaborators have spent the past two decades studying. The Art of Moral Protest dees adequate description in such limited space. Readers will nd something of interest on almost every page of this well-written monographcogent observations, theoretical insights, provocative assertions, original research hypotheses, and pearls of wisdom. Serious students of social movements should place it at the top of their reading list. Beyond that, I highly recommend that all scholars interested in the human condition partake in this artful scholarly creation. Agrarian Reform and Class Consciousness in Nicaragua. By Laura J. Enrquez. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1997. Pp. x 206. $49.95. Carlos M. Vilas CEIICH-UNAM Agrarian reform was a most relevant ingredient in the Sandinista strategy for revolutionary change. With regard to the peasantry, it was addressed to the fulllment of three basic, interrelated objectives: furthering economic development through both productive differentiation and the promotion of cooperative organization; improvement of peasants well-being by means of access to credit, productive inputs, technical services, and so on; strengthening peasants political support to Sandinismo. Enriquez discusses the performance of the reform along these three avenues. She focuses on the shifts in the Sandinista regimes approach to the role of peasants in economic development and the impact of these shifts upon peasants attitudes toward both the government and the opposition. Two additional ingredients played a decisive role in the development of the peasantrys political attitudes toward Sandinismo, which Enriquez also deals with in detail: the class origins of specic segments of the peasantry (i.e., poor and landless peasants, minifundista peasants, and others) and the type of productive organization (collective ownership of land as well as of production; individual/family ownership of land together with cooperative management of credit, commercialization, or specic inputs; and so on) promoted by the revolutionary government. Through two case studies, Enriquez concludes that, despite the agrarian reforms economic success (output growth and differentiation, technical improvements, and so on), its ability to feed political support toward Sandinismo was mostly conned to former poor and former landless peasants, while small producers, enjoying some access to land prior to the reform, tended to be less politically enthusiastic. In turn, the specic types of peasant organization, pushed forward by policy makers, acted in different segments of the peasant class to favor either an increased political involvement in the revolution, a pragmatic acceptance of specic policies while rejecting others, or an increasing shift toward political opposition. 1837

American Journal of Sociology In spite of Enriquezs attempt to link her subject to processes of transition to socialisman option that she accepts to be quite controversial her conceptual discussion refers to the relation between economic development and politics and to the role Third World peasantries tend to play with regard to radical socioeconomic and political change. Enriquez contends the hypothesis of an essentialist conservative bias in peasants; her case studies show there is no political essentialism in class identities and that, in order to reach relevant conclusions, differentiations inside the peasantryin terms of access to land and other resources, as well of the specic histories of particular segments of the peasantry and the institutional environment where these factors operatehave to be acknowledged. The discussion of plan Masaya (chaps. 5 and 6) points to the many elements prompting for a stregthened political commitment of peasants to the revolution, while her presentation of the Los Patios project (chaps. 3 and 4) stresses the factors conducive to a conservative reorientation of the projects beneciariesin spite of economic goals of the agrarian reform being achieved in both projects. Enriquezs conclusion points also to the relevance of effective peasant participation in processes of radical socioeconomic and political change in societies where the peasantry makes up a larger segment of the subaltern classes. Yet, the book does not explore the reasons why participatory democracy has confronted so many shortcomings in so many dimensions of the Sandinista agrarian reform. A discussion of the class extraction and ideological commitments of Sandinista policy makers drawing agrarian reform policies could have helped readers to understand the frequent conicts between public ofcials and political leaders on the one side and peasants on the other. While relating Sandinismo to transitions to socialism, neither reduces nor increases the relevance of Enriquezs discussion of the agrarian reform failures and successes, and the inclusion of class consciousness in the books title is misleading. What one sees is a number of peasant groups that share a basic attachment to land as the means to survive and advance in life: some of them became strong supporters of Sandinismo, yet others moved toward political opposition. Furthermore, political cleavages or allegiances do not oppose different kinds of peasants. Enriquez nds Sandinistas together with oppositionists in each of the two projects; there are pro-Sandinistas among the small owners involved in Los Patios, as there are in more proletarianized beneciaries of Plan Masaya, as much as there are also supporters of the opposition in both projects. Since there is no conceptual discussion of class consciousness and its role in the books subject, the purpose of referring to it in the title is not clear. Despite these marginal critical comments, the book is worth reading for graduate students with a basic knowledge of Nicaraguas recent history, as well as for readers interested in processes of structural change in peasant societies. It makes an important contribution to both peasant studies and the comparative analysis of revolutions. 1838

Book Reviews Ethics and Activism: The Theory and Practice of Political Morality. By Michael L. Gross. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. xiv 305. $59.95. Laura J. Scalia A man rushes into a burning building to free a child trapped inside. Certainly, if this rescuers good conscience selessly guided him, his act deserves to be termed moral. However, what if the child was the mans only son? Alternatively, suppose the saver was a reman, handsomely paid to put out blazes and rescue trapped inhabitants, or suppose he was an aspiring politician, seizing a photo opportunity to enhance his chances of electoral success. Would the good deed still be deemed moral? Michael L. Gross, in his new book Ethics and Activism, asks us not to extend praise only to high-minded, principled acts. His rationale is simple: Most do not risk their lives for the good of abstract mankind; most seek to benet themselves and their close friends when doing so-called good deeds. Why not extend moral credit to this majority? Grosss essential quest is to put a moral soul onto the actions of individuals like the father, reman, and aspiring politician, who, though mostly concerned with themselves and their immediate relations, nonetheless do great deeds for society. Specically, he studies to what extent ethical intentions motivate ordinary folk to participate collectively in those everyday causes that invigorate and preserve democracy. To do this, Gross examines two moral conceptions, which he then thoughtfully operationalizes by integrating aspects of social, psychological, and rational choice theory. These interdisciplinary tools are subsequently used to determine which moral construct better explains popular engagement in just causes. Underlying the analysis is a normative aim: to develop a theory of political morality consistent with empirical evidence (p. 18). To the author, Knowing how individuals can act helps us understand how they ought to act (p. 19). Given his overall methodology and normative aspirations, Gross deserves the ear of empirical theorists, especially those interested in collective action and moral philosophy. Part 1 discusses two views of morality: the strong, which assumes only principled actions deserve to be termed moral and which Gross seeks to overturn as empirically naive, and the weak, which deems interests and localized concerns viable bases of moral action and which the author sees as realistically reecting human behavior. Part 2 operationalizes these views, outlining alternative motivational theories. (Herein are scattered helpful gures explicating how different factors are thought to inuence political action.) Among the factors described are incentives that rational choice theorists emphasize, including monetary and solidarity incentives as well as normative, nonmaterial stimuli. Also incorporated are inuences that cognitive psychologists stress, including a persons way of morally reasoning, from dogmatically choosing as self-interest and authority dictate, to selecting provincially or nationalistically as a good community 1839

American Journal of Sociology member or citizen might, to autonomously relying on universal principles that transcend communal norms. All variables seek to measure whether activists are morally weak or strong, self-seeking or high-minded. Part three carefully examines specic cases of activism: Dutch and French rescuers of Jews during World War II, Americans in the pro-life and pro-choice movements, and Israeli supporters of retaining or returning occupied lands. Each chapter provides brief but adequate background about the ethical cause and its historical particularities. Each looks at the participants themselves, their cognitive level of moral development, the available social networks, and the obtainable incentives accepted. Although differences exist, in each case, the vast majority of political activists are found to be weak moralists, cognitively parochial or nationalistic, motivated by monetary and solidarity incentives. These ndings certainly illustrate that even individuals engaged in deeply ethical issues mostly fail to satisfy the model of strong political morality. Less obvious is whether that discovery merits rejecting the model. First, the empirical evidence is somewhat biased. The book examines rank and le members, whom elite theorists would consider followers, not societys best guardians. Gross never investigates the motivations of leaders: the initiators of underground rescue, the original mobilizers for and against abortion, or the rst organizers for Middle East peace. He analyzes why ordinary individuals join and remain attached to established organizations and causes, not what drives founders to cultivate ethical movements. If originators were the seless, principled, autonomous agents of strong moral theory, then perhaps the model is less empirically naive than the author suggests. Moreover, the normative justication for redening morality is thin. In his quest to have reality drive theory, the author gives selsh and seless intentions the same legitimacy, claiming that in politics an actions good consequence is all that matters. But, is outcome really the only signicant issue? An accidental killer is not deemed evil, yet the intentional murderer deserves our strongest reprobation. Malicious intentions can make acts immoral; should not good intentions also impact judgment? Though the author might agree, his call to reconceptualize political morality so that only the efcacy of action matters asks us to divorce intentions from actions, something moralists may nd troubling. Troubling or not, Grosss analysis forces readers to rethink the issue and provides them with a novel, interdisciplinary framework for conceptualizing the bases of collective action.

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Book Reviews The Sociology of Religious Movements. By William Sims Bainbridge. New York: Routledge, 1997. Pp. vi 474. $74.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper). Rhys H. Williams Southern Illinois University, Carbondale William Sims Bainbridge has produced a textbook, in two senses of the word. First, this is a text on the sociology of religious movements, suitable for graduate seminars and upper-division undergraduate classes. It is less survey coverage of the eld than an introduction to religious movements through concepts and examples drawn from Bainbridges own research and theorizing. Thus, it is perspectival, committed, and engaging. Second, this is a textbook case of application of theory to data; Bainbridge begins with the theory of religion, which he has developed in conjunction with Rodney Stark (roughly, a rational choice theory of religious motivation, based on the provision of supernatural compensators by religious groups), and applies it to the dynamics of a series of religious movements, such as the family, the holiness movements, and the contemporary new age. As a text (in the rst sense), Bainbridges book will be useful to many scholars. There is a wealth of empirical data, from GSS analysis to ethnographic to historical material. As a textbook application of theory, readers will respond based on their orientation to the grounding assumptions; as the Stark-Bainbridge theory is central to much of the rational choice work currently controversial in the sociology of religion, the response will no doubt be divided. After an initial chapter that lays out the basics of the guiding theory, the book is divided into three sections, covering the dynamics of schism (sects formed from divisions within religious bodies), innovation (cults formed as innovative new religions within their cultural contexts), and transformation (dealing with and changing the societal environment). Each section has an initial chapter covering a general topic pertinent to the sections theme, followed by three chapters of empirical examples. The initial orienting chapters in each section are a bit idiosyncratic as Bainbridge only glances over the literature before developing his own ideas about the issue in question. The results are uneventhe examination of church-sect theory works well for the section on schism. However, a lengthy excursion into Watergate (and another on the Star Wars trilogy in the conclusion) did not reward the space allotted. As is often true with rational actor models, individual-level analyses continually rise to the fore. For example, the chapter on cultural diffusion (orienting the innovation section) spends most of its attention on conversion, and the chapter on morality (orienting the transformation section) discusses the effects of religious beliefs on controlling deviant behavior such as substance abuse, larceny, and suicide. In the empirical chapters, Bainbridge is interested in religious movements because they represent a special form of religion, rather than being interested in religious movements as a special case of social movements 1841

American Journal of Sociology generally. As a result, he draws few insights from the burgeoning scholarship on social movements and collective action. For example, the chapter on democratization movements discusses whether religion promotes or retards democratization, rather than covering the dynamics and history of particular democratization movements (or the genre). The concluding chapter argues that religion will continue to renew itself into the future through the phenomena of movements. When institutional religion loses touch with the particular needs that initially drew its adherents, it loses its tension with its host culture and undercuts member motivation. Religious movements then arise to provide the missing passion, innovation, and tension with the culture. Thus, religion itself is a perpetual system that provides the supernatural compensators humans need to survive. Bainbridge also discusses the factors, both internal and external, that shape the success of religious movements, dened as organizational growth and continued member commitment. I must note that the nal chapter also engages in some tiresome competitive comparisons between the so-called new and old paradigms in the sociology of religion. The new paradigm is represented here by the StarkBainbridge theory of religion, while the old paradigm is a caricature of secularization theory, represented by a 1950s-era article by A. F. C. Wallace (I suppose ensuring its status as an old paradigm). Then Bainbridge runs through a series of regressions on data on religious membership, church growth, and religious variety. New paradigm-based predictions are pronounced winners when they explain more variance than old paradigm assumptions. The usefulness of this exercise eludes me. I do not understand what is gained for sociology as an intellectual enterprise through this wins-andlosses logic. Further, the credit that might accrue to the Stark-Bainbridge theory is undercut both by the simplistic version of secularization theory used as foil and by the overidentication of the new paradigm with rational choice models. There is something of a chest-thumping tone to the effort. One wonders to what end. William Bainbridge has much to teach us about the emergence, success, and dynamics of religious movements, and this book is rich reading. Of course, those not persuaded initially by Bainbridges approach may well remain unconvinced, and that should be a net gain to the eld whether developing or disputing this work, future research is sure to follow.

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Book Reviews End of Millennium, vol. 3 of The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture. By Manuel Castells. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1998. Pp. xiv 418. $69.95 (cloth); $29.95 (paper). John Boli Emory University We live in the network society. Relationships of production have shifted in fundamental ways, with exible production and network-based global structures becoming ever more central. Production is primarily informationalism: the control, manipulation, and distribution of information as both product and means of organizing other types of products. Power has become primarily a matter of symbolic manipulation; elites are ephemeral and situation specic, while classes decline in signicance. In opposition to the Net (the realm of real virtuality generated by globally interlinked nodes of informational production) stands the self, that is, the individual dened and self-dened increasingly in terms of primordial identities (gender, race, religion, ethnicity) and engaged in identity movements that have become the central arena of political struggle in this endof-millennium time. Such are the claims of Manuel Castells, a polyglot and much travelled, productive scholar who in many ways epitomizes the global information producers conceptualized in his analysis. Castells knows the world well, and his sharp observational sense has been honed through extensive eld work in numerous countries. In this book, the third wing of his sprawling, complex edice that attempts in exceedingly ambitious form to make sense of our world, he draws out the implications of the analysis in the rst two volumes (The Rise of the Network Society and The Power of Identity [Blackwell, 1996 and 1997]) for major political and economic changes in recent decades. The book ranges widely, from a detailed dissection of the collapse of the Soviet Union (and, by extension, of the failure of statism) to analyses of the immiseration of the socially excluded (the Fourth World that includes pockets of misery in the developed countries), the rise of global criminality, the Asian economic surge led by the developmental state, and European unication as a defensive response to American and Asian economic domination. All of these topics are handled with great authority and considerable insight. Despite Castellss prodigious knowledge and effort, I nd it difcult to know what to make of this book and of the three-volume series as a whole (readers are advised at least to skim the rst two volumes; volume 3 does not stand easily alone). In a blurb on the back cover of the paper edition, Giddens does Castells the disservice of unwisely suggesting comparison with Webers Economy and Society. Against that extraordinary work, End of Millennium hardly measures up; Castells offers little of the institutional and historical incisiveness so characteristic of Weber. Castells nds his main inspiration in the work of Daniel Bell and Alain 1843

American Journal of Sociology Touraine on postindustrialism, along with Nicos Poulantzass neo-Marxist writings. To my mind, the book also recalls Galbraiths The New Industrial State (New American Library, 1967), and volume 2 clearly builds on Roszaks The Making of a Counter Culture (Doubleday, 1969). The series is, then, a grand-sweep analysis that is decidedly contemporary and clearly intent on coming to grips with emerging and increasingly dominant trends in the social development of the past three decades. For general readers, and even many specialists, it has much to offer in this highlevel sense. Yet, End of Millennium and its companions are a good deal less illuminating than I had hoped. Castells warns us early on that he chose to eschew grappling intensely with the theoretical and empirical complexities of the many literatures upon which he draws, and that choice has regrettable consequences. In treating religious fundamentalism, for example, he accepts without question the Martin Marty line that fundamentalists are always reactive, reactionary, so the insights of alternative interpretations of fundamentalism are ignored and a too-neat-and-tidy view of fundamentalism emerges. The same sort of problem characterizes Castellss treatment of identity movementsthey are interpreted as either reactions against the impersonality, vapidity, power, and voracious appetite of the Net or as proactive efforts to construct various forms of idealized community (nonpatriarchal, pristinely natural, ethnically authentic . . .) outside of or as protection against the informational core. That identity movements might be about such boring perennial issues as gaining power and wealth, the imposition of quasi-religious beliefs on others, or rampant individualism raised to an obsessively narcissistic level are interpretations that go begging here. What bothers me most about End of Millennium specically is that the ve substantive chapters generally lose sight of the core ideas developed in volumes 1 and 2. For example, while informationalism is the dominant theme of Castellss analysis, it is prominent in volume 3 only with respect to explaining the collapse of statism, which Castells shows to have been unable to adapt to informational production and application. In the other chapters, informationalism is hardly visible. Overall, Castells is much less explanatory than descriptive. His descriptive material is often fascinating, but his scholarly contribution would be greater if he had made the effort to explicate the causal chains underlying his expositions and give his readers guideposts to a general theory of informationalism. While he often claims to be developing hypotheses about events, at the end of the day one has great difculty identifying any clearly testable statements in his analysis. End of Millennium and its companion volumes are decidedly worth a read, for Castells has an impressive grasp of the contemporary world. As an original contribution to knowledge or a stimulus to further scholarly research, however, they are a good deal less impressive than their scope and ambitiousness. Food for thought, but readers will need to do much of the thinking. 1844

