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Reviewed Work(s): Liberation Sociology by Joe R. Feagin and Hernán Vera
Review by: Patricia Hill Collins
Source: American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 107, No. 4 (January 2002), pp. 1097-1098
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/343194
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Book Reviews
Liberation Sociology. By Joe R. Feagin and Hernán Vera. Boulder, Colo.:
Westview, 2001. Pp. ix⫹308. $28.00 (paper).
Permission to reprint a book review printed in this section may be obtained only from
the review author.
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American Journal of Sociology
1098
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Book Reviews
The Race Card: Campaign Strategy, Implicit Messages, and the Norm of
Equality. By Tali Mendelberg. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
2001. Pp. xv⫹307.
Felicia Pratto
University of Connecticut
Like miners, scholars sometimes labor in the dark, feeling they are digging
toward something valuable but unable to recognize what it is without
more light and more experience with the thing in hand. For the last four
decades, a number of sociologists, political scientists, and psychologists
have been digging at seams that should come together and do not: white
Americans’ expressed egalitarian values and their opposition to any policy
that might actually bring about racial equality, their shift away from overt
and old-fashioned racial stereotypes and prejudice and strong evidence
of their automatic, implicit racist attitudes. A number of theories have
been offered to explain these contradictions. David O. Sears suggests that
ostensibly nonracial ideologies like the Protestant work ethic become ra-
cially symbolic. Similarly, Samuel Gaertner and Jack Dovidio argue that
whites’ racial attitudes are ambivalent because they hold egalitarian at-
titudes but believe that blacks violate the Protestant work ethic they hold
dear. John McConahay suggests that racism has taken on a different form,
resembling resentment against progressive efforts. Russ Fazio has argued
that implicit racial attitudes, those shown on tasks measuring automatic
evaluative associations, are better indicators of “true” racial attitudes than
are explicit attitudes such as those measured by McConahay’s modern
racism scale. Jim Sidanius and I argue that racism and other predominant
cultural ideologies underlie support for the institutional discrimination
that perpetuates racial inequality. Only Paul Sniderman seems to believe
that contemporary politics is only accidentally racialized.
Tali Mendelberg offers a new light to bring these seams together. The
Race Card argues that political parties rely on norms in order to contrast
themselves with one another along salient ideological dimensions. When
racial inequality is a widely valued norm, politicians win by outdoing
each other as racists. But when the explicit norm is racial egalitarianism,
politicians can make political hay not by trying to outdo each other as
egalitarians but by implicitly appealing to racism in the public. Once the
racism in such appeals, such as the elder Bush’s use of Willie Horton in
the 1988 political campaign, is revealed, much of the bang fizzles. Men-
delberg integrates and addresses some predominant theoretical proposi-
tions in social and political psychology, those concerning social norms and
automatic attitudes, but considers what they mean for political dynamics
and for the mass media.
Mendelberg mines an impressive array of empirical evidence in support
of her thesis. First, she examines political campaigns from Reconstruction
through the 1870s and shows how explicitly racist white Americans’ be-
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American Journal of Sociology
liefs and political campaigns were. Then, using content analysis of cam-
paign speeches and demographic examinations of voters, she shows how
politicians began to shift away from explicitly racist discourse and toward
more implicitly racist discourse during the debate over the 1964 Civil
Rights Act. Mendelberg undertakes a damning analysis of George H. W.
Bush’s use of implicit racism in the 1988 presidential election. From inside
the campaign, she shows that Lee Atwater and others, though they denied
it, knew that Horton was black and planned on using him as the cen-
terpiece of their campaign against Dukakis, following the Nixonian
“Southern strategy.” Mendelberg also illustrates how, in this campaign,
the news media are complicit in replaying implicitly racist messages with-
out recognizing their poison. More optimistically, she shows that once
implicit racism is called “racist,” as it was by Jesse Jackson in this case,
it loses power. Analyzing this campaign further, Mendelberg tracks public
attitudes, using the NES as the implicit and explicit race messages of the
campaign were revealed. To this pile of evidence, Mendelberg adds a field
experiment using video news stories that are race neutral (using whites
to discuss welfare), implicitly racist against blacks, or explicitly racist.