Book Reviews Contested Countryside Cultures: Otherness, Marginalisation and Rurality. Edited by Paul Cloke and Jo Little. London: Routledge, 1997. Pp. viii 295. $85.00 (cloth); $25.95 (paper). Michael Mayerfeld Bell Iowa State University The countryside is becoming more interesting. Beset for decades by the twin modularizing modernisms of industrial agriculture and positivist rural social research, the landscape of rural life had been determinedly developing into a monotonous monoculture. Those monocultural tendencies are still with us, particularly with regard to agricultures continued bigger-is-better beggaring of the rural economy and the rural environment. But rural society is taking on a more diversied appearanceat least in terms of its representation by a more diversied rural studies literature more attuned to the margins and the differences and the othernesses contained within the rosy (albeit contradictory) idylls of a mechanized-and-transgenetic countryside or a Babe-and-Farmer-Hogget countryside. As Contested Countryside Cultures wonderfully shows, rural social research is becoming less of a monoculture. This welcome volume by a group of 15 British geographers illustrates the renewed diversity of rural studies in two broad ways. The rst I have already alluded to: the elds recognition of the diversity of its topic. Contested Countryside Cultures adds to a growing literature on rural difference and its representations and misrepresentations, a critical literature that intervenes in the ow of rural images and inspects the power relations that shape them. Much that rural researchers had taken for granted is now coming into the foreground: the cultural construction of nature, the politics of space, the experience of place, the ideology of rurality. And as well, the diversity of people who live a life they or others deem rural is also coming into the foreground, what Paul Cloke and Jo Little in their introduction to the volume describe as hidden others in what is sometimes perceived as a monolithic stronghold of the white, the nationalist, the Christian, the homophobic, and the patriarchal. In other words, there is now postmodern rural research too. This postmodern turn has also been largely responsible for the second form of diversity now emerging in rural studies, a diversity of method. Here again, Contested Countryside Cultures exemplies the trend. Flipping through its 295 pages, the reader encounters nary an equation or a graph and only a few tables. Rather, the contributors to the volume mainly employ the wide range of ethnographic and textual approaches that postmodernism and cultural studies have ushered back into the social sciences, now welcome in rural studies too. The contributors to Contested Countryside Cultures are all at British institutions, and most of the chapters deal with British case material. A few chapters also consider the United States, but no other countries receive sustained attention. Nevertheless, the themes of all the chapters 1845

American Journal of Sociology have much to inform a North American audience. The book begins by furthering Chris Philos debate with Jonathan Murdoch and Andy Pratt over what postmodern rural studies should look like, a debate that began in the early 1990s in a series of articles published in the Journal of Rural Studies. Philo again advances his view that rural studies needs, without political premeditation, to open itself truly to the possibility of rural others and other rurals, giving here the example of the unusual rural vision of the Shaker movement in the United States. Murdoch and Pratt then repeat their caveat that the study of rural others must also consider how these Others came to be Othered (p. 55)that rural studies needs to attend to power relations and to the possibility of political engagementand go on to argue that, like power itself, rural identities need to be understood as uid and provisional not eternal or inevitable. Subsequent chapters present a series of challenges to a stable view of rural life, showing both something of the range of hidden rural others and of the constant contestation of their identities. Annie Hughes and Jo Little introduce us to the identity struggles of British rural women; Gill Valentine revisits the lesbian separatist rural communities of the 1970s and 1980s United States; Julian Agyeman and Rachel Spooner recount the marginalization of blacks and Asians in the British countryside; David Sibley critiques public order legislation that controls the movement of Gypsies, new age travelers, and hunting protestors; Paul Cloke lets us hear the voices of the rural poor of Britain and the United States and discusses their conicting imageries; Sarah Harper and Clare Fischer remind us about the lives of, respectively, rural elderly and rural craft workers; Owain Jones and David Bell describe the representation of rurality in childrens literature and in the American horror lm; Keith Halfacree invites us to consider even the counterurbanite commuter as a kind of other. The book thus demonstrates much of the promise of postmodern researchand some of the pitfalls. There seems to be a tendency here to regard nearly everyone as in some way neglected and misunderstood, as a marginalized othereven counterurbaniteswatering down the power perspective that underlies postmodern cultural studies. There also seems to be a potential to not merely give voice to others but to create them to begin with and to gain academic standing from their exoticness. In the concluding chapter, Cloke and Little give us a sensitive discussion of this latter problem, what they term research tourism. But the promise of restoring to view those commonly overlooked is nonetheless admirably accomplished in this book. Indeed, rural studies in its own way has been something of a hidden other within the social sciences. Like the half of the world that still lives in rural areas, including a quarter of the population of the rich countries, rural social research has often been overlooked by an urban-oriented academe. There is some interesting stuff happening in rural studies these days, though, and this book is an excellent illustration of that trend.

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Book Reviews Sociology on the Menu: An Invitation to the Study of Food and Society. By Alan Beardsworth and Teresa Keil. New York: Routledge, 1997. Pp. x 277. $69.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper). Consuming Geographies: We Are Where We Eat. By David Bell and Gill Valentine. New York: Routledge, 1997. Pp. ix 236. $69.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper). Rick Fantasia Smith College In explaining why, until very recently, food and eating have received less analytical attention from sociologists than from scholars in neighboring disciplines, Alan Beardsworth and Teresa Keil suggest that, paradoxically, one reason may be that the very centrality of eating to human life has made it relatively invisible to the principal analysts of society. Whether or not this is so, Sociology on the Menu has been designed to make visible the complex of activities and relationships surrounding the human food system, from production to consumption, as well as to highlight the contributions made by sociologists to our understanding of its social and cultural dimensions. This is not a modest pair of objectives but objectives that are mostly attained by a book that manages to sustain a certain anaytical density while successfully avoiding the arid, encyclopedic quality of most textbook introductions. Organized into four parts, the book consists of 11 chapters that break down fairly evenly between those areas that would be obligatory in any attempt to reasonably cover such a eld (i.e., The Origins of Human Subsistence, The Making of the Modern Food System, Eating Out, and Changing Conceptions of Diet and Health) and those areas that seem to have been animated by the particular intellectual and political commitments of the authors (a strong emphasis on gender inequality throughout, and specic chapters on Food Risks, Anxieties and Scares, Dieting, Fat and Body Image, and The Vegetarian Option). Each chapter includes some critical recapitulation of the recent sociological research related to the specic topic, and data from the United Kingdom tends to predominate (while this very well may be the result of more and better research on the relationship between food and society in the United Kingdom, it may also have something to do with the nationality and institutional location of the authors). A chapter devoted to the principal theoretical perspectives offers a useful review and assessment of the contributions made not only by the most well-known theorists (such as Levi-Strauss, Mary Douglas, Jack Goody, and Norbert Elias) but also by those like Stephen Mennell and Claude Fischler, who may be less widely known outside the eld of food and foodways but whose work has been very important in helping us to understand it. Although the authors assert change and ambivalence as the thematic thread linking all of the chapters, this does not really contribute very 1847

American Journal of Sociology much in analytical terms (after all, what domain of social activity is not characterized by change and ambivalence?) and mostly seems like an attempt to override any perceived imbalance resulting from the dual pressure on the authors to both cover a wide area and to pursue their more focused interests. This is unnecessary, since the very subject matter provides ample thematic coherence, while the authors display a sufciently rm grip on the principal theoretical perspectives and empirical studies on food and society to give the reader condence that if some issues have been treated more or less exhaustively than others, nothing really crucial has been left out. Sociology on the Menu succeeds in its main purpose of introducing the reader to the primary sociological literature and thinking in this area. But the authors have a secondary goal, that of advancing the status of the sociology of food and eating as an important and distinctive project (p. 257). By demarcating its intellectual boundaries, they seem to be seeking to establish food and eating as a distinctive subeld. But besides adding a degree of needless severity to the work, what they actually have shown is that many of the key questions tend to be generated by and within a number of existing subelds of sociology (culture, development, gender, class, political, and environmental sociology; themselves rather arbitrary designations). Whether or not their book elevates the status of food and society, it has identied it as a valuable and important area of concern for the discipline. Less encumbered by these sorts of concerns, David Bell and Gill Valentine have written a book that, while covering some of the same ground as Beardsworth and Keil, shows little respect for either disciplinary boundaries or academic conventions. Beginning with the glossy image on the books coverthe distorted head of a fat, loutish-looking man, blissfully licking the whipped cream that is smeared about his mouth and chinwe know that Consuming Geographies: We Are Where We Eat has entered us into a world of stylish (some might say, stylized) irreverence. The playfulness extends to the satiric photographs and advertising images smattered throughout the text, as well as to the favourite recipes placed at the beginning of every chapter, each contributed by a member of a group of the most cited geographers. Despite the appearances, there is denitely a there there, as the authors (lecturers in the United Kingdom in cultural studies and geography, respectively) have fashioned their analytical lens from some of the best materials in both elds to examine eating practices as a way of thinking about consumption, identity, and place. The book is structured according to spatial scales: the body, the home, the community, the city, the region, the nation, and the global. Various aspects of food consumption are examined at each of the scales, or levels, as a way of constructing an account of the circuits of culinary culture as they map across space (p. 12). So, for example, the chapter on the body examines social and cultural practices related to such issues as body size, dieting, eating disorders, bodily pollutants, the eroticism of 1848

Book Reviews food, and the body as cultural capital. The chapter on the city considers various urban food rituals, including restaurant consumption as entertainment, as performance, the varieties of eating places, fast food and homogenization, and the culture and system of the contemporary supermarket. While the authors specic analytical points often lean toward the postmodern, they also frequently summarize systematic research ndings when it is relevant to their analyses, and so the book provides one with a reasonably good sense of what sociologists have been learning with respect to contemporary food consumption. Throughout, the authors engage in a sort of theoretical bricolage, drawing ideas from the sources that seem relevant at the time (Mary Douglas or Pierre Bourdieu here, Michel Foucault or Arjun Appadurai there) and have interspersed, at various points in the text, boxed excerpts, several paragraphs long, from raw interviews (i.e., Jackie, who is 43 and a lone parent. She has two adult daughters and an 11-year-old son [p. 33]). The extended quotations, many of which have a confessional quality, are implicitly played off against the theoretical analyses offered by the authors and the theorists they are working through. Although one can imagine some readers becoming irritated by the authors meandering style (they often seem to wind their way in no particular direction) the structure of the book serves to contain their movement to some degree and is generally quite effective. Plus, the authors happen to be concerned with issues that most sociologists will nd interesting and important. Consuming Geographies is provocative, signicant, and enjoyable. Changing Financial Landscapes in India and Indonesia: Sociological Aspects of Monetization and Market Integration. By Heiko Schrader. New York: St. Martins Press, 1998. Pp. 293. $59.95. Michael McIntyre DePaul University In this study, Heiko Schrader attempts to account for the uneven development of nancial institutions, formal and informal, in India and Indonesia from the precolonial era to the present. The central thesis is that a world economy requires a more developed network of nancial institutions near the center than it does closer to the periphery. Hence, for example, Mughal India, which was more central to the precolonial Asian world economy, had a far more developed set of nancial institutions than did precolonial Indonesia. Similarly, colonial India, as a colony of a core power of the capitalist world system, continued to develop an intricate set of nancial institutions, while the Dutch East Indies, attached to a far lesser power, developed a far more truncated set of institutions. Clearly, for Schrader, the key theoretical point of reference is Immanuel Wallerstein, but the design of this book breaks with the monistic view of a single world system. This break is methodological rather than theo1849

American Journal of Sociology retical, for there is in this book still a sort of functionalist determination of the last instance: the world system gets the nancial institutions that it needs, where and when it needs them. But by conceding a relative autonomy to geographically delimited subsystems, Schrader is able to proffer a causal rather than a functional account of the emergence of those institutions. The long synthetic essays on India and Indonesia at the heart of the book in which those accounts are elaborated are the books best feature: lucid, economical, focused, and for the most part convincing. Particularly noteworthy in these sections is an extraordinarily ne-grained appreciation of the interpenetration and meshing of formal and informal nancial institutions. By skillfully deploying an array of theoretical categories developed, perhaps at too great length, in the introductory section of the book, Schrader is able to avoid reifying the notions of formal and informal sectors without slipping into mere ad hoc description. At the end of the book, though, the theoretical tension is not entirely resolved; it is not altogether clear whether Schrader is arguing that India garnered a denser network of nancial institutions because its place in the world system required it or whether India garnered a more central place in the world system because of its denser network of nancial institutions. Most of the material in the empirical sections of the book points to the latter interpretation, the material in the concluding theoretical section to the former. Nonetheless, despite this unresolved tension, Schrader is largely successful in his avowed aim of showing how contemporary nancial landscapes and regional differences result to a high degree from processes in the past taking place both on the particular national level as well as on a higher, structural level (pp. 3738). There is, however, a less explicit agenda in this work about which I have greater reservations: to demonstrate the centrality of nancial institutions to capitalist development on a world scale. The tight focus on relations of exchange in this study often, I fear, slight the importance of the means and relations of production. One nds this uneven emphasis, for example, in the very able summary of the Great Firm theory of the Mughal Empire, the notion that the Empire (and its British successors) relied on a network of bankers who underwrote its expansion. One nds no similar discussion of scholars who give primacy to the Mughals varying success in creating a patrimonial bureaucracy capable of collecting land revenue. Similarly, great emphasis is placed on the ability of the Dutch and British East India companies to tap into preexisting networks of merchant bankers, without considering that in this trade many were called but few were chosen. From the Portuguese on, the ofcial European trading enterprise regularly found itself stymied by its own agents who found trading on their own account to be more protable than loyally serving their rms. In the end, what distinguished both the British and the Dutch was their transformation from trading companies to quasi states whose revenues were based on agricultural production: land revenue in the British case, plantation agriculture in the Dutch. These colo1850

Book Reviews nial enterprises succeeded because they made their money the old-fashioned waythey beat it out of the peasants. In sum, then, this study is an interesting and unusual use of comparative analysis in a theoretical framework that heretofore has ill supported such work. Anyone who needs a convenient summary of the development of nancial institutions over a very long period of time in either India or Indonesia will nd this an accessible and for the most part reliable rst stop. Those sympathetic to the longstanding critique of Wallersteins neo-Smithian Marxism, however, will nd little in this study to change their view. Making Capitalism in China: The Taiwan Connection. By You-tien Hsing. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Pp. xiv 250. $35.00. Doug Guthrie New York University In a time when scholarship on China increasingly relies on large-scale surveys of household income to examine general issues of economic change, it is refreshing to see a rigorous study that is driven by substantive issues rather than available data. Combining ethnographic research with in-depth interviews You-tien Hsings study of Taiwanese investment in southern China is as deep and systematic as it is informative. The methodological appendix is impressive on its own: for this study, Hsing conducted 221 in-depth interviews with Chinese ofcials, Taiwanese investors, and Chinese managers and workers; she visited 40 factories in Southern China; and she worked on the assembly line for extended periods in two additional factories. The result is a study that extensively examines an important aspect of economic development in China. In the opening pages of the book, you get the sense that this is simply going to be another of the studies that views China as a connectionsover-all-else world and that business and economic development in China are completely structured around social ties, personal favors, the exchange of gifts, and corruption. However, throughout this nuanced and balanced analysis, Hsing does a wonderful job of weaving a tale of cultural particularism, institutional and historical contingency, and general social analysis. Hsings central question revolves around how network practices of Taiwanese investors and local ofcials in Southern China are shaped by the institutional and historical conditions in which these actors are embedded. Hsings argument essentially is the following: industry in Taiwan is heavily organized around industrial and social networks, especially among medium- and small-scale rms. In the late 1980s, just as local Chinese authoritiesespecially in southern Chinawere being given economic autonomy (as well as responsibility for meeting bottom lines) and just as Western investors were pulling out of China (in response to the Tiananmen Square incident), Taiwan was loosening restrictions 1851

American Journal of Sociology on its citizens visiting the mainland. With a common language and knowledge of the nuances of gift exchange in China, medium- and smallscale Taiwanese manufacturers brought their networking strategies to Southern China. Two issues lie at the heart of the argument. First, a decentralized state that forges national policy at the center but relies on increasingly autonomous local administrations to carry out these rules has fundamental implications for investment practices at local levels. Local ofcials, who are under economic pressure to make ends meet, want to attract foreign investors to their jurisdictions, and the exible implementation of the laws and policies that come from Beijing is the central bargaining chip they have to offer potential investors. The key is that investors and ofcials must keep these projects local and smalland thereby stay off of Beijings radar screenso the size of investments is a central part of the story. Second, though Hsing makes connections (called guanxi in China), a central part of the story throughout the book, her analysis of the role of connections in Taiwanese investment never loses sight of the extent to which the connections are shaped by institutional contexts. Hsing avoids the trap that many scholars of guanxi fall intothat guanxi is something particular to Chinese society and that it is rampant throughout China. Hsing repeatedly reminds readers that gift economies and connections are present in many societies and to varying degrees throughout China, and the interesting project for research is to gure out the specic institutional contexts that allow such practices to ourish. Hsings answer here is that a history of network-based business practices among investors, common culture and language, and autonomy and economic pressure for local ofcials explain the prevalence of network-based investment practices among medium- and small-scale Taiwanese investors. The weakness of the study lies in the attention to details: in three of the chapters, Hsing spends much more time giving us background details about different aspects of the structure of Taiwans fashion shoe industry than she does using her own empirical research and data. While some of the information related in chapters 1, 2, and 5 is necessary, I would have preferred to have the discussion interspersed with direct information and insights about how the managers and investors Hsing interviewed view such issues as industrial networks in Taiwan or local autonomy in China. An additional weakness is a lack of familiarity with certain relevant literatures. While parts of the analysis draw appropriately on extant theories (e.g., the work of Mark Grannovetter), Hsing eschews citations to relevant literatures in institutional sociology. For any study so clearly interested in the ways that institutional contexts effect economic action, this is an obvious lacuna, but the omission is especially noticeable in her discussion of creative imitation, which would clearly tie into Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powells theory of mimetic isomorphism. This is an unfortunate gap, because Hsings balanced treatment of networks and institutional effects could actually make signicant contributions in institutional research. Nevertheless, despite these gaps, this book is an excel1852

Book Reviews lent study of investment in China and of patterns of international development more generally. Portraits of the Japanese Workplace: Labor Movements, Workers, and Managers. By Kumazawa Makoto. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996. Pp. xv 267. D. Hugh Whittaker University of Cambridge I rst encountered Kumazawa Makoto in an article on labor simplication, written several years before Bravermans de-skilling treatise and drawing on empirical and theoretical studies of Japanese workplaces dating back to the early 1960s (Rodo tanjunka no ronri to genjitsu [Theory and Reality of the Simplication of Labor] in Nihon rodo kyokai zasshi, June 1970). It was an eye opener, both for what it said about the transformation of Japanese workplaces under rationalization and technological innovation at the time and for the current of scholarship it represented, empirically and theoretically rich but virtually unknown outside Japan. Andrew Gordon may well have had the same experience, and we must be grateful to him and Mikiso Hane for introducing Kumazawas work in this book. As Gordon points out in his introduction, Kumazawas roots are in the school of scholars who took Western or British industrial relations and working class solidarity as a model and from that basis criticized Japanese industrial relations, especially the failure of the labor movement to chart a course toward that model in the postwar period. It is not a simplistic criticism, however, as constant references to light and dark in this book suggest. Elsewhere, Kumazawa has suggested that Japanese unions pressed for citizens rights (kokumin no kenri) and in many cases gained them, but they failed to protect villager autonomy (sonmin no jichi) or control over the labor process (Shokuta shakai no sengoshi [Postwar History of the Workplace Community] in Sengo rodo kumiai undoshi ron [On the History of the Postwar Labor Union Movement], edited by S. Shimizu [Tokyo: Nihon Hyoronsha, 1982]). The key questions are whether, in the face of intense employer pressure, they had a realistic alternative and whether the majority of workers who acquiesced in the trade-off of autonomy for rights did so willingly and advisedly. On these questions, the chapter on the transformation of the shop oor in the steel industry in the late 1950s and 1960s offers important evidence, because these changes set precedents that spread throughout Japanese industry. They also laid the groundwork for the subsequent spread of zero defect and quality control circles, which is discussed in another chapter. Although the questions may not ultimately be resolved, these two chapters are at the heart of Kumazawas workrightly soand are highly informative. 1853

American Journal of Sociology For those who have gained citizenship and whose interests do not stray far from those of their employers, the outcome may well have been favorable. For those who have not gained citizenship, options can be limited and unpalatable, as is shown in the penultimate chapter on working women. For regular workers whose interests diverge from those of their employer and who are unwilling to toe the line, there can be intense hardship, as we see in the nal chapter: Twenty Years of a Bank Workers Life. Here a Marxist banker called Kawabe faces various forms of discrimination for his views and activities and experiences increasing isolation within the bank. But he himself embodies many contradictions, which is what makes him so real and Kumazawas analysis so interesting. An enemy of capitalism, he works meticulously in capitalisms citadel and is a family man to boot. This book obviously calls into question naively rosy pictures of Japanese industrial relations. However, it is also a critique of opposing pictures painted with broad brush strokes, which dismiss Japanese labor unions out of hand and assume that a power imbalance gives employersor bureaucratsa free hand to do what they will. The former does not recognize the Kawabes of Japan; the latter dismisses the struggles of the Kawabes (or those who ultimately desert his cause) and sees them simply as workaholic bank employees. Kumazawa seeks to bring complexity, contradiction, and subjectivity into the picture. The book is clearly a critique of those who emphasize harmony and groupism in Japanese culture as well. Indeed, Kumazawa argues that Japanese workers have been very individualistic and wishes they were less so. Like his groupism of the British working class, however, his atomistic individualism is only partly convincing, not because Japanese workers are all groupist, but because those who have deserted Kawabe work hard for a variety of reasons, and not simply to run up the promotion ladder the company has cleverly lowered for them. And there are other types of individualism in Japan, found for instance among small rm workers and owners, which unfortunately are not explored in this book. Such weaknesses acknowledged, this book deserves to be read widely because it focuses on vital developments in Japans industrial relations and fearlessly explores the complexities, contradictions, and meanings of these developments. Atomistic individuals perhaps, the workers in this book are human beings rather than robots, happy or exploited. For this reason alone, the book deserves the attention of scholars of Japan. Portraits of the Japanese Workplace is highly recommended for all those who are not satised with stereotypes of Japan and Japanese industrial relations and employment.

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Book Reviews Work and Pay in the United States and Japan. By Clair Brown, Yoshifumi Nakata, Michael Reich, and Lloyd Ulman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. xi 234. Christena Turner University of California, San Diego While it is common to observe that compared to American companies, Japanese companies have more employee training, job security, employee involvement, and seniority-based pay schemes, explorations of the complex relationships between these practices and the ways in which they inuence national economic performance are rare. This is the task Clair Brown, Yoshifumi Nakata, Michael Reich, and Lloyd Ulman set out to accomplish in Work and Pay in the United States and Japan. Drawing on data from large American and Japanese companies and on national economic data, they set company practices in the relevant institutional contexts and do an ambitious cross-national comparison. This is an empirically rich demonstration of the synergy between employment practices, job security, pay structure, and labor-management relations. The authors dene two contrasting employment systems, SET (security, employee involvement, and training) and JAM (job classication, adversarial relations, and minimal training systems). SET systems are found in large Japanese rms and in U.S. companies that have learned from the Japanese in recent decades. JAM systems are found in more traditional U.S. rms, although in the United States professional and managerial workers may be incorporated into SET human resource systems even when production workers in the same rm are not. Doing a nuanced comparison, they ask how elements of these systems work in various employment environments in each country. Increased seniority in a SET employment system increases voice in the United States but not in Japan. The usual American distinctions between production and managerial/professional workers are not found in Japan, but the SET systems in Japan affect only the core workers in large rms, somewhere between 17% and 50% of employed males by their estimates (p. 38). Security of employment, training programs, and employee participation are all parts of an integrated human resource system wherein workers are more motivated to take extensive training and managers to offer it because both are assured of a long-term relationship. This clearly differentiates Japanese and American employment practices because of shorter average tenure in the United States. While these observations are not new, the authors present extensive empirical detail to ground them in recent corporate and national practice. They discover, for instance, that in spite of the more extensive use of training in Japan, the Japanese spend less on employee training than do U.S. companies (p. 80) and that demonstrating a willingness to be trained aids Japanese workers in achieving promotions and wage increases (p. 91). The books strongest contribution is its sober look at specic aspects 1855

American Journal of Sociology of human resource systems in the United States and Japan over the last two decades of domestic and international economic challenges. Avoiding the discourse of collapse and downfall, the authors analyze both efforts to changemost Japanese companies have been trying to increase meritbased components of pay since the early eightiesand outcomesvery few Japanese companies have succeeded in making signicant changes (p. 105). They point out ways in which U.S. companies have been inuenced by Japan but retain, for example, distinctly more exible labor markets. The effort to explain why, in spite of recent economic problems, Japanese productivity has continued to grow and unemployment has remained relatively low is an ambitious one, and it is here that the book falters. Brown et al. conclude that SET systems are partially responsible for some national comparative advantages and highlight practices like the use of overtime for core employees as a substitute for new hiring and just-in-time learning as a way to target on-the-job training for immediate rm needs. They would, however, be on rmer ground if their arguments incorporated larger institutional and political processes. Their chapter on Shunto is a case in point. They offer a ne discussion of how this national wage negotiation institution has been used from the late 1980s to suppress wages rather than equalize and raise them as it had been doing since the 1950s when it was founded (p. 185), but they omit the national political process that resulted in the merger of the national federations Domei and Sohyo into the new federation Rengo in the mid1980s. The birth of Rengo was lamented by labor movement activists as the death of progressive labor politics at the national level. The link between union-sponsored wage negotiation and national economic trends is easier to understand when the virtual elimination of the radical Sohyo federation, which founded and set the agenda for Shunto in the 1950s and dominated it through the 1960s and 1970s, is linked to the more recent emergence of conservative and conciliatory union bargaining. While many of the elements linking rm employment systems and national economic performance are present in the book, the authors neglect the political processes that link labor activism, corporate strategies, and national and international economic policy and are unable to offer a sharp explanation for national performance. Instead, they conclude that overall economic performance is not determined by either rm employment systems or national economic institutions (p. 191) but that there is an important interaction between these factors, a measured and appropriate if somewhat anticlimactic conclusion.

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Book Reviews World of Possibilities: Flexibility and Mass Production in Western Industrialization. By Charles F. Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin. New York: Cambridge University Press. Pp. x 510. $79.95. Robert Salais IRESCO This book brings together a series of historical essays on varied economic worlds (regions, geographically concentrated industries, and rms). Their products are diverse, as are the periods under study (long or short, shifting from the 18th century to the present) and the disciplines to which their authors belong (though economic history and sociology predominate). We nd, for example, the silk industries of Lyon and London in the 19th century, the cutlery industry of Solingen, Germany, since the 19th century, the British engineering industry (18401914) or the Italian metalworking industry (19001920), the plastics industry in Oyonnax, France, after World War II, and so on. What unites these economic worlds is the fact that the actors, rms, and institutions tried to respond to the changing difculties and uncertainties of the market by constantly renewing and expanding their product lines and introducing new technologies. These essays are remarkable in themselves for their precision, instructiveness, and innovative methods (such as exploring new sources). According to Charles Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin (who initiated the international seminar sponsored by the Maison des Sciences de lHomme in Paris, where this research was elaborated and discussed), each of these worlds offers a ground for thinking and trying out new ways of doing economic history. In so doing, they have largely renewed the approach introduced in their seminal article Historical Alternatives to Mass Production. Politics, Markets and Technology in Nineteenth-Century Industrialization, published in Past and Present in 1985: Economic history has reached a turning point, if it is to continue providing lessons for contemporary thought. Indeed, todays economies are marked by three factors: the fragility of institutions compelled to adapt to ever-changing contexts, the recombinability and interpenetration of a plurality of organizational forms, and the awareness of the actors role in decision making, innovating, and creating institutions. The traditional methodology of economic history is at fault, as it emphasizes the longterm, historical periodization into major phases of crisis or growth and a structuralist conception of social dynamics. Sabel and Zeitlin intend to renew this methodology by insisting on the relationship between rational economic actors and institutions. Their goal, as I see it, is to place economic history within the framework of an institutionalism revisited by the methodology used in history. In so doing, they have joined, albeit in an original way, similar efforts underway in Europe, especially in France (see Salais and Storper, Worlds of Production [Harvard University Press, 1997]), in economic history and sociology. This book is thus a highly im-

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American Journal of Sociology portant contribution to the debate on action, coordination, and institutions within social science. The challengers in this area are, roughly speaking, neo-institutionalism (Coase, Williamson, and so on) on the one hand and evolutionism (Gould, and so on) on the other. Sabel and Zeitlin retain the rst groups conception of the rational actor, but they differentiate themselves by making him a strategizer rather than a maximizer. The research in the book reveals actors as much concerned with determining, in all senses, the context they are in as they are in pursuing what they take to be their advantage within any context (p. 5). Action is embedded in strategies, which are possible narratives linking the past, present, and future of the action that are intelligible to the actors and provide a framework for their action. The actors acquire an identity that structures them and makes them aware of their place in a common destiny. Thus, they are capable of designing institutions likely to generate the trust required for collective action within uncertainty. The book offers several convincing illustrations: for example, joint boards of arbitration or conciliation in the case of labor disputes and systems of collective tutelage to maintain the ow of trade in the market, despite the impossibility of drawing up complete contracts. Clearly, we are far from evolutionism. The movement of history is not a selection of able individuals but an adaptation process in which human initiative and reection are paramount, involving recombinations, reelaborations, and compromises between various forms of organization. All this sets out a path for fruitful research. The book is a ne way of opening a discussion within the history of industrialization that will surely ourish. Joining in at the outset, we might ask whether Sabel and Zeitlin have not erred on the side of Schumpeterian optimism. Can we generalize on the basis of the essay results? Should collective failures not be studied more closely? Is history, and more broadly human life, only intelligible as narration? Is rational reexive action not forced to compromise with material objects and products and with a temporal trajectory inscribed in institutions? Should the concept of possibility not be examined in greater depth, for, while it appears in the title, it remains at the horizon of the book?

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Book Reviews Between Equalization and Marginalization: Women Working Part-Time in Europe and the United States of America. Edited by Hans-Peter Blossfeld and Catherine Hakim. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. xx 333. $85.00. Gunn Elisabeth Birkelund Institute for Social Research, Norway Part-time work is a cross-national trend of growing signicance, yet patterns of part-time work differ across nations and over time. This book, edited by Hans-Peter Blossfeld (University of Bremen) and Catherine Hakim (London School of Economics), is an impressive cross-national study of the long-term development of part-time work in Europe and the United States. Focusing primarily on womens part-time work, the various chapters comprise thorough empirical case studies of country proles of part-time work conducted by national researchers, using a wide range of cross-sectional and longitudinal data. The book includes studies of part-time work in the following countries: Central and Eastern European countries, written by Sonja Drobnic; Greece by Haris Symeonidou; Italy ` by Tindara Addabbo; France by Laurence Coutrot, Irene Fournier, An` nick Kieffer, and Eva Lelievre; West Germany by Hans-Peter Blossfeld and Gotz Rohwer; the Netherlands by Paul De Graaf and Hedwig Vermeulen; Britain by Brendan J. Burchell, Angela Dale, and Heather Joshi; Denmark by Sren Lenth-Srensen and Gotz Rohwer; Sweden by Marim; and the United States by Sonja Drobnic and Immo anne Sundstro Wittig. The country-specic studies document a postwar growth in female labor force participation and the development of full-time and part-time work. Several authors also include statistics on mens part-time work, which in many countries is nonnegligible and increasing. The distinction between part-time work, exible work, and reduced work hours is also discussed. The impact of education and family-stage for married womens labor supply is emphasized. Several authors also discuss the impact of political and institutional frameworks, such as the availability of child care arrangements and rules of taxation. Since most studies rely on ofcial statistics and individual-level surveys, such as the Labour Force Surveys, changes in the employers behavior cannot be studied directly. Indirectly, however, some aspects of demand-side mechanisms are addressed, such as the thesis of the reserve army and various theses pertaining to the restructuring of the labor market in terms of postindustrial development, sexual segregation, and public sector growth. The research design of the book is a challenging one. The aim is to investigate the rise in womens part-time employment in modern societies in a cross-national perspective, combined with an awareness of time-related variations in industrial structure and economic development. There is always a danger that a project like this results in a number of very interesting and well-performed national studies (as this book also does), 1859