This experiment showed that the implicitly racist news segment was the
most powerful in provoking racial resentment and that no general policy
stance tested was as powerful a predictor as race. Finally, Mendelberg
discusses the implications of her theory for elections in other countries.
Drawing so powerfully on common theory, but integrating and ex-
tending those ideas, Mendelberg’s book merits a careful reading by so-
ciologists, psychologists, political scientists, historians, and communica-
tions scientists interested in norms, racial attitudes, and political
campaigns. Taking these ideas seriously might enable other scholars to
answer some of the important theoretical questions this book leaves un-
answered. Most notably, Mendelberg cannot say what an implicit racial
appeal is, I suspect because it hinges on the awareness of the audience
rather than being a property of the message. Also, Mendelberg addresses
neither why our society is still so racist that implicit appeals work nor
how normative equality is if politicians are not dressing themselves in it.
Nonetheless, this vein where mass media, political campaigns, implicit
psychology, and societal norms intersect is worth digging out.
Geneviève Zubrzycki
University of Chicago
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Book Reviews
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American Journal of Sociology
canons” in both so-called high (art, belles lettres, history) and popular
(folk customs, myths) forms of culture as an indicator of their national
identification or “cultural valence.” Culture is thus itself conceptualized
as bounded, and Kloskowska’s scale of national valences, designed to
schematize and interpret degrees of assimilation, ultimately participates
in a process of cultural objectification and the reification of the nation as
a category. As sympathetic as the reader might be to the effort to grasp
empirically and schematize analytically something as slippery as national
identity, this scale does not offer the firm theoretical ground it promises.
The reason is that it measures putative national identities rather too sim-
plistically, as the relative mastery of the canon or lack thereof. The reader
may inquire, as one of Kloskowska’s informants did (p. 344), whether
this is really the most salient measure of national identification. A more
useful strategy might have been to begin with actual practices and then
attempt to discern how they are made, discursively and otherwise, “Po-
lish,” “Ukrainian,” or “Silesian.” Nevertheless, the book addresses impor-
tant questions and provides much-needed empirical materials.
Finally, the book suffers from an unredeemable translation problem.
Without diminishing the study itself, the careless editing and translating
gave this volume a haphazard feel it certainly does not merit: Geertz’s
“thick description” is rendered “dense description” (p. 23); Marcel Mauss
becomes “Marcel Strauss” (p. 344); ethnic cleansing is called “ethnic clean-
ing” (p. 399); Hobsbawm’s “invention” is now the “discovery of tradition”
(p. 33); and Znaniecki’s Modern Nationalities (University of Illinois Press,
1952) is cited as “Contemporary Nations” (p. 16). These are only the most
egregious examples of a pervasive problem and they are mistakes, I hasten
to add, that are not present in the original Polish text. More significant
than the careless, uninformed English translation, however, is the fact
that National Cultures remains altogether a Polish book, a book written
for Polish audiences. The non-Polish or non–Polish specialist reader will
unfortunately find himself adrift in a sea of cultural, geographic, historical,
and literary references that are not “translated”—not located, contex-
tualized, or clarified in footnotes. Hence, despite the book’s sharp insights
and rich materials, it may not reach the wider sociological audience en-
gaged with nations and nationalism and the sociology of culture that a
scholar of Kloskowska’s reputation and stature deserves.
Deadliest Enemies: Law and the Making of Race Relations on and off
Rosebud Reservation. By Thomas Biolsi. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Uni-
versity of California Press, 2001. Pp. xiii⫹240.
Alan Hunt
Carleton University
Biolsi explores the “deadliest enemies” thesis, which asserts that the deep-
est antagonisms exist between those most immediately in contact, in this
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Book Reviews
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American Journal of Sociology
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Book Reviews
The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of Amer-
ican Environmentalism. By Adam Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2001. Pp. xvi⫹299. $54.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).
James M. Jasper
New York City
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American Journal of Sociology
Stephen F. Hamilton
Cornell University
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Book Reviews
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American Journal of Sociology
Mary Blair-Loy
Washington State University
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Book Reviews
allowing at least some comparisons across key variables would have been
much more useful.