American Journal of Sociology without the synthesis of results that a comparative perspective requires. In the last chapter, however, Blossfeld integrates the common features as well as differences between the countries studied by returning to the six clusters of societies (or welfare state regimes) that was advocated in the rst chapter of the book (this typology is partly following Gsta Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism [Polity Press, 1990]): The Scandinavian welfare states; the liberal welfare states, such as Britain and the USA; the conservative welfare states, such as West Germany and the Netherlands; France (with the most sophisticated provisions of child care within Europe); the South European countries; and nally the former socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. These clusters of countries have different packages of family, employment and welfare policies (p. 12) that are expected to inuence womens employment in the postwar period. The results show that the integration of married women into the labor market has occurred between the mid1950s and late-1970s in Northern Europe and the United States. Married womens part-time work is a typically Northern European phenomenon. Within the former socialist countries, part-time work hardly existed, and presently, part-time work is not specically related to women. The countries in Southern Europe hardly supply part-time jobs, and the editors argue that this canat least partlybe explained by the later economic development of these countries. The title of the book reects two perspectives on womens labor market participation. These perspectives are briey elaborated by the editors in the introduction of the book. The rst perspective argues that womens labor force participation increases their independence and may be a vehicle for greater equality between men and women; whereas, the other perspective argue that most womenin particular married womenwork part-time, and part-time work is secondary or marginalized work. The editors of this book argue that the rst perspective is too optimistic, since it overstates the liberating effects of womens employment; whereas the second is too pessimistic, since it exaggerates the negative aspects of parttime work. Blossfeld and Hakim, therefore, are in favor of a third perspective, which emphasizes that married womens work must be understood within the context of their families and the sexual division of labor in the family. Part-time workers are usually secondary earners within their families, thus the high level of job satisfaction that often is documented among part-time workers may not be a paradox after all: Lowpaid and noncareer jobs can not only be tolerated but even enthusiastically appreciated by dependent wives and other secondary earners, (preface) I would want to add that these women would alsogiven the choicemost certainly prefer part-time work with better terms. In order to avoid the time bind of present-day societies (see, Arlie R. Hochschild, Time Bind [Metropolitan Books, 1997]), part-time work may be seen as an indicator of a new and alternative work orientation, since it allows women to structure their time schedules differently. Yet the male

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Book Reviews model of full-time continuous employment is not challenged, since parttime workers are dependent on a main breadwinner. Despite the national differences in the overall level of womens parttime work, these ndings also suggest that there are cross-national similarities and continuities over time in the structuring of gender relations; married women still carry out the major part of child care and domestic work, yet their labor market proles differ greatly. A comparative design can illuminate the importance of political and ideological country-specic contexts, and the longitudinal perspective reveals different country-specic trajectories. This book is an important contribution to our understanding of part-time work and womens employment across countries and over time. The book contains useful statistics and analyses of part-time work in European countries and the United States, and I can recommend it to anyone interested in labor markets, family research, and comparative welfare state research. Essential Outsiders: Chinese and Jews in the Modern Transformation of Southeast Asia and Central Europe. Edited by Daniel Chirot and Anthony Reid. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998. Pp. vii 335. $25.00 (paper). Walter P. Zenner University at Albany The economic success and political vulnerability of the overseas Chinese have frequently been compared to that of Jews in Europe and elsewhere. Both groups have been subsumed under rubrics such as middleman minorities or ethnic entrepreneurs. There have been articles that compare a specic Jewish community in one country (Poland or Romania) with a Chinese community in another land (the Philippines or Indonesia), as well as various works that have compared these groups among others. This is the rst volume specically devoted to a comparison of Chinese in one region and Jews in another area. The phrase, essential outsiders, speaks to the central issue of how the Chinese in Southeast Asia and the Jews in Europe played central roles in the lives of these lands, while remaining strangers. They were strangers in Georg Simmels sense of being inside the society but not of it. The volume as a whole conveys a particular viewpoint regarding both groups as well as issues in the sociology of ethnic relations. The two introductory essays by the editors, Daniel Chirot, a Europeanist, and Anthony Reid, an Asia specialist, are the only ones that directly compare the two groups. In parts two and three, there are essays on both Chinese and Jews, while part four is devoted exclusively to essays on Chinese business in contemporary Southeast Asia. Although one essay, Victor Karadys article on Hungarian Jewry, brings the story of one Jewish community

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American Journal of Sociology into the 1990s, the other articles on Jews, by Hillel Kieval and Steven Beller, deal with the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For the editors, the issues relating to anti-Semitism and European Jewry are passe. The dilemmas relating to people who are identied as Chinese are very much part of the present scene in Southeast Asia, having prospered during the recent boom. The articles by Kasian Tejapira, Gary Hamilton, and Tony Waters; Linda Y. C. Lim and L. A. Peter Gosling; and Edgar Wickberg portray communities that have become more, rather than less, assertive about their Chinese identity, unlike Chinese in the region in the 1960s. The assertiveness of the Chinese may have some relevance for the United States, considering the role attributed to Chinese immigrants to the United States as well as wealthy businessmen of Chinese ancestry, such as the Riadys in Southeast Asia in the campaign fund-raising scandal during 1996. The essays by Chirot and Reid, as well as the other contributors, show familiarity with what has been called entrepreneurial or middleman minority theories. Yet the editors, in particular, dismiss these theories. Reid writes that the nomenclature used by the North American middleman minority theorists is too broad, and their lumping together of status-gap minorities in developing nations with immigrant small businesses in the United States is not useful (p. 36). Some of the authors do address these theories head on. Kieval, for instance, uses his essay to refute the economic explanations implicit in most middleman minority theories in accounting for anti-Semitism. His analysis of propaganda used in 19th-century central Europe to support accusations that Jews murdered Christian children for ritual purposes was not grounded in either an economic or a medieval theological discourse but in a modern criminological language. Takashi Shiraishi also places the rise of anti-Sinicism in Indonesia into a larger context. He shows that the Chinese role in the Indonesian colonial economy was not static and that Dutch colonial ofcials, as well as Indonesian Muslim activists, viewed it differently in various periods. The stress on historical change is a major theme in this book. These two articles go along with the editors emphasis on a nationalistic framework that excludes Jews and Chinese from the national community as an explanation for the status of these groups. They claim that the blood and civic varieties of nationalism explain the different fates of Jews and Chinese during various periods and in different countries. Whether one comes to this subject matter from the eld of middleman minorities or from comparative nationalism and ethnic relations, the essays here do provide one with useful comparisons, contrasts, and generalizations. For instance, Steven Beller, on the Jews of Vienna, contrasts anti-Semitic Vienna with other Hapsburg cities and populations, such as the Germans of Prague and Hungarian Budapest, where non-Jews were friendlier to Jews than in Vienna. Takashi Shiraishi shows similar changes over time in relations between Chinese and Muslims in Java. The present climate in Southeast Asia, in which anti-Jewish sentiment is promulgated by Muslims makes Chinese in the area loathe to identify 1862

Book Reviews themselves with Jews, as the editors point out. Yet, not only have the Chinese been called the Jews of Southeast Asia by outsiders, they have also at times seen themselves in this way (W.P. Zenner, We are the Jews of . . .: The Symbolic Encounter of Diaspora Chinese and Jews, in Points East, vol 8:3:1 pp. 34, 1618). There are also some roads not taken in this book. The parallels between the wealthy Chinese in Indonesia and Thailand, who have been clients of powerful military elites, and the court Jews of 18th-century central Europe are close, despite the preindustrial nature of the latter economies. This would be a fruitful eld for future research; yet there are important differences. The global economy plays a much more important role than the emerging world-system of the early modern period. In addition, the connections between China, Taiwan, Singapore, and the minority Chinese are many stranded. In fact, the opening of mainland China to global capitalism has had a major impact on the Chinese in Southeast Asia. Many of the Chinese in this region have now been able to demonstrate their roles as brokers between China and their present homelands, a relationship far different from what it was in the past. While the authors of the articles in this book write during the boom, several suggest that in the event of a sharp economic downturn, relations between the Chinese and their neighbors may turn in a hostile direction. This has not occurred in Thailand, but Indonesia in early 1998 has seen a number of anti-Chinese riots. As the title of this volume makes clear, they remain outsiders. In general, I would recommend this volume highly to both those interested in Southeast Asia and Europe and those who wish to learn more about the interaction of economics and nationalism. Opposite Poles: Immigrants and Ethnics in Polish Chicago, 19761990. By Mary Patrice Erdmans. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998. Pp. xi 267. $50.00 (cloth); $19.95 (paper). Mary E. Kelly Central Missouri State University Opposite Poles by Mary Erdmans is an engaging account of the struggles of three distinct groups in Chicagos Polonia to work together to ensure an independent, democratic Poland. While Erdmans focuses on new immigrants (Polish immigrants since the 1960s) and ethnics (descendants of earlier immigrants), she also analyzes the role of World War II emigres who acted as mediators between the two groups. Like the new immi grants, the emigres had been born in Poland, but they had lived in the United States for decades and thus also shared many characteristics with ethnics. Although much of the current literature on ethnics and immigrant groups assumes uniformity among people of the same nationality, Erdmans discovers that there are extensive differences among groups. In 1863

American Journal of Sociology short, identity and solidarity are inuenced by borders created by migrational and generational differences. She situates her study in the pivotal years of 197690 when Poland was making headlines around the world as Poles tried to free themselves from the grip of Soviet rule. Data was collected through participant observation, interviews, archival resources, and surveys. Erdmans suggests that in some circumstances the various groups were able to work together toward their common goals. Different resources gave them something to exchange, while having distinct networks minimized competition. For example, new immigrants had ties to the opposition in Poland whereas Polish Americans had connections to American institutions and ofcials. They also supplied legitimacy to each other; Polish-American organizations gave legitimacy to the newer ones because of their established history, while political refugees lended legitimacy to Polonia. New immigrants were able to channel aid to local groups and individuals in the Polish underground through their contacts, while Polish Americans were limited to giving assistance to legitimate institutions in Poland. The groups experienced conict, however, when their strategies and goals diverged. Although all the groups traced their ancestry to Poland, their political strategies and ethnic identities are affected by their political identitiesPolish or American. For this reason, new immigrants, with strong ties to Poland, advocated more radical measures for helping solidarity activists than did Polish-American ethnics. Frustration also arose over who the legitimate leaders of Polonia should be. New immigrants believed that their knowledge about the current situation made them better leaders, while the established Polish Americans believed that they were the superior leaders due to their American connections. The differences became glaringly apparent during the Polish partially free elections of 1989. In this instance, national loyalty took precedence over ethnic identity. It did not matter if one felt culturally attached to Poland, because it was a political decision whether or not to vote. One of the most fascinating accounts in her book is the policing of ethnic boundaries within Polonia. The ethnics and immigrants both believed that they were the authentic Poles in the United States. The new immigrants focused their identity around current events while Polish Americans had a historical orientation. As a result, new immigrants accused the Polish Americans of being more interested in doing the polka than in the struggles of the solidarity workers in Poland. Polish Americans, however, thought the new immigrants should be concerned also about U.S. issues, such as defamation and cultural maintenance. They simply had different understandings of what it was to be Polish and centered their identities around disparate cultural symbols. The question raised was, who are the true Poles? Those who had lived under Communist rule and thus were tainted by it or those who had ed Poland before Soviet occupation? It would be interesting to see similar studies done on Polish-American 1864

Book Reviews communities outside of the Chicago area. This study is unique in that there is such a large concentration of members from all three groups in Chicago. Did the same identity and national issues come about in smaller communities? It is likely that in areas where people of Polish ancestry (whether born in the United States or Poland) are small in number and dispersed in the suburbs that there would be a stronger inclination to embrace the new immigrants, despite the differences. In fact, in commu nities without a signicant emigre population, new immigrants might be considered the real ethnics, not those who had been in the United States for several generations. This book should be of great interest to American ethnic and Polish historians as well as to scholars of immigration, ethnicity, and social movements. Erdmans clearly summarizes the historical circumstances in both Poland and the United States, which lead to the cooperation and conict between the ethnics, emigres, and immigrants in Polonia. In addition, she situates her discussion in the literature on ethnic identity, assimilation, and pluralism. Finally, she synthesizes the relevant literature on social movements to help explain the different resources and strategies available to the Polonia organizations to mobilize for a democratic Poland. Competing Visions of Islam in the United States: A Study of Los Angeles. By Kambiz GhaneaBassiri. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997. Pp. xiv 202. $59.95. Aminah Beverly McCloud DePaul University The study of Islam in the United States is an increasingly viable eld of inquiry open to investigation by scholars in every discipline in both the social sciences and the humanities. While this text has critical deciencies as an in-depth sociological analysis, it is of denite value for the authors discussion of important, hidden issues in Muslim communities. It is the analysis of these issuessuch as gender, ethnocentricity, new interpretations of scripturethat make this text important. The central argument of this text is that in the absence of a central Islamic authority (i.e., no government or religious oversight) in the United States Muslims have become ethnic enclaves with freely competing interpretations of Islam and its practice. GhaneaBassiri, an American Muslim of Iranian descent, situates his study as a survey from a 13-page questionnaire given to a variety of Muslims living in Los Angeles and its suburbs. Unfortunately, the survey instrument is far too ambitious for the population, is not reproduced in the text, and was not analyzed. He uses 83 multiple choice and 14 short answer questions for a respondent population that is signicantly under 18 years old (36%). Because of the preponderant age of the respondents one 1865

American Journal of Sociology questions the relevancy of the questions to them as well as their ability to answer them. Even though some of the questions are used (approximately 45) throughout the text to enhance discussion, we are unable to surmise who answered the questions or what values have been assigned to the responses used. I surmise that what we actually can benet from are GhaneaBassiris discussion, based upon his extensive experiences of the issues, concerns, and problems in a diverse Muslim community. There are several, at least seven, studies of Muslims living in Los Angeles that attempt to describe the population. This text does not add to that general information but does for example, take readers inside some Iranian organizational meetings. From this we are able to take a rare look at Shiis operating in social groupings rather than individually as is typically the case in most studies. Here a good discussion of Shiism would have been helpful in giving readers background for understanding issues around the Iranian Revolution, an event that is the major dividing line in the community. What emerges as signicant for research on Islam in America is how Muslims understand Islam in the United States (p. 11). Here GhaneaBassiri explains the dimensions of Muslim outreach to each other and to non-Muslims (dawah) insightfully. He explores in some detail the changes in Islamic understandings that are occurring in the United States, such as changes in the role of the imam and the diversity of thought in the absence of authority. Examination of gender issues leads to discussions of women leading prayers in the mosque and divergence of concerns about womens dress, dating, and even diet. GhaneaBassiri asserts that in the United States Islamic laws have been deemphasized as American Muslims are quite pleased with the absence of authority that dictates everything in the Muslim world. He found that Muslims have the same problems as the majority society when it comes to raising children. The various freedoms in this society and the violence cause problems across the board. It is these freedoms, however, that permit women to assume more meaningful roles Islamically, such as their attendance and participation in mosque activities. This does not mean that the longstanding Muslim assertion of equality between men and women is being actualized. Even in America women almost never share in the ofcial leadership of mosques. The American Muslim community like its world counterpart has not provided an atmosphere where there is an equality of responsibility. Immigrant women, though they have the freedom to go, still do not attend the mosque. Women who do go nd the separation or rather the type of separation between men and women for the congregational prayer, negative or isolating. Even though Muslims of differing ethnicities and ideologies interact more in the United States than anywhere else, there is only tolerance, not cooperation, not a real brotherhood. No leader has emerged to lead the whole community. GhaneaBassiri expresses the sentiments of many Muslims when he points to Muslim leaders who do not actually have followers. He asserts that it is the lack of leadership that prevents Muslims 1866

Book Reviews from exerting any political or measurable social inuence. Almost every aspect of living Islam has undergone some change. Mosques are built and maintained by individuals in the United States rather than the government as in the Muslim world. While this can be good it denitely changes the understanding of place of prostration, since individual owners can then decide who can or who cannot come in. This text could have given more information on the interactions of Muslims in the general Los Angeles community but, as previously stated, nds its forte in discussions of concerns and issues. GhaneaBassiri does a good job of integrating other research on issues into his narrative thereby adding to its credibility. This is a welcome addition to texts on Islam in America. From Black to Biracial: Transforming Racial Identity among Americans. By Kathleen Odell Korgen. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1998. Pp. ix 143. $55.00. Michelle D. Byng Temple University In From Black to Biracial, Kathleen Odell Korgen proposes that there has been a transformation in the racial order of the United States. She argues that the civil rights era changed societal recognition of and individual identication among those persons who have an African-American and a white parent. Although historically the one-drop rule assigned all persons with known African heritage to black racial identity, it is no longer strictly applied. Today these individuals can identify and are socially recognized as biracial. Korgens analysis is based on 64 interviews with persons who have a black and a white parent: eight primary interviews and 22 secondary interviews (from Lise Funderburgs Black, White, Other [William Morrow, 1994]) with persons who were born before 1965 and 32 primary interviews with Boston area college students who were born after 1965. (The methodology is outlined in an appendix.) The rst chapter gives a well-written and informative history of miscegenation and black/white racial identity in the United States from 1619 to the present. The next chapter uses three case studies of biracial adults, born before, during, and after the civil rights movement, to examine how social context inuences racial self-identication. Here Korgen establishes the foundation for her proposition that those born before the civil rights movement adhere to the one-drop rule and identify racially as black, while those born during and after the movement acknowledge or adopt biracial identity. Chapter 3 looks at the inuence of appearance, the civil rights era, culture, and neighborhood and family on black versus biracial self-identication. The evidence here points to the importance of social class and neighborhood composition for racial self-identication. Korgen argues that racial identi1867

American Journal of Sociology cation is problematic for those who have a mixed racial heritage. However, the concept of race is shifting, although the boundary between black and white still exists (p. 55). Even though the younger cohort identies as biracial, none of the respondents identify as white. In chapter 4, Korgen argues that in college the younger group of biracial Americans face a tremendous amount of social pressure, from both blacks and whites, to racially identify as black. Dating provides the litmus test for which racial group a biracial student has chosen. Failing the racial litmus test can have serious consequences: Some are literally driven from the communities in which they nd themselves tested (p. 66). In the following chapter, Korgen applies the concept of marginality to the experiences of her respondents. Even though the younger cohort is willing to label themselves biracial, they, like their older counterparts, express some difculty around being able to t in. On the other hand, many of the respondents perceive themselves as having a more objective view of race than those who are not biracial. Chapter 6 examines symbolic interactionist and postmodernist theories of identity formation. Korgen argues that these theories provide useful insights into racial identity transformation, however, they should be expanded to include chosen identities (p. 95). She says globalization and economic shifts require that people have more uid identities. As identities shift, so do persons demands on society. This in turn prompts a further alteration in social structure (p. 95). In the nal chapter, Korgen addresses the policy implications of her ndings. She notes that biracial people face the same discrimination and racially based injustices that African Americans face. Additionally, like other Americans, her respondents have varying opinions about afrmative action, but they are overwhelmingly supportive of biracial Americans beneting from it. Also, this chapter examines adding a multiracial category to the United States census in 2000. Here the concerns are with whether biracial/multiracial people will succeed in having their interest in this recognized and what form the question would take (i.e., allowing people to check as many boxes as apply or a single box labeled multiracial). According to Korgen, the multiracial future of the United States is at hand (p. 118). For those who are interested in the racial categories that will appear on the census in 2000, Korgens research is very useful. She clearly demonstrates that her younger respondents see themselves as having more than one racial identity, even though they are very aware that American society continues to apply the one-drop rule in identifying them racially (see, e.g., chap. 4 and p. 114). Thus, Korgens analysis is not fully convincing in terms of her argument that the racial identity of biracial Americans is no longer socially constructed as black. She never provides an analysis of a transformation in the racial structure of American society to support her proposition about societal change. The only applicable data she presents are from a survey of 204 New England area college students, where 74% of them agreed that people with an African-American and a white parent should be able to identify as biracial (p. 42). 1868

Book Reviews Furthermore, Korgens analysis is weakened by her focus on identity theories without incorporating race and ethnicity theories. While it is reasonable to propose that people, to some degree, can choose their identities; within the subeld of race and ethnic relations, one factor that distinguishes race from ethnicity in the United States is the optional (or choice) character of ethnicity and the identiability that is associated with racial labeling. Additionally, it is the ability to identify those who are black or nonwhite that makes them easy targets for discrimination. Although Korgen nally acknowledges that biracial persons, and, what is more important, her respondents experience the same discrimination as African Americans, she never analyzes if these experiences inuence whether her respondents identify as black or biracial. While I agree with Korgen that today there is more willingness to acknowledge the conicts around black/white racial identity, biracialism does not resolve the racial dilemmas in American society. If as Korgen suggests, Our multiracial future is at hand (p. 118), maybe it should begin by acknowledging the multiracial identity of African Americans that she outlines in her rst chapter. Wider awareness of this history may have the potential to close the racial divide and transform the racial structure of the United States. After Pomp and Circumstance: High School Reunion as an Autobiographical Occasion. By Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Pp. x 203. $39.00 (cloth); $14.00 (paper). Shaunna L. Scott University of Kentucky Perhaps it was fortuitous for Vinitzky-Seroussi that her analysis of high school reunions arrived in my mailbox near the 20th anniversary of my own high school commencement. My general enthusiasm for this topic and my favorable assessment of the authors description and analysis may result from my reunion state of mind. The time has come for me to reminisce and account for myself, after all. So, what could be more enjoyable and enlightening than reading about others in a similar situation? However, the fact that this book offers an accessible and competent analysis of an underresearched social phenomena should make it appealing to most sociological reading audiences, regardless of when they graduated high school or what their experiences of high school and high school reunions may have been. Vinitzky-Seroussi examines high school reunions as autobiographical occasions (p. 3), a term coined by Robert Zussman (Contemporary Sociology [1996] 25:143) to refer to social settings in which actors share their life stories. This author takes seriously Zussmans complaint that autobiographical scholarship concentrates too much on the narrative while paying scant attention to the social context in which the narrative un1869

American Journal of Sociology folds. She sets about the task of providing an explicitly sociological account of identity construction and life story narration that occurs at high school reunions. For the most part, the book succeeds in this task quite well. In fact, the primary strength and appeal of the book is its absolute insistence upon the social nature and embeddness of human beings, even in their most personal and individual endeavors of self-scrutiny, reection, reminiscence, and interaction at the microlevel. This analysis is based upon participant observation at ve class reunions held at three suburban East Coast high schools (one from a middle-class neighborhood and two from lower-middle-class areas) as well as interviews with 94 reunion participants, 200 questionnaires from reunion attendees who were not interviewed, and questionnaires from 115 individuals who declined to attend their high school reunions. It covers such topics as the construction of personal and situated identities, the creation of communities and collectives, how pasts and presents can be connected and evaluated, and how collective and personal memories are forged. The author takes a symbolic interactionist approach to these subjects, with particular reliance on Erving Goffmans dramaturgical metaphor and Charles Cooleys concept of the looking glass self. In general, the book is well researched; it makes a clear argument and employs appropriate methodological tools and theoretical perspectives in accomplishing its intellectual goals. Readers on such general sociological topics as collective memory, community, social control, identity, autobiographical occasions, and the study of life story and narrative should nd this book worthy of their attention. This work is also a prime candidate for use in undergraduate courses where it is important to offer a good read on a sexy topic that is, above all, clearly focused upon the social dimension of human life and thought. Readers of AJS who are considering this as an undergraduate text should be forewarned, however, that the author occasionally employs concepts without adequately dening themalienation, for example (p. 34). Similarly, in a discussion of spouses reunion experiences, she writes, spouses bracket the event (p. 64). Without adequate explication, undergraduates could be left confused by this statement. In the same vein, the author cites Howard Chudacoff (How Old Are You? [Princeton University Press, 1989]) in order to make the claim that age-based reference groups have assumed great importance in contemporary American society. Yet, she never adequately describes the empirical basis upon which she and Chudacoff have based this conclusion. Finally, chapter 3, which makes an excellent argument concerning the subtle processes of social control operating in even the most benign and voluntary social settings, could use some editing with attention to organizational concerns. More troubling, however, is the appearance that the author may be overgeneralizing from this study of (predominantely) white, East Coast adults to American culture, more generally. In an attempt to counter exaggerated claims concerning the death of the subject, on one hand, as

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Book Reviews well as criticisms of American culture as individualist, shallow and overly concerned with appearances, on the other, Vinitzky-Seroussi occasionally oversteps the empirical limits of her study. Statements, such as Americans are loath to confront tension between outer appearance and inner beliefs (p. 15) and contemporary Americans nd it difcult to completely separate them [situated and personal identity] and have trouble living with the tension between what is publicly held and what is internally felt (p. 162), push the boundaries of what can be reasonably concluded on the basis of this data. Though more limited in scope than its author sometimes admits, this book is nevertheless interesting and signicant. Procreative Man. By William Marsiglio. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Pp. xi 276. $55.00 (cloth); $18.95 (paper). Barbara Katz Rothman City University of New York Just think how far we have come: Someone can write a book called Procreative Man, and that is exactly what it is aboutmen, fellas, guys, not women. Just think how far we have to go: Someone can write a book called Procreative Man, and the text runs to less than 200 pagesthere are only 30 pages of references, not all of which are even about men. I am grateful to William Marsiglio for having done this book: it is a very useful piece of work. The bibliography alone, wonderfully interdisciplinary, including some classics but brought right up to date, makes the book indispensible. Want to know what is known about men and birth control, men and childbirth, men and abortion? This is the place to begin ones research. The problem is that we are indeed only at a beginning. Look up cesarean section in the index, as I did, to see what is known about mens experiences with this surgical procedure that accounts for close to onefourth of the births in the United States, and you nd it mentioned once. Look up lactation, breastfeeding, nursingnot listed. Am I focusing too much on men as other here? So look up impotence: two references, both in passing. When it comes to reporting the data, the book isnecessarilylled with phrases like while no reliable data exists and perhaps, maybe, and one study suggests. This is not Marsiglios problem; this is his contribution. He highlights for us that we have not really bothered to ask these questions. We do not know a lot about how fathers whose children are born by cesarean section experience that event, how it does or does not affect their relations with their partners or the children themselves. We do not know much about how men experience living with what the breastfeeding literature likes to call the nursing couple. And until Via-

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American Journal of Sociology gra burst on the scene, we did not even know how many men are troubled by their (relative) impotence, and we still do not know what if anything that has to do with their experience of themselves as fathers. So while I would like to see a 500-page, densely packed encyclopedia of procreative man, I am grateful for what I have in this book. The best statement of what this book is about, its accomplishments and limitations, is offered by the author in the preface. He assures us that while the title is simple, he does not mean to imply or portray a singular gure, a universal procreative man. He remains sensitive to the varieties of experience men have. Obviously, procreation means different things to men older and younger, married, single and gay, fathers of newborns, grandfathers, nonfathers, and to men of different cultural backgrounds. But where is the data supposed to come from for Marsiglio to draw this out for us? The paucity of data on some of the topics I cover limits my ability to explore the procreative experiences for different categories of men, many of whom are affected by different types of masculinities. My principle contribution, then, is to develop new ways of thinking about mens diverse procreative experiences and to generate future research avenues (p. x). I think he is much better at the latter than the former. I saw dozens of different dissertations rise up before my eyes as I read this book. I did not, however, feel I had come to some new way of thinking or understanding mens diverse procreative experiences. The rst chapter does lay out a theoretical scheme, guided, Marsiglio informs us, by symbolic interactionism, the scripting perspective, and identity theory, each briey explained. His conceptual model is organized around two loosely dened social pscyhological concepts or themes, which he calls procreative consciousness and procreative responsibility (p. 5). The next chapter provides a brief history from the discovery of biological paternity through the HIV epidemic, all in under 20 pages. The third chapter, Gender, Sex and Reproduction, I found most productive of theoretical thought: the answers may not be available, but the questions are very rich indeed. Chapters 4 and 5, on birth control and on abortion, are the most solidly data based. Chapter 6 on Pathways to Paternity and Social Fatherhood talks about pregnancy, new reproductive technologies, adoption, and stepfatherhood. I want to know more about how men feel about nurturance, about their relationships with children, and how that does or does not relate to ideas about paternity in the bio-legal denitions. Here is where gender politics between the author and this reviewer come to the fore. As an adoptive mother and as a sociologist who focuses on the signicance of human relationships, I felt distressed by the conclusions of the section on adoption and stepfathers: While anecdotal evidence reveals that children are sometimes quite close with adoptive fathers and stepfathers, this does not negate the possibility that children may at times emphasize the presence or absence of a biological connection. Indeed, some adopted children devote a considerable amount of time and energy to locating their birth parents (p. 143). We 1872

Book Reviews do not need to relegate the signicance of family ties in adoption and stepparenting to anecdotal evidence. We have better than that. And when we do look at the adoption search literature, what is immediately apparent is that the search has been overwhelmingly for birth mothers and relatively rarely for genetic fathers. And what does any of that tell us about procreative man? By the last chapter, Marsiglio and I had parted company. The future of Procreative Man includes a call for a Pregnancy Resolution/Child Support (PRCS) contract (p. 76), ideally signed prior to partners having sex (p. 175), which would delineate the negotiated rights and responsibilities of the parties involved (p. 75). As a man who began this book discussing his own entry into fatherhood with an unplanned pregnancy when he was 18, Marsiglio seems to have wandered rather far from the real world. In spite of my concerns, I return to where I started: This book is a good indication of how far we have come and how far we have to go in understanding procreative man. Post-Soviet Women: From the Baltic to Central Asia. Edited by Mary Buckley. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. xvii 316. $59.95 (cloth); $22.95 (paper). Bolshevik Women. By Barbara Evans Clements. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. xiv 338. $64.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper). Rochelle Ruthchild Norwich University The plight of the majority of the population in the former Soviet Union has received little attention. Women, the focus of so much Soviet propaganda, live mostly on the margins of the new society rising from the ashes of the Soviet Union. Mary Buckley is prominent among a group of British scholars who have consistently produced signicant studies of Soviet and post-Soviet women. The collection of essays in Post-Soviet Women is Buckleys latest contribution. The author provides a useful introduction, framing the discussion in terms of continuity and change, diversity and distance from current western feminist debates. Her book is divided into two parts: part 1 focuses on Russia, its economy, society, and polity; part 2 discusses women in the newly independent states formed from the former Soviet republics. A number of the essays challenge common assumptions; others reinforce them, but the overall tone is gloomy. Sarah Ashwin and Elaine Bowers argue that womens unemployment has been overstated, that women remain the backbone of many industries, and are more reluctant than men to leave their traditional work for the private sector. In contrast to western press accounts, for most Russian women, the allure of housewifery 1873

American Journal of Sociology is not appealing; they praise the work collective and prefer to stay in the paid labor force. But in so doing, they face increasing discrimination and shifting stereotypes, all aimed at keeping women at the bottom of the heap. Women in the countryside fare no better. They remain a critical part of the rural workforce, especially now that more men are moving into the private sector. As Sue Bridger shows, increased alcohol abuse and malingering by their men make the women even more reliant on subsistence farming and barter to get by. Rebecca Kay discusses images of the ideal Russian woman, showing the ways in which young women have absorbed western images of femininity. Lynne Attwood addresses the issue of violence against women and the ways in which women are blamed for this increasing phenomenon. While post-Soviet changes have allowed more open discussion of this issue and have allowed the establishment of womens crisis centers and shelters, the problem persists, and societal attitudes are getting worse. Hilary Pilkington makes visible the plight of Russian women and children forced by rising nationalism to migrate from the newly independent states. The situation of women in the other areas of the former Soviet Union is the subject of essays that take up about one-third of the book. Nijole White is comparatively positive about the prospects of women in Latvia and Lithuania, citing the greater support for womens organizations and the openness to western models of feminism. Solomea Pavlychko is pessimistic, outlining the problems in Ukraine of blending nationalism and feminism, and citing the strengthening of discrimination and womens conservatism. Nora Dudwick is similarly pessimistic about the situation of women in Armenia, and Shirin Akiner outlines the problems of central Asian Women, the surrogate proletariat emancipated by the Soviets and now caught in the midst of resurgent Islam and economic uncertainty. So what is a woman to do? Even when women do attempt political activism, the results are mixed at best. The blending of womens activism, nationalism, and pacism is described in Tamara Dragadzes account of the Georgian womens peace train seeking and failing to stop the conict between Georgians and Abkhazians in Abkhazia. Kathryn Pinnick explores the history of the Committee of Soldiers Mothers, founded in 1989 by mothers who had lost their sons in the Afghan war. Mary Buckley traces the checkered history of the Women of Russia party, the old Soviet Womens Committee transformed into the rst all-female group in the Russian parliament, or indeed in any parliament, from its high point in the 1993 elections to its subsequent slide. Only Olga Lipovskaia is positive, recounting the growth in womens activism despite the hostile political and popular climate. Russias future may be less in politics than in prot making. Here again, women are marginalized, mostly at the bottom, but adapting to changing conditions. They are invisible in accounts of the new entrepre1874

Book Reviews neurs but quite visible as street vendors, selling goods to survive. Despite lack of access to capital, some women have even created successful, generally small-scale, businesses. In a more hopeful vein, Marta Bruno shows how women, outside the sphere of big money, have created a counterculture of entrepreneurship based on networking and mutual support and thus are adapting to the vicissitudes of the market economy in their own way. How is it possible that a post-Soviet patriarchal renascence is taking place in a country that considered itself the cradle of womens emancipation? Barbara Clements analyzes the antecedents of early gender debates and their results in Bolshevik Women, her study of the Bolshevichki, the women who joined the Bolshevik party before 1921, and shows how the changes in their careers and lives mirrored the resurgence of patriarchal attitudes and values from the earliest days of the socialist state. Most studies of women in the Soviet period have connected the reassertion of more traditional values with Stalins rule. For Clements, the change occurred as early as 1917, when the Bolsheviks seized power. She argues that the Bolshevik Revolution, despite its sweeping enactment of laws liberating women, actually marked revolutionary womens nadir of power, that women rose highest in the Bolshevik organization when it was at its most egalitarian, that is, before and during 1917 (p. 12). After the revolution, in Clementss view, the Bolsheviks reverted to tyrannical political habits deeply embedded in Russian culture and to the kind of gender discrimination that marked all European political parties. Her argument runs counter to the prevailing scholarship, which links Bolshevik authoritarianism directly to Lenins philosophy and personality and any pre-Revolutionary egalitarianism to Lenins inability to control the party from afar. Clements based her study on a database with records of 545 Bolshevichki, 318 pre-1917 members (about 13% of approximately 2,500), and 227 of those who joined during the civil war years (about 7.5% of the total of about 30,000), which she then compared to a database of male Bolsheviks, culled from the massive 28,000 entry Soviet Data Bank. She then added information from the biographies of seven leading Bolshevik women, including Inessa Armand and Elena Stasova, both of upper-class origins, and Alexandra Artiukhina and Klavdiia Nikolaeva from the working class. She bolstered her work with 41 tables, six graphs, and 31 illustrations, adding a further dimension to her portraits of the Bolshevichki. Clements applies current social movement theory to her study, especially stressing notions of collective identity in shaping the views and actions of these women. She makes much of the concept of tverdost, or hardness, as an important part of the collective identity of the Bolshevichki. The term has layers of gendered meaning, but for the revolutionaries, it meant someone who was coldly rational and unsentimental, someone with a tight control on their emotions, in other words, a woman who had mastered the ideal qualities of a man. 1875