For example, Reed reports that her respondents immediately began
constructing her as a budding entrepreneur who would soon be com-
modifying her academic knowledge into public relations or market re-
search services. Although she was a sociology doctoral student at the time,
they listed her in the association directory as a business consultant. This
identity-construction process may be even more important than the prac-
tical information, networking, and lobbying that the association also
provides.
The strongest part of the book draws on Reed’s analysis of the
NJAWBO meetings (chap. 6). She explains how the meetings create a
symbolic community in which everyday interactions construct and elab-
orate members’ entrepreneurial identities. Reed insightfully notes the ten-
sion between the association’s liberal, free-market, individualistic, mer-
itocratic ideology and its advocacy on behalf of an ascriptive category,
women. The association encourages pull-youself-up-by-your-bootstraps
thinking and minimizes the existence of group-based discrimination, yet
it also essentializes gender by promoting women’s business strengths.
The rest of the analysis is less successful. Reed makes several provoc-
ative claims without much empirical support. A general problem is the
research design. Her single case—a middle-class organization for female
entrepreneurs—does not allow her to upack all of the variables and pro-
cesses she professes interest in. A research design allowing at least some
comparisons across key variables would have been much more useful.
For example, Reed’s arguments about the relationship between class
and working conditions and entrepreneurship (i.e., entrepreneurs’ man-
agerial experience with former employers is a valuable resource in their
new ventures) cannot be fully examined without class variation among
respondents. Her argument that women face gender-based barriers to
entrepreneurship cannot be fully investigated in an all-female organization
and sample. Her claim that suburbia harbors particularly restrictive ide-
ologies of womanhood cannot be supported without a comparison to ur-
ban (or rural) entrepreneurs. Her argument about the importance of the
association for nurturing fledgling entrepreneurs cannot be tested without
a comparison case of an association for women employed by corporations.
An alternative comparison that would have strengthened her argument
immensely would have been to contrast members of NJAWBO with fe-
male entrepreneurs who do not belong to a business owner’s association.
Reed’s central argument—that novice entrepreneurs have their iden-
tities constructed and affirmed by the association—could have been more
systematically studied within the existing design. She could have com-
pared new entrepreneurs (or new members of the NJAWBO) to long-term
business owners (or association members) to better explicate this process.
Unfortunately, this analysis was not presented.
The book is potentially relevant for several subareas of sociology: stud-
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American Journal of Sociology
Stephan Haggard
University of California, San Diego
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Book Reviews
autonomy and ideology. But this explanatory task is less important to the
book than tracing the organizational concomitants of different strategies,
particularly the balance between state, foreign, and local firms of different
sizes; in this way, he takes up the comparative challenge left by Peter
Evans’s classic treatment of the “triple alliance” in Dependent Develop-
ment (Princeton University Press, 1979).
In chapter 3, Guillen tackles the rise of the indigenous business con-
glomerate in developing countries. Such groups must possess re-
sources—inputs, technology, and access to markets—in order to enter new
activities repeatedly and successfully. Different forms of international ec-
onomic integration affect those resources and thus the industrial organ-
ization of the country and the structure of the firm. National business
groups are likely to prosper only under what he calls “asymmetric” eco-
nomic integration: when either inward or outward trade and investment
are limited. Under more open conditions, such as those in Spain, foreign
firms and smaller enterprises enjoy advantages. These claims are sup-
ported by cross-national evidence, by longitudinal analysis of the weight
of domestic business groups in Argentina, Spain, and Korea, and by case
studies. Chapter 4 extends a similar analysis to the relative position of
“small and medium” firms—many of them in fact quite large—in three
industries in the three countries: rolling stock, wines and liquors, and
publishing. Case studies of Spanish champagne maker Freixnet and the
society tabloid business in Argentina and Spain make these cases not only
pointed but compelling and fun to read.
Chapter 5 extends the discussion to multinational corporations (MNCs).
Guillen underscores how an export orientation need not be combined with
an embrace of foreign firms. However, he also uses the chapter to extend
the analysis to the political position of labor and the conditions under
which they will be more or less welcoming of foreign investment. In
democratic settings with “modernizing” labor movements, foreign own-
ership may make little difference for labor. In authoritarian settings with
a history of labor populism, by contrast, MNCs are more likely to be
reviled as villains.