American Journal of Sociology The author provides a useful perspective on the comparative progress of female and male Bolsheviks both before and after the Revolution. It should come as no surprise that female Bolsheviks fared less well than their male counterparts, were passed over for prominent positions (Armand), or unceremoniously ousted when they did get them (Stasova). Nevertheless, Clements provides signicant details to esh out the story of Bolshevik sexism. The Bolshevichki were subject to sexual innuendo in the erce intraparty power struggles before and after the Revolution, and responded by withdrawal, self-exile, or in at least one case, committing suicide. In the early years, troublesome female activists were generally demoted or exiled. Losers in most power struggles, the female activists gender sometimes aided them in avoiding the worst of the purges. Reversing the traditional patriarchal notion that marriage protected a woman, single women such as Stasova, nicknamed Comrade Absolute and Kollontai, were considered least dangerous and generally spared. Younger activists, without the baggage of life in the underground, found opportunity in a system whose propaganda promoted equality; nowhere else in the world were there so many female professionals, artists, scientists, judges, as in the USSR by 1930. As Stalin gained power, many of the Bolshevichki showed themselves lacking in the requisite amoral toughness, but some survived, and one, Rosaliia Zemliachka, was rewarded for her enthusiastic participation in the purges with appointment to the Council of Peoples Commissars, becoming the sole woman to break through this Stalinist glass ceiling. Clements is particularly good when she eshes out her portraits, in good feminist fashion integrating information about the personal and political lives of her subjects. There is more about the better known Bolshevichki, such as Inessa Armand, Alexandra Kollontai, and Elena Stasova, but there is also information and reinterpretation of the importance of less well-known women, such as Alexandra Artiukhina, a worker and the last head of Zhenotdel, usually portrayed as a party hack. This is the rst time that so much information has been gathered in one place about both prominent and rank and le Bolshevik women. Clements is to be commended for her diligent detective work and dedication to her task. In showing how the Bolsheviks co-opted the ideology of womens emancipation for their own ends while preserving basic aspects of patriarchal power, she helps explain the conditions that have led to the dramatic loss of opportunity and economic independence analyzed so vividly in Mary Buckleys collection.

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Book Reviews Reconstructing a Womens Prison: The Holloway Redevelopment Project 196888. By Paul Rock. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Pp. xii 360. $69.95. Andreas Glaeser University of Chicago Narrating the history of the reconstruction of Holloway, Englands most notorious womens prison, Paul Rock lays bare the ironies of policy, planning, goodwill, and anxiety in a sophisticated, multilayered analysis of the vicissitudes of an attempted prison reform. Rock begins his fascinating tale in the mid-1960s when Holloway, an imposing Victorian structure built to intimidate, discipline, and guard its inmates, started to be perceived as inhumane because it seemed to constitute an environment hostile to the therapeutic treatment of its inmates. Thus, the replacement of the old structure with a pathbreaking modern design was conceived, literally inverting the old panopticon by substituting a park as meeting ground for the central inspection bridge. Intertwined with the reconstruction was a plan for reform. The centrality of security was supposed to be replaced by an emphasis on treatment by building the new Holloway on the model of a hospital and thus changing the fundamental character of the relationship between personnel and inmates from surveillance to treatment. However, soon after its initiation, the reconstruction project ran into difculties when unforeseen environmental changes began to challenge some of the basic assumptions underpinning the reconstruction project. With the advent of prominent women terrorists and with the overall number of female prisoners steeply on the rise, the proposition that women were not really criminal in the same way as men had to be reconsidered. Moreover, the rst oil-price crisis triggered comprehensive cost-cutting measures putting a denite end to liberal public spending. Both of these changes in the external environment led to signicant alterations in the plans for the new building, in stafng levels, and in perceived staff responsibilities. By the mid-1970s, contrary to the reformers original intentions, security measures were moving to the foreground again. The result of the thwarted reform was, according to Rock, a vicious cycle of violence between wardens and inmates. Anxieties about an uncontrollable situation provoked prison personnel to insist on locking prisoners up into their cells for longer periods of time. Inmates, in turn, reacted to these restrictions by increasingly violent, seemingly crazy behavior, giving wardens yet more cause to keep them in their cells. Rocks tale culminates in the analysis of a strike staged by the wardens union in 1988 to enforce even tighter security measures in an already very strictly controlled environment. Instead of caving in to the demands of the union, Holloways governor chose to ght for more liberal prison regime. Locking out the striking security ofcers, the governor decided to run Holloway with a minimum of staff, relying on the maximum cooperation of the inmates. Allowed to take greater responsibility for their 1877

American Journal of Sociology own lives, the inmates in fact did cooperate, leading to what Rock describes in vivid colors as the most humane episode in Holloways pained history. The governor succeeded in the end, but his success came at a price. Alarmed by the anger the strike had caused in the wardens union, the home ofce relieved the governor of his duties, thus rendering the nal success of a more lenient, more humane penal regime at Holloway uncertain. What remains according to Rock is the hope that the strike was a rite of passage permanently transforming the consciousness of all involved. Rocks well-written book thematizes human agency from two different, equally fascinating angles. First, he explores the structural and cultural conditions under which bureaucrats enjoy the freedom to enact their own agenda. Narrating his story from the point of view of Holloways governors, while considering a truly impressive variety of inuencing factors (ranging from the impact of spatial environments and the rhythm of career trajectories, over personal biographies and networks, to group conict, local politics, changes in public ideology, and international affairs), Rock is able to draw an admirably nuanced picture of the decision making of the reform project in progress. He also strikes a convincing balance between the agency of individual and institutional actors on the one hand and structural changes on the other by integrating systemic changes both as political constraints and as cultural representations into the life worlds of creative actors. In this sense, Rocks book provides an excellent quasiethnographic perspective to the literature on bureaucratic decision making and the state. Second, Rock looks at the consequences of structural constraints and cultural presuppositions of the prison personnel on the types of action taken by Holloways inmates. Rock reads the increasing rates of seemingly crazy, violent, and self-destructive behavior of inmates as a direct consequence of curtailing their freedom. As a ipside to this view, he interprets the cooperation of the prison inmates during the strike of 1988 as the humanizing effect of trust and respect granted to them by the emergency staff keeping Holloway operational during the strike. Given the importance of this interpretation for Rocks rhetoric of reform, it is very unfortunate, however, that Rock has very little interview material with inmates to substantiate this part of his analysis. Thus, it remains quite unclear, for example, how inmates interpreted their own actions before, during, and after the strike. Given the two very different angles on agency developed by Rock, it would have been helpful if he had moved beyond a juxtaposition of his material on inmates and ofcials to systematic comparison and theoretical reection. Without theoretical reection, the tenor of Rocks work remains paradoxical, for he suggests more autonomy for the inmates as effective means of prison reform. A rigorous theoretical exploration of this paradox might have also enabled him to respond more effectively to Foucaults biting observation that the very idea of reform has always been a functional part of the prison system without ever yielding the pro1878

Book Reviews claimed result of improving the reintegration of exprisoners into mainstream society. Being There: Culture and Formation in Two Theological Schools. By Jackson W. Carroll, Barbara G. Wheeler, Daniel O. Aleshire, and Penny Long Marler. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. xi 299. $35.00. Mary Blair-Loy Washington State University This book is an ethnographic study of two postbaccalaureate institutions that prepare students for various types of ministry in protestant churches and organizations. Mainline Seminary is the pseudonym for a seminary afliated with a liberal protestant denomination. Evangelical Seminary denotes a multidenominational seminary loosely aligned with conservative, evangelical churches and organizations. The authors goals are to map the culture of each seminary and to show how this culture affects the formation of students character, vocation, and resources for answering their call to ministry. The authors nd that each school has a distinct, core normative message that functions as the pivot of the institutions culture, anchoring the culture and orienting the educational agenda (p. 205). Evangelical Seminarys cultural anchor is that the world needs to embrace a sober, religious discipline that allows people to follow Gods orderly plan for human redemption that is inerrantly inscribed in the Bible. Mainline Seminarys central message is that the world needs to be cleansed of all prejudice and oppression to help usher in Gods reign of justice. Despite the substantive difference in these cultural messages, the authors identify striking formal similarities in how the school cultures are organized and how they shape and are shaped by students. Each culture provides a tool kit of strategies for ministry in uncertain times (Ann Swidler, Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies [American Sociological Review 51 (1986): 27386]). Each culture has a normative core and permissible variations that include purer, more radical and watereddown versions of the core message. Both seminaries allow students leeway in contesting the core cultural message and in ultimately negotiating a qualied acceptance of some version of that message. The processes of critique, negotiation, and altered reproduction occur in small student groups and in the classroom. The cultures of both seminaries are thus constructed and changed over time by the interaction of students, faculty, and staff. Each school culture is also affected by the seminarys selective adaptation to and isomorphism with broader organizational elds from which it derives resources and legitimacy. And in contrast to other scholars accounts of culture wars, these authors nd that each school emphasizes the reform of the religious institutions with which they are closely 1879

American Journal of Sociology afliated rather than castigates those at the opposite end of the ideological spectrum. By the end of the book, the authors convincingly make the theoretical argument I have just summarized. However, readers may nd the road to this argument long and frustrating. Although the authors say they followed Barney Glaser and Anselm Strausss grounded theory method (The Discovery of Grounded Theory [Aldine Publishing, 1967]), the books organization does not mirror a grounded theory approach of reciprocal attention to data, literature, theory formation, back to data, and so on. Rather, the book rst presents nine chapters of pure description before offering any explicit theorizing. The reader must absorb a dizzying array of detail about the two schools and meet a huge cast of characters before any framework is given for the datas relevance or interpretation. Without context or framework, some of these data are bafing. While my education at a liberal divinity school helped me follow the description of Mainline Seminary, I lacked the cultural capital to understand much of life at Evangelical Seminary. For example, I could only very supercially follow what is presented as a signicant argument between students and faculty over process theology (pp. 6468), and I remain bewildered by the debate between dispensationalism and the mainstream Evangelical Seminary position. The descriptive chapters lack an authorial voice to guide readers through the maze of characters, ideas, and debates. Yet perseverance in reading the rst nine chapters is rewarded by the clear, thoughtful interpretation in chapters 1013. The book ultimately presents a compelling analysis of each schools culture and its relationship to student formation. This book will interest sociologists of culture, religion, organizations, and education. Several ndings are relevant to higher education in general. Most students in both schools are profoundly effected by their interaction with faculty and with other students. But students who do not spend substantial amounts of time at the seminary miss out on this process of vocational formation and seminary culture reproduction and change. One must be there temporally and geographically to shape and be shaped by the school culture. The authors caution that many trends in higher education, from part-time and commuter students to video- and internet-based distance learning, will undermine the process of personal and institutional formation and reformation.

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Book Reviews Is Science Multicultural? Postcolonialisms, Feminisms, and Epistemologies. By Sandra Harding. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Pp. xi 242. $35.00 (cloth); $14.95 (paper). Bart Simon Queens University Sandra Harding is no stranger to challenging the boundaries of the philosophy and social studies of science and knowledge. As a feminist philosopher of science, Harding has made issues of diversity and difference a central aspect of her program of strong objectivity. This program has always had two basic components. The rst is an analysis of modern science as historically gendered and raced in ways that privilege a predominantly white, patriarchal, and eurocentric standpoint. The second is the development of an epistemological framework that allows for the recognition of other nonwhite, nonpatriarchal, and non-Western standpoints without retreating from a conception of objectivity or falling prey to a form of naive pluralism or relativism. In effect, Hardings latest book, Is Science Multicultural? is a logical extension of her previous work in feminist epistemology with a few renements. Hardings previous work might be understood as an attempt to mediate between the concerns of constructivist sociology and history of science on the one hand and more politicized feminist science studies on the other. This new book adds a third voice: that of postcolonial science and technology studies. The mere attempt to bring together these three often disparate trajectories of research on science marks this book as both unique and important to the development of a broader understanding of knowledge-making and science. Is Science Multicultural? initiates a conversation that should have taken place 10 years ago amongst science studies scholars; if there is a major drawback, it is that the conversation barely gets started before the book is over. Hardings project is perhaps too grand to suit most social scientists, but her intention is to lay out the possibilities for a multicultural epistemology that might transform scientic practice, international science policies, and their effects. Modern science, for Harding, is not culturally transcendent but is bound to specic cultural histories and their relations. Hardings targets, therefore, are the dominant eurocentric and androcentric science and technology policies that are in part legitimated by a positivist and internalist epistemology, which has its origins in the development and expansion of European patriarchal culture. To counter these conceptions of science, Harding advocates adopting a postcolonial standpoint and looking at Western science from the outside. As most readers will be unfamiliar with the genre of postcolonial science studies, Hardings advocacy is valuable for this reason alone. The rst half of the book considers three kinds of postcolonial perspectives: studies of the relationship between European colonial expansion

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American Journal of Sociology and the emergence of modern science, studies of contemporary non-European (and American) cultures scientic practices, and development studies that question the universal applicability of Western paradigms of scientic progress. Harding provides brief accounts of a range of historical and ethnographic studies written from a postcolonial perspective, which demonstrate the cross-cultural contingency of both early-modern and modern scientic practices. While the main issues are clearly laid out, Hardings discussions of these texts are all too brief and are seldom critical. In the second half of the book, Harding proceeds to articulate the consequences of adding postcolonial voices to the development of feminist standpoint theory and her brand of strong objectivity. Particularly useful here is Hardings discussion of the possibilities for antiessentialist and nonrelativist borderlands epistemologies. Although important in their own right, Hardings overt epistemological concerns cut short the conversation on the implications of postcolonial perspectives for science studies and vice versa. A more interesting and important task, perhaps, is articulating the ways that knowledge is made and deployed across cultural contexts. Postcolonial studies are important for understanding the relationship between non-Western epistemic practice and the globally dominant ways of knowledge-making we call science. While Harding takes an important epistemological and political stand in referring to all systematic attempts to produce knowledge about the world as sciences, this does little to help us understand how actors must regularly negotiate the boundaries of what counts as legitimate knowledge within and across cultures. A nal disappointment is that, despite Hardings advocacy of postcolonial scholarship and its epistemological implications, her text contains almost no discussion of extant work in postcolonial critical theory. Hardings arguments would benet from the reection on the problematic meanings of postcoloniality, the process of decolonialization, and neocolonialism by authors such as Franz Fanon, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and members of the Subaltern Studies Group. To a certain degree, the same criticism applies to Hardings use of the term science. It is often unclear when Harding wants to refer to science as a Western cultural institution, a set of local practices, a collection of beliefs about the world, or a particular epistemological framework that grounds those beliefs. All of these meanings are ne, but the lack of specicity in her discussion makes nding the points of convergence and divergence between postcolonial, feminist, and constructivist science studies a more difcult task than it needs to be.

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Book Reviews The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography. By Martin W. Lewis and Karen E. Wigen. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997. Pp. xv 344. $55.00 (cloth); $19.95 (paper). Jeffrey C. Bridger University of Kentucky Metageography, the set of spatial structures we use to organize and comprehend the world, would seem to be a topic of immense interest at this juncture in history. It is surprising, though, that systematic inquiry has not kept pace with developments that threaten to demolish longstanding understandings of global geography. Martin Lewis and Karen Wigen see this oversight as one of the most serious aws in contemporary geography and attempt to rectify it by identifying the dominant metageographical frameworks currently in use, the spatial distortions to which these give rise, and the ideological and political consequences that ow from reliance on an overly simplistic metageography. Their critique provides the basis for the building blocks needed to construct a more sophisticated global geography. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, our view of a world composed of relatively stable units has been revealed for the ction that it is. Boundaries that once seemed natural and immutable are now contested and ephemeral. Deeply rooted ethnic and religious conicts have erupted in regions that were once largely ignored or treated as if they formed homogenous cultural units. Despite these and other changes, we continue to describe the world with such static metageographic categories as continents, East/West, First/Second/Third World, and Europe/Asia. According to Lewis and Wigen, the bulk of our misunderstanding can be traced to an uncritical acceptance of a series of convenient but stultifying geographical myths, based on unwarranted simplications of global spatial patterns (p. xiii). These include the myth of continents, the myth of East and West, the myth of the nation state, and the myth of geographic concordance. The myth of continents and the myth of East and West are singled out for detailed treatment, while the myth of the nation state and the myth of geographical concordance occupy supporting roles, reinforcing the prejudices and stereotypes that grow from the central myths. The myth of continents is by far the most basic and damaging metageographic category. Continents, as generally understood, are large, continuous expanses of land separated by bodies of water. The most obvious problem with this scheme is that the required size and degree of physical separation have never been dened. Over time, different criteria have been used to draw continental lines in different places, depending on the interests of who was doing the drawing. Thus, Europe, which is most accurately viewed as part of single continent that includes Asia, is nevertheless elevated to continental status. In doing so, it assumes a level of cultural and political importance that is not warranted by size alone. This 1883

American Journal of Sociology is not simply a matter of convenience or the result of a simple oversight. Instead, it has been a key element in the effort to establish and maintain a cultural dichotomy between Europe and Asia, a dichotomy that was essential to modern Europes identity as a civilization (p. 36). Like the continental scheme we have inherited, the spatial division between East and West is largely arbitrary. And it too has been subject to shifts over time. During World War II, for instance, some historians classied Germany as an eastern country in order to distance Nazism from true European civilization. With the onset of the cold war, the boundaries shifted again; West Germany became part of the West, while everything behind the iron curtain was East. In this incarnation, the West was synonymous with capitalist democracy and the East with communism. Today, the West has come to mean the developed world, without reference to the actual location of particular countries. With this redenition, Japan becomes a western nation while the countries of Latin America simply become part of the Third World. The spurious geographical division between East and West is compounded by unexamined assumptions about the cultural differences between these regions. While Lewis and Wigen catalog a host of attributes that supposedly distinguish Western and Eastern Culture, they argue that rationality has long been the most important. In this view, Western progress was made possible by a commitment to a peculiarly Greek spirit of rationality (p. 83). The implication here is that this force was missing in the East. However, if one denes rationality in broad terms, the West can hardly be said to have a lock on reason. At times, in fact, China and parts of the Islamic world have in many ways been more committed to rational inquiry than Europe. The misunderstandings that grow out of the myth of continents and the East-West myth are exacerbated by a persistent environmental determinism that continues to assert a causal relationship between the physical environment and cultural and social traits. This is seen most clearly in the notion that Europes developmental trajectory was largely dependent on a temperate climate: Europes physiographic and climatic diversity are now sometimes viewed merely as having prevented the consolidation of large empires and allowed scope for the development of a marketdriven economy (p. 44). While it is obvious that our uncritical use of metageographic categories serves to highlight the achievements of European civilization, it also has a more pernicious consequence. As Lewis and Wigen put it, Our awed metageography has become a vehicle for displacing the sins of Western Civilization onto an intrusive non-European Other in our midst (p. 68). By redrawing the physical and cultural lines between East and West when the need arises, the blame for all manner of atrocities can be shifted and historical responsibility denied. This last charge is open to serious debate. For while some scholars may indeed have used stereotypes of the East to shift blame for Western sins, Lewis and Wigen ignore the work of Horkheimer, Adorno, and other 1884

Book Reviews members of the Frankfurt School who trace some of the most despicable acts of the 20th century to contradictions embedded within the Enlightenment. Despite this omission, Lewis and Wigens broader argument is a sound one. Overly simplistic metageographic categories are a barrier to understanding an increasingly complex world, and our reliance on them does lead to generalizations with often damaging political consequences. Replacing the existing framework, however, creates new problems. For all the deciencies inherent in the systems currently in use, they do provide a shared language for talking about the world. The move to an open-ended melange of overlapping and incommensurable distributional patterns (p. 13) will upset common understandings and threaten our ability to communicate effectively. Hence, some form of taxonomy is essential. The world region framework is the scheme that comes closest to meeting these criteria. Lewis and Wigen propose that we take this as a starting point for developing a more subtle map of the world. In addition to the 10 regions that are typically delineated, they suggest that we add three new ones: African-America, Melanesia, and Central Asia. Their world map is also explicitly rooted in historical processes, ignores political and ecological boundaries in favor of meaningful cultural areas, and conceptualizes regions both in terms of internal characteristics and their relations with one another. This rendition provides a more nuanced view of sociospatial relations, and while useful to scholars and policymakers, it does little to correct popular stereotypes and prejudices that are inseparable from the myths of metageography. Dislodging these will take more than a new set of lines on the map. The Struggle over the Soul of Economics: Institutionalist and Neoclassical Economists in America between the Wars. By Yuval P. Yonay. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998. Pp. xiii 290. Mark Blaug University of Exeter This luridly titled book is a ne example of the sociology of science applied to the history of economics, in particular, the interwar period in American economics that consisted in large part of a struggle for hegemony between institutionalists of the Veblen-Commons-Mitchell variety and orthodox neoclassical economists. It utilizes the actor-network approach (ANA) associated with the Paris School of Bruno Latour and Michel Callon that views science as a social network of individual scientists who negotiate with one another in an endless struggle for intellectual dominance, the outcome of which is never decisively inuenced by either internal or external forces but rather by an unpredictable combination of both cognitive and sociological elements. The appeal to the names of Latour and Callon, not to mention Barry Barnes, Harry Collins, Karin Knorr-Cetina, and Trevor Pinch, suggests that we are going to be shown 1885

American Journal of Sociology how economists in such interwar economic laboratories as the National Bureau of Economic Research and the University of Wisconsin Department of Economics actually conducted their research. But this is not Professor Yonays tack: instead, he connes himself to the written word, a limitation that he frankly acknowledges. Nevertheless, the thesis that he establishes by an examination of the primary literature is that institutional economics was in ascendancy throughout the 1920s and maintained its grip on the economics profession even in the 1930s and 1940s, only to be vanquished by neoclassical economics in the late 1940s. Moreover, this brand of neoclassical economics (a label that was itself invented by Veblen as early as 1903) was nothing like what we now call neoclassical economics. Somewhere around 1950, economics went through a veritable revolution of mathematization, with names like John Hicks, Paul Samuelson, Kenneth Arrow, and Gerard Debreu becoming the idols of a new generation of postwar economists. From that moment on, in the customary manner in which history is always being rewritten by the winners, the story of interwar American economics was reinterpreted as one of an inevitable victory of orthodox neoclassical economics and the equally inevitable demise of institutionalism. In consequence, it is now difcult to recognize the writings of some of the leading mainstream interwar economists such as Frank Knight and Jacob Viner as orthodox at all: they seem at times to be highly critical of assumptions regarded nowadays as absolutely sacrosanct. This may not be as novel an interpretation as the author claims (e.g., see my own Disturbing Currents in Modern Economics, Challenge [MayJune 1998]) but nevertheless this is the rst detailed demonstration of the argument and hence may convince even the most skeptical of textbook writers in the history of economics. As a bonus, we are given an attractive account of the new school of ANA as a species of the genus of constructivism in the philosophy of science, of which other closely related examples are the Bloor-Barnes strong program in the sociology of science and the McCloskey-Klamer program in the rhetoric of economics (chaps. 1, 10). Until the very last pages of the book, ANA is sold to the reader as the only successful explanation of the evolution of interwar American economics, superseding Thomas Kuhns appeals to paradigms or Imre Lakatoss notion of scientic research programs. But in the nal pages (pp. 21822), it is suddenly conceded that the methodology of any social science such as economics also has a normative objective, namely, to appraise developments in the subject with a view to improving the quality of practice and even to criticize the drift of current developments. Professor Yonay argues that construction is not indifferent to normative issues and does not necessarily condone whatever is standard fare in an area of scientic inquiry. I was not entirely persuaded by this all too brief defense. It does seem to me that ANA, like all varieties of constructivism, is bound to conclude, not only that anything goes but that everything goes. As for causally explaining the past, ANA likewise suffers from excessive generality. What could possibly contradict an ANA expla1886

Book Reviews nation of a historical episode when in fact every conceivable element in scientic disputes is recognized and is indeed recognized as having equal value? An ANA explanation of a past event strikes me as very much like playing tennis with the net down. Nevertheless, I can think of no historian of economics who would not learn a great deal from this book; needless to say, it is vain to imagine any workaday economist reading this book since they (a) never read books, and (b) never read books on intellectual history. Is this an ANA argument? La decouverte du social: Naissance de la sociologie en France (1870 1914). By Laurent Mucchielli. Paris: Editions la Decouverte, 1998. Pp. 572. Robert Leroux Universite de Montreal Reference books usually have the limited yet practical function of providing information on a particular topic. Laurent Mucchiellis work is more than a simple reference book; it deserves to be read in its entirety. Defending an interesting and important general perspective, Mucchielli proposes to situate the institutional genesis of French sociology in its social, cultural, intellectual, and political context. Using a sociology of knowledge approach to identify the multitude of inuences at the origin of the main French sociological theories that emerged between 1870 and 1914, Mucchielli shows that the discovery of the social was the result of a major collective effort. In the rst part of the book, Mucchielli argues that at the end of the 19th century the previously dominant biological and racial models were replaced with an understanding of sociology as an objective science. He analyzes in minute detail the works of sociologists of that period, their intellectual networks, and their main theoretical concepts. Mucchielli goes on to demonstrate how Emile Durkheim and his collaborators represent a new sociological paradigm, in the Kuhnian sense of the term. The theoretical projects of Durkheims key opponents are examined, in cluding Gabriel Tardes theory of imitation and Rene Wormss organicism. The strength of Mucchiellis work lies in the second part. He shows how the Durkheimian school, which gravitated around the journal LAnnee Sociologique, tried to impose its project on the other social and human sciences of that period (i.e., criminology, psychology, biology, geography, history, linguistics, ethnology, political economy), while at the same time being largely inspired by them. The contribution of Dur kheims major collaborators (Bougle, Halbwachs, Hubert, Mauss, Meillet, Richard, and Simiand) in the inauguration of a fertile dialogue with these competing sciences is brilliantly analyzed. This book is a very valuable work for many reasons. First, the subject 1887

American Journal of Sociology itself is highly original from the perspective of the history of ideas: Mucchielli focuses on the birth of French sociological thought in this decisive period of its history when the fundamental questions, which are still with us, were rst addressed (i.e., the links between theory and empirical research). Some authors analyzed by Mucchielli, against whom the Durkheimian paradigm raised its voice, had never previously been seriously taken into account, despite the fact that they played an important role in the emergence of sociology in France. Second, the interest of the interpretative framework of the book must be underlined. This framework, which rests on an impressive erudition, is conceived in such a way that the main thread of Mucchiellis argument is never broken between the general project and the particular constructions, that is, between the analysis of central theoretical concepts and the effort to reconstruct an intellectual horizon on the one hand and a series of portraits of authors on the other. Beyond individual sociological contributions, it is the ideas themselves, their confrontation with each other, and their broader intellectual signicance that are at the center of Mucchiellis investigation. Third, while Durkheims work has been abundantly discussed, the contributions of his disciples have been less well studied, with the exception of his nephew Marcel Mauss, who has been the object of a few scholarly books in recent years (Marcel Fournier, Marcel Mauss [Fayard, 1994]; Marcel Mauss, ecrits politiques [Fayard, 1997]). Mucchiellis most remarkable contribution is his presentation of a generous sample of works from main contributors to LAnnee Sociologique. Some of the Durkheimi ans, Celestin Bougle and Francois Simiand in particular, have played a central role in the elaboration and diffusion of the Durkheimian paradigm, but their names often remain unknown outside French borders. Mucchielli reminds us what Philippe Besnards works have already shown (La formation de lequipe de LAnnee sociologique, Revue francaise de sociologie [1979] 20:731; The Sociological Domain [Cambridge University Press, 1983]): the emergence of the Durkheimian paradigm is the result of a fruitful teamwork of young scholars from different disciplines. Finally, Mucchiellis bibliography is impressive, containing an important compilation of both primary and secondary sources. There is no doubt that this well-written reference book will be of interest not only to both undergraduate and graduate students but also to professional sociologists and other social scientists who want to learn more about the birth of French sociology. Its merit resides in the fact that it accurately presents an intellectual landscape about which very little is known in North America and, to some extent, even in France. In sum, Laurent Mucchielli succeeds in meeting the challenge he had set for himself: his book will be useful to many, and one can already predict that it will become an authoritative source of knowledge on a crucial period in the history of sociology.

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Book Reviews Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. By David Swartz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Pp. viii 333. $57.00 (cloth); $15.95 (paper). David Gartman University of South Alabama Of all contemporary European sociological theorists, only Pierre Bourdieu has yet to nd his denitive American interpreter. Partly because of the fragmented nature of our disciplinary eld, Bourdieus complex corpus has been appropriated largely in bits by specialists who are unaware of or unconcerned about the integral whole. So in a manner reminiscent of the Indian folk tale of the blind men and the elephant, there are many American Bourdieus: an anthropologist of Algeria, a sociologist of education, an analyst of art and culture, a researcher of stratication. Bourdieu has contributed to this fragmentary appropriation by adamantly refusing to theorize, that is, present his general concepts and ideas in a form abstracted from his empirical research. This faulty American reception of Bourdieus sociology will hopefully change with the publication of David Swartzs new book, which is the rst successful and accessible overview of Bourdieus entire corpus. Culture and Power puts all the parts of the elephant back together, revealing not merely the power and breadth of the animal but the warts and wrinkles as well. Swartz is in the right position to accomplish this sympathetic but probing treatment. As a student at the Sorbonne in the 1970s, he attended Bourdieus seminars but did not become a disciple. Familiar with the Parisian intellectual eld, yet viewing it from the remove of the American university, Swartz achieves a felicitous balance between insider and outsider. The result is a book unsurpassed in the breadth and depth of its comprehension of this major sociological theorist. But readers looking for a mere introduction to Bourdieus work had best look elsewhere, for this is a highly sophisticated work that presents a wealth of details, complexities, and nuances. Before diving into his exposition of Bourdieus basic concepts, Swartz gives us an enlightening chapter on his career and position in Frances intellectual eld. Bourdieus relentless criticism of the role of culture in general and education in particular in reproducing social inequalities is explained by his own origins as a petit-bourgeois outsider who, despite his remarkable upward mobility, has always felt marginalized by the up per-class culture of Frances grandes ecoles. Bourdieus concepts and research are insightfully interpreted as strategic moves against competitors in this complex and contentious Parisian intellectual eld. Swartz then moves on to explicate the general concepts that inform all of Bourdieus research. His utmost objective is to extend the notion of self-interested action usually associated with economics to cultural practice. For Bourdieu, all social action is motivated by the pursuit of prots

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American Journal of Sociology and power, but the seeming disinterestedness of cultural pursuits allows them to launder and legitimate the structured inequalities of other areas. He argues that in modern societies cultural practices have become the most important method of reproducing inequalities, as the upper classes invest money and time in education and art, which become the basis for social selection. Bourdieus theory departs, however, from rational choice and conict models of action in holding that the pursuit of gain is not conscious but is governed by a set of preconscious dispositionsa habitusinculcated by early socialization in the class structure. The effects of habitus on action are, however, always mediated by the particular eld of struggle, one of Bourdieus more recent and less understood concepts, which Swartz does a good job of clarifying. Swartz then devotes several chapters to detailing how Bourdieu mobilizes these concepts in empirical studies of social class, education and art, and intellectuals. Researchers in these elds will nd a wealth of intriguing material here, for the author is in thorough command of the French literature by and on Bourdieu. Unfortunately, however, he only rarely engages the American literature in these areas, which often reveals the limited generalizability of Bourdieus French ndings. The last several chapters explore Bourdieus conceptions of science and reexive sociology. His insight that science too is a self-interested practice in a eld of competition leaves Bourdieu struggling to maintain faith in the objectivity and emancipatory potential of science. But ever the defender of an autonomous and scientic sociology, he argues that sociologists can partially transcend the limits of their own interests by reexively analyzing their own scientic eld. As Swartz insightfully notes, however, Bourdieus professional optimism about the objectivity and progressive political potential of sociology contradicts his pessimistic theory that all culture, however autonomous, is inevitably interested and reproduces inequalities. Swartzs book is a welcome and indispensable contribution to understanding Bourdieus sociology, but it is not without aws. In his attempt to be comprehensive, the authors expositions often end up exhaustive and repetitive. There are also too many footnotes, some of which are interesting textual supplements, while more are merely annoying interruptions. Finally, I was surprised to nd in a book published by the venerable University of Chicago Press a generous sprinkling of typographical errors in the text and numerous errors and omissions in the references. Readers deserve better.