Chapters 6 and 7 contain compact, comparative case studies of the auto
and banking industries. Guillen shows how strategic choices by the state
had strong implications for performance. Korea’s emphasis on large firms
in the auto industry allowed it to enter the market for vehicles, which
requires Fordist organization, but proved a disability in developing a
dynamic parts sector, which requires greater flexibility. By contrast—and
counter to the claims of critics of globalization—Spain’s internationalist
strategy ended up supporting a vibrant components complex, even at the
cost of some loss of indigenous capabilities in several wrenching shakeouts.
An analysis of the banking sector—not usually examined in the context
of industry studies—reaches similar conclusions. The closed Korean fi-
nancial sector was nothing more than an instrument for siphoning cheap
credit to large domestic groups, making it highly vulnerable to crisis. By
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American Journal of Sociology
Jeffrey Henderson
University of Manchester
Recognizing that the traditional state centrism of sociology (and the other
social sciences) has rendered it largely bereft of the meso- and microlevel
categories necessary to guide research on the dynamics and asymmetries
of our global epoch, Leslie Sklair, in an earlier contribution (Sociology of
the Global System [Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995]), proposed a
framework to address this conceptual void. In that book, Sklair sketches
a “global systems theory,” not as a transhistorical architecture, but
specifically as an attempt to make sense of global capitalism since the
mid-20th century. The conceptual core of global systems theory is the
notion of “transnational practices”: actions associated with flows of
capital, power, knowledge, imagery, and so forth, that cross state bound-
aries. Analytically, transnational practices are seen as being organized
in three interrelated spheres: the economic, the political, and the cultural-
ideological. The transnational practices are associated in the economic
sphere predominantly with transnational corporations; in the political
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Book Reviews
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American Journal of Sociology
Neil Fligstein
University of California
One would expect that a book with this title would contain articles that
would define how firms were changing and provide evidence that these
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Book Reviews
changes had spread across the population of firms around the world. But
that is not what this book does. It presents three pieces that have some-
what different views about what these changes might look like, four
commentaries on those pieces, and a nice summary piece by the editor of
the volume in which he tries to dissect the differences of opinion. The
underlying theme of two of the three thematic pieces is that some form
of network firm has replaced the traditional hierarchical firm. The rest
of the pieces agree, disagree, or try to elaborate what this thesis might
mean.
Walter Powell and David Stark provide the boldest statements. Powell’s
paper proposes that changes in technology and competition have driven
firms to produce a new logic of organizing, what he calls “network pro-
duction” (p. 54). He characterizes this logic in three ways: (1) firms organize
jobs around projects, not occupations; (2) this flattens organizational hi-
erarchies and causes firms to engage in more contracting with outside
firms for needed inputs into projects; and (3) this causes firms to use their
technologies to blur the boundaries across industries by using their core
competencies to diversify their products. Powell’s assertion is that this
revolution may have started in the United States but is spreading across
Europe (pp. 66–67). Stark’s take on the network organizational logic is
based on his studies in Eastern Europe. He too thinks that hierarchy is
disappearing in firms. It is the interdependence of firms and their need
to learn from one another, what he calls “heterarchy” (p. 75), that drives
the network form forward. For Stark, the important networks for this
learning are not alliances or projects, but joint ownership structures. He
argues that these changing networks of ownership have given firms flex-
ibility to meet market challenges in Hungary and the Czech Republic.
Eleanor Westney presents a dissenting view by considering the Japanese
economy and its main organizational form, the keiretsu. The keiretsu may
be the original network organization, or at least the organization that is
closest in spirit to what Stark describes. After World War II, the American
occupation government forced the large, family-owned Japanese con-
glomerates, called zaibatsu, to be broken up. In the postwar era, these
groups gradually reemerged by taking ownership shares in other firms to
form business groups that came to be called keiretsu. The keiretsu are
generally given credit for the great success of the Japanese economy. Their
flexibility in producing new and innovative products and giving workers
lifelong employment was thought to be a winning logic of organizing.
The keiretsu form has come under attack as the Japanese economy has
drifted for the past 10 years, and Westney argues that the keiretsu are in
the process of being deinstitutionalized by the Japanese state (p. 141).
Westney claims that networked firms are not rising but failing in the
world’s second largest economy.
The next four pieces in the volume are commentaries. Kraakman offers
a strong dissension by arguing that hierarchies and corporate forms are
not disappearing even if firms are doing more outside contracting and
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American Journal of Sociology
Dietrich Rueschemeyer
Brown University
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American Journal of Sociology
loses status as its sole arbiter, deferring instead to institutions that nurture
productivity” (p. 5). With the exception of Argentina, all countries in the
set she calls “the rest” developed systems of conditional subsidies and
careful performance monitoring. These “reciprocal control mechanisms”
are the critical innovation that, Amsden claims, underlies the success of
these countries. They allow substantial government intervention, even
interventions that distort the working of the market (intentionally “getting
prices wrong” instead of following the mainstream advice of, first of all,
“getting prices right”), without reaping the harvest of rent seeking and
corruption. This quite visible hand of the state does not displace the
discipline of the market, but it is in Amsden’s analysis the decisive factor
in the rise of “the rest.”
Combining cross-national statistical evidence and case analysis with
theoretical argument, this is a rich work that goes far beyond just ex-
amining the core thesis sketched above. For example, it offers interesting
discussions of how economic inequality relates to growth. Amsden has
the eye for patterns that marks the successful comparative historian. She
notes, for instance, that “countries that invested heavily in national firms
and national skills—China, India, Korea, and Taiwan—all had colonial
manufacturing experience. Countries that were magnets for foreign direct
investment and slow to invest in advanced skills (or inept at doing
so)—Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Turkey—all had North At-
lantic émigré experience [in the prewar period]” (p. 16). The wealth of
evidence that is integrated in this work is indicated by the apparatus of
notes and bibliographic references; these compose 40 and 50 pages,
respectively.
The book focuses on policies and their consequences. It has less to say
about the character of the state and of state-society relations that makes
the reciprocal control mechanism possible and successful. It offers only
sparse discussions of corruption and reveals little about the conditions
that encourage the kind of developmental state action that is at the heart
of the argument. The book thus represents a challenge to the advanced
but still not conclusive institutionalist research on the state in sociology
and political science. Another feature comparative-historical analysts may
miss in this volume is a greater emphasis on tracing causal sequences in
a country over longer periods of time. This could have added significantly
to the confidence of readers in Amsden’s conclusions.
While this volume may not end the debate on the role of the devel-
opmental state (the gulf separating economic history as well as sociology
and political science from mainstream economics is probably too wide for
that), The Rise of “the Rest” is a landmark publication. It is indispensable
reading for anybody interested in economic development.
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Book Reviews
Doug Guthrie
New York University
The field of economic sociology aspires to study and understand the social,
political, and cultural bases of market institutions and market practices.
At the center of analytical pursuits in this field lies a desire to pull back
the veil on the nature of capitalism in the modern world. Yet, for a variety
of reasons, many studies in economic sociology seem unable to grasp or
depict the dynamic nature of capitalism at the dawn of the 21st century.
Perhaps it is the strange division of labor between economic sociologists
and political economists that has led the former to refrain from mentioning
capitalism lest they be accused of closeted Marxist tendencies. Or perhaps
it is the pressure to compete with economists that takes us more often
into the realm of clean (narrow) theoretical discussions and therefore away
from in-depth descriptions that depict the dynamism and contradictions
of modern global capitalism. Whatever the reasons, we would do well to
learn from scholars who are less preoccupied with getting the theoretical
framework “right” and more focused on illuminating what is actually
going on at the ground level.
Within this context, I strongly commend Buying and Believing, a fas-
cinating anthropological study of the advertising industry in Sri Lanka.
The book is based on an industry-wide analysis that begins at the level
of the transnational corporation and moves systematically down to the
household, giving us a sense not only of the global nature of the powerful
actors in this area but also of how these processes play out at local levels.
The style of description and analysis will raise red flags for some soci-
ologists, as phrases such as “the modular character of economic devel-
opment,” “the vulgarizing aspects of advertising,” and “the transnational
flows of people” (pp. 20–21) pepper the text throughout. However, if
sociological readers can look beyond the language (which, to be fair to
Kemper, is not out of place in an anthropological text), they will find a
great deal that is familiar and a great deal to admire in this research and
analysis. On the familiar side, Kemper’s use of “follow-the-thing anthro-
pology” and “multisite ethnography” (both of which gained notoriety in
the field through George Marcus’s essay “Ethnography in/of the World
System: The Emergence of Multi-Site Ethnography”) is an empirical strat-
egy fitted well with the “organizational field” perspective in economic
sociology and comparative participant observation, respectively. These
methodological techniques are empirical trends within the field of an-
thropology, both of which can be found in Kemper’s work (though the
former more than the latter), that are important for sociologists to keep
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American Journal of Sociology
Jennifer Cole
University of Chicago
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Book Reviews
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American Journal of Sociology
The Elusive Embryo: How Women and Men Approach New Reproductive
Technologies. By Gay Becker. Berkeley: University of California Press,
2000. Pp. 319.
Sarah Franklin
Lancaster University
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American Journal of Sociology
The Sexual Citizen: Queer Politics and Beyond. By David Bell and
Jon Binnie. Cambridge: Polity, 2000. Pp. 184.
Kenneth Plummer
University of Essex
While the idea of citizenship has been debated for centuries, it has recently
garnered renewed attention. Everywhere we look we can now find new
kinds of citizens: multicultural citizens, diasporic citizens, postcolonial
citizens, flexible citizens, cultural citizens, global citizens, technological
citizens, intimate citizens, radical citizens, consumer citizens, critical cit-
izens, dissident citizens, and the like. It is not at all surprising, therefore,
to find that we now also have “sexual citizens.”
Within the fields of sexuality, gender, and queer theory, the issue of
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American Journal of Sociology
Eric Klinenberg
Northwestern University
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Book Reviews
focus instead on everyday life along the color line. In Talking at Trena’s,
Reuben A. Buford May offers a refreshing perspective on a working- and
middle-class African-American tavern in Chicago where he became a
regular during 18 months of fieldwork. May is not the first Chicago so-
ciologist to experiment with “deep hanging out” in a neighborhood bar
or restaurant, but he asks original and important questions about the
productive work that men do over drinks. May is most interested in
exploring how casual conversations in a safe space establish the discursive
terrain on which black men understand the significance of race in the
outside world. May’s reconstructed transcripts and richly described ac-
counts of talk about television, sex, relationships, and work provide ample
support for his argument that segregated social settings are key sites for
identity formation and differentiation based on mediated impressions of
other groups. Although some of his interpretations of how these processes
work are less persuasive, the questions May leaves unanswered will likely
be revisited by sociologists who return to the pub.
The trouble, as we learn in the opening chapter, is that not everyone
is welcome at places like Trena’s. May, a 30-year-old black man and
lifelong resident of the surrounding area, is well situated to gain the trust
and favor of the patrons, whose ages ranged from the twenties to the
seventies, but even he stumbles over the first barriers to entry. Spatial
proximity to concentrated crime and poverty constantly threatens the
status and security of black middle-class regions, and the staff at Trena’s
safeguards the environment by locking the glass front door during the
afternoon and ignoring suspicious-looking outsiders who try to enter. May
got lucky. After hovering conspicuously around the main entry he found
an open side door, and when a regular walked in behind him the others
mistook the sociologist for a known entity. Soon thereafter, Monique, a
sociable bartender who was fond of him, learned May’s favorite drink
and helped to facilitate his integration with the others.
Once inside, May orients his attention to the social dynamics among
the regulars, and his findings are often surprising. Unlike Eli Anderson,
who observed in Jelly’s bar an internal status system in which patrons
contested each other’s social standing, May claims that “few patrons make
distinctions inside the tavern among themselves on the basis of employ-
ment” (p. 32) and interprets their boasts of sexual conquest as signs of
black male solidarity. The theme of internal cohesion and shared fate
recurs throughout the book. The patrons