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Book Reviews Simmel et la modernite. By Lilyane Deroche-Gurcel. Paris: Presses Universitires de France, 1997. Pp. x 336. Suzanne Vromen Bard College This signicant addition to our knowledge of Simmel is remarkable by the breadth of its scholarship and the depth of its interpretations. In tracing the many ways in which Simmel is an exponent of modernity, the author argues for the overall coherence of Simmels thought and shows the close relationship between his sociological, philosophical, and aesthetic writings both in concepts and essential reasoning. Simmels aesthetic contributions have received relatively little attention. Simmel et la modernite remedies this situation. As sociologys search for global and denitive explanations has waned and holistic systems have been replaced by critiques, the author argues, Simmels popularity has grown. By founding social life on interaction, by stressing process and the ux of becoming (in contrast to being), and by overcoming the limits of disciplinary boundaries, Simmel shapes a unitary and modern vision of culture and society. The author contends that Simmel is not a positivist, because he rejects the belief in an immanent, unique truth dened by its contents, nor is he a postmodern relativist, because he refuses to assume that truth is an illusion and that all opinions are equally valid. His theory of knowledge is founded on a nonskeptical relativism. In this epistemological rupture, truth is not content but a relation, a reciprocity of action. Relativity is the essence of truth, thus an isolated or absolute truth does not exist, only a relational one. For example, a line considered in isolation is neither short nor long. Truth and reality have to be separated. It is precisely on this point that Simmel criticizes naturalism, synonymous for him with realism. Art and the social sciences have the ability to create a world instead of merely copying one. Just as truth is not the duplication of reality, the art work does not copy the real. Reciprocal action explains the dynamics of social life, but it is also central to the critique of modernity embedded in his sociology of art. Simmel criticizes two unsatisfactory artistic conceptions of modernity. The rst pursues only purely formal intentions; form clearly predominates over content. The other, expressionism for example, gives priority to the effusive subjectivity of the artist and claims authenticity by sacricing form. For Simmel, both conceptions lead into an impasse, for both miss the expression of totality. The real modern artist seeks the totality of life in which both beauty and ugliness, perfection and imperfection are included. Pure technical virtuosity cannot achieve excellence. On the contrary, Simmel praises art for life, thus afrming the interdependence of form and content. In the works of Rodin and Rembrandt, Simmel nds the most accomplished expressions of modernity, for, different as they are, they both rep1891

American Journal of Sociology resent the unity of soul and body, the totality imperative for Simmel. In Rodins sculpture, constant movement yields a new way in which surfaces meet and confront each other. Rembrandt is modern in expressing the immediate individuality of his subjects through form and color without concern for classical beauty. Opposition and contradiction together with individuality and particularity characterize modern art, and Rembrandt is for Simmel the rst painter to have realized this. Academic painting only establishes types. But Rembrandt frees himself from the general semiotic code that imprisons the academic painter and expresses individuality as a pictorial problem, not as a psychological or metaphysical or anecdotal one. A quote from Simmels book on Rembrandt cited by the author sums it up well: this knowledge of life that speaks through creations and not concepts (p. 84; my translation). The author contends that Simmel refutes the pessimism that modernity inspires in his contemporaries. It is ambivalence that marks modernity, therefore, a possible disenchantment is never fatal. If the blase displays melancholy, this attitude reveals itself paradoxically to be a technique of adaptation. To highlight Simmels modernity, the author contrasts him with Durkheim. Durkheim is roughly characterized as an interventionist sociologist, deterministic, with a voluntaristic reformative thrust, a moralizer emphasizing permanence and regulation. In contrast, Simmel stresses agency and the creative power of the individual, with the blase attitude an effective adaptive behavior and aiming at lucid understanding but no societal prescription. A short review cannot do justice to all the facets of this work nor to the incisive connections that the author makes with major literary gures and art critics. Various secondary sources are used, yet two prominent Simmel scholars, namely Donald Levine and Birgitta Nedelmann, are overlooked. The author also neglects to discuss Simmels thoughts on the place of women in the modern world, a subject embedded in his theoretical scheme and one that he treats seriously in contrast to his contemporary peers. Further, is it really necessary to juxtapose Durkheim and Simmel, or to put it differently, does praising Simmel demand damning Durkheim? Finally, I would have liked to learn more about the reception of Simmels aesthetic works in his time. The book is unfortunately written in a turgid and redundant style. It will, however, be cherished by Simmel scholars for its insights and broad range, and it deserves to be rapidly and coherently translated. Simmel should be satised; justice has been done to his thought.

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Book Reviews Re-forming the Body: Religion, Community, and Modernity. By Philip A. Mellor and Chris Shilling. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1997. Pp. 234. $75.00 (cloth); $26.95 (paper). Ann W. Ramsey University of Texas, Austin Mellor and Schilling contribute to a growing sociological literature on embodiment as the matrix for both collective experience and the sense of self. Their nonteleological model uses ideal-types (the medieval body, the Protestant modern body, and the baroque modern body) to examine the persistence of the sacred in Western development. The argument proceeds on three fronts. First, the authors aim to broaden historical perspective in current debates about the postmodern condition by showing how the senses and the human body have been constantly restructured over time. They focus on the character of these changes rather than the complexities of dening the agents of these changes. Second, they argue that debate over the future of Western civilization must consider the resilience of the human body and its resistance to cognitive control. They warn that this resistance may be liberating or dark and violent. Third, by dening their work as an expansion upon Emile Durkheims interest in the relationships between forms of embodiment, forms of sociality, and forms of knowing, the authors join the ongoing debate about the legacy of Durkheim himself. They draw inspiration from the analysis of the sacred res of effervescent sociality, in Durkheims Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Lloyd E. Sandelands work on embodiment (The Body Social, in The Mark of the Social, edited by John D. Greenwood [Rowman & Littleeld, 1997]) critiques the primacy of cognition in Durkheims approach to social life. Mellor and Schilling, however, pursue a different project of cultural criticism and historical analysis emphasizing Durkheims commitments to homo duplex. The authors stress the enduring signicance of sacred forms of sociality (p. 201). Their critique of the human costs of the rationalist Enlightenment project (p. 22) nally depicts mind/body dualism as an inadequate ontology of the human body. The argument begins in afnity with Max Weber and presents the disciplined and cognitively controlled early modern Protestant body as the touchstone of Western modernity. The authors have clearly, however, been paying attention to dramatic shifts in historians understanding of the Reformation era and the religious culture of medieval Catholicism. The present generation of cultural and religious historians have shifted their attention from doctrinal analysis in order to explore peoples experience of the sacred and the changing attitudes toward the human body that shaped religious values, authority relations, the sense of the self, and the fundamental ways in which one knows the world. The authors are right to warn the reader not to look here for empiricist history (p. 32). As a historian, I missed the lack of direct analysis of the 1893

American Journal of Sociology historical material of the past. All their historical material on the Middle Ages and Reformation era is drawn from monographic and even textbook interpretations (for the latter chiey Euan Cameron, The European Reformation [Oxford University Press, 1991]). But, the authors have chosen well: Peter Brown, Caroline Walker Bynum, John Bossy, and Robert Scribner, among others, have led a veritable revolution in historians understanding of the place of the body in the changing religious culture of Christianity. One may criticize Mellor and Schillingss generalizations about the superstitious character of premodern religious belief or their lack of social differentiation in treating medieval epistemologies of the sacred. More important, however, this book enriches the conceptual arsenal for interdisciplinary analysis of political, social, and cultural change. Their work particularly stimulates more nuanced thinking about the cultural and political legacy of the Reformation era. By drawing attention to fundamental differences in the way Catholic and Protestant reform movements of the 16th and 17th centuries reshaped the senses and bodily experience, the authors in effect emphasize an often overlooked diversity in the Western cultural inheritance. This forces rethinking of oversimplied schemas of historical development that tended to focus on Protestant paths to modernity. Their methodology of ideal types, if read as incitement to further research, manages both to clarify tensions surrounding cultural and social integration in the late 20th century while underscoring the real historical complexity of modern bodies. This is most evident in their treatment of the importance of the Catholic Reformation and its culmination in the culture of the baroque, which opposed the asceticism of Calvinism with complex strands of sensuality and a more physically grounded asceticism. The interpretation of the baroque modern body continues this theme. In tracing connections between baroque sensuality and contemporary pursuits of the hard athletic body, the authors draw upon an important, relatively new historiography on late-medieval and early modern Catholic religious experience and its connections to the postmodern temperament. Here one misses acknowledgment of the work of Michel de Certeau (The Mystic Fable [University of Chicago Press, 1992]) or Edith Wyschogrods Saints and Postmodernism (University of Chicago Press, 1990). But, there is much more to be grateful for than can be mentioned here, especially in the political vein in critique of the contractarian mentality and in the conceptual distinctions stressed in the notes. The book and its bibliography will be a welcome overview in courses on the body and the sensoria. Readers in all disciplines who are interested in pursuing the important insight that the construction of reality is an embodied process will nd this provocative reading.

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Book Reviews Social Mechanisms: An Analytical Approach to Social Theory. Edited by Peter Hedstrom and Richard Swedberg. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. x 340. $59.95 (cloth); $22.95 (paper). James Johnson University of Rochester The contributors to this volume are dissatised with the current state of social and political research. They claim that much of what now passes for empirical social science and much of what now passes for social theory is decient because those who engage in either enterpriseone symptom of deciency is that hardly anyone engages in bothneglect the task of identifying the causal mechanisms that explain phenomena in the social world. Many practicing social scientists and social theorists will be tempted to dismiss such criticism as a distraction from their ongoing research. They should resist the temptation. They should resist, most obviously, because the contributors to the volume form a distinguished group of sociologists, economists, and political scientists. I am not invoking authority in a supercial way here. Instead, I simply suggest that we ought to listen to colleagues whose own researchsome quite recently, others over the course of several decadessets standards that are very difcult to match. In the end, this initial presumption is born out. The message that the contributors convey is, taken as a whole, very persuasive. Although they sometimes are repetitive and do not always agree on all details, the contributors to this volume would agree that social mechanisms enable social scientists to identify causal agency. In this sense, a mechanism m is a component of some more encompassing theory T, where m typically operates at a level below T and makes T more credible in the sense that m renders the explanations that T generates more negrained. So, for example, when we elaborate a theory to account for some social practice or change, we may invoke a mechanism (such as risk aversion, dissonance reduction, or utility maximization) that, while it operates at the individual level, can, once we properly specify the relevant aggregation processes, help us explain the particular features of that practice or change. The contributors all elaborate on this general idea. The largest set of papers develops, in a more or less abstract manner, conceptions of social mechanism and explores what such conceptions entail. This group includes, besides an insightful introduction by the editors, essays by Raymond Boudon, Tyler Cowen, Jon Elster, Diego Gambetta, Gudmund Hernes, and Thomas Schelling. These papers explore a variety of theoretical issues. They explain why the search for mechanisms does not presuppose that we can identify general laws and why, consequently, while they are crucial to explanation, most mechanisms afford unreliable bases for prediction. They impress upon us the difculties that the search for mechanisms involves because, for instance, mechanisms typically are not directly observable and because they often interact in complex, dy-

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American Journal of Sociology namic ways. They also stress that the search for mechanisms pushes social research toward a sort of modest abstraction that relies on the formulation of models to represent crucial features of the social or political phenomena we wish to explain. And they stress that the search for mechanisms directs theoretical attention to the forms of interdependent human agency that sustains most aggregate social practices and institutions. As this too schematic account suggests, the argument of the book is in certain respects old-fashioned. The authors generally hope to resuscitate a mode of social research exemplied by a lineage whose most exemplary gures are Alexis de Tocqueville, Max Weber, Robert Merton, and James Coleman. The importance of this enterprise becomes clear when we turn to a second set, or rather, pair of papers. These papers canvass existing work in sociology and persuasively detail the baleful consequences that emerge when we fail to identify the mechanisms that animate our inquiries. Aage Srensen chastises empirical social scientists for mistaking statistical for theoretical signicance. He argues that social research often is naively and unduly preoccupied with statistical methods that, he rightly points out, have no social theory whatsoever. As a result, social research focuses almost entirely on describing effects (accounting for the variation of some factor or other) and so neglects to specify in a theoretically credible way the causal processes that generate and so explain those effects. Axel van den Berg, by contrast, works from the opposite direction. He probes the sort of grand theory to which most contemporary social theo rists aspire. He focuses on the writings Jurgen Habermas, Pierre Bourdieu, Jeffrey Alexander, and Anthony Giddens, searching, largely in vain, for any explicit, systematic discussion of mechanisms that might allow social theorists to account for observed features of the social or political world. In combination, then, these two papers make clear how inattention to mechanisms has not only impoverished both empirical social research and social theory but made efforts to reduce the distance between the two enterprises especially difcult. A nal group of papers illustrates the power and generality of specic mechanisms. This group includes papers by Peter Hedstrom on rational imitation, by Timur Kuran on varieties of dissonance reduction, and by Arthur Stinchcombe on monopolistic competition. Each author induces us to see how particular causal mechanisms operate in distinctive, if somewhat different, ways across a range of empirical settings. These more constructive analyses nicely complement the theoretical and critical offerings described above. Taken together, the contributors advance a sophisticated and penetrating agenda for social research. Readers surely will disagree with various parts of the argument that this volume advances. I am condent, however, that research in social science and social theory can only be improved by confronting the challenge that the contributors lay down.

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Book Reviews Rational Choice Theory and Large Scale Data Analysis. Edited by HansPeter Blossfeld and Gerald Prein. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1998. Pp. xiv 322. $60.00. Peter Abell London School of Economics Why are sociologists moved to contribute to a book linking rational choice theory (RCT) and large-scale data analysis? Economists, for instance, would not do so; they would take the connection for granted and view much of the content of the book under review as self-evident. It is for them standard practice to test theoretical models, derived from rational choice precepts, against large data sets. Things are different in sociology; rst, RCT has only a tenuous hold on theory, and, second, most research that draws on large data sets is notable for an absence of systematic theory (chap. 2). Why is this so? Take the second difference rst. As a number of the contributing authors note, social theory is a failed intellectual tradition and has neither had a signicant impact upon empirical research nor achieved any depth of its own. Thus, the barely concealed agenda behind the present volume is not merely one of locating a symbiosis between RCT and large-scale statistical analysis but of promoting RCT as the theoretical framework where others have failed. The canvas is correspondingly large. While these objectives are, in my view, perfectly laudable, I am afraid some of the essays are not always quite up to the mark. Many show signs of having been hastily written, and the English language editing of others is sometimes far from perfect. Uninitiated and skeptical readers will often nd it difcult to follow the argument and even, in places, to understand what is going on. This is a shame because, with a little more care, the book, I believe, could have proven a landmark. As it is, it will necessarily have to ght an uphill battle. Based upon chapterssome by well-established rational choice theorists and some by statistical modelersand linked commentaries, the contributions are varied, running from the slightly technical (Stanley Lieberson) to the more philosophical (Hartmut Esser and Undo Kelle and Christian Ludermann). There are also a number of chapters based upon empirical research. The editors provide a most lucid introduction, and Michael Hechter concludes with observations that future research in sociology is likely to be a team effort. Furthermore, since rational choice is the best general theory we have, until something better turns up, we best stick with it. Despite the books title, one of the most arresting sections is given to a skirmish between Stanley Lieberson, promoting a well-argued skepticism about small-N studies and advocacy of probabilistic causality, and Charles Ragin, advancing his own version of the Boolean analysis of small-N case study research. Although one can nd no intellectual closure

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American Journal of Sociology here, Liebersons insistence that we should draw a sharp distinction between the causal factors that shape a distribution and those that allocate individuals within the selfsame distribution is surely central to the RCT treatment of large data sets. Nonetheless, the distinction is rarely made by empirical researchers. Rational choice theorists, however, usually work with the grain of this distinction in requiring (at least as an opening gambit) that preferences and opportunities are independently determined. What I found missing here though, and throughout the essays, was any treatment of the strategic interaction of individuals in determining opportunities. Clearly, if individuals are strategically linked, then the standard assumption underlying most large-scale data set research, whereby the units of analysis (individuals) are drawn independently, must be called into question. Surely, both endogenous and exogenous autocorrelation must in practice be rife. I nd little recognition of this in the research literature or in the essays in this volume. Part two of the book covers the central issue, linking RCT and quantitative sociology. Predictably enjoyable essays by John Goldthorpe and Siegwert Lindenberg both nd a compelling complementary between the two traditions, though in different ways. Goldthorpe, as one might expect, implores us to start with well-established empirical generalizations and then to search for RCT explanations for them. (Peter Hedstrom and Richard Swedberg agreecalling the explanations mechanisms.) Lindenberg, however, nds the connection less seamless; he wants to protect us from simple economic imperialism, feeling that the unadulterated combination of statistical analysis and RCT will not work without a richer model of the individual (and her constraints) than RCT usually provides. He is not, however, happy with the standard procedure of multiplying the arguments in any postulated utility functions. If we are to do this, then feeder theories are required telling us how, why, and when. These will inevitably transcend the connes of any straight-laced RCT. Lindenberg, thus, raises an issue taken up in different ways by many of the authors (notably Hans-Peter Blosseld and Harmut Esser), namely as to the role of both generalization and historical specics in sociological explanation. Blosseld and Prein, in separate essays, begin to formulate the problems of using longitudinal models in this respect, both of which begin to push empirical models toward a more adequate approach to causality than we usually nd in cross-sectional studies. A number of chapters deal with bridge assumptions, that is, with the links between macro and micro (both ways), and there are three chapters devoted to empirical research: Anthony Heath on voting, Wout Ultee on the cohesion of Dutch society, and Karl Dieter-Opp on political mobilization. I would recommend that the skeptical reader start with these, then move on to Goldthorpes and Lindenbergs essays before embarking on the rest.

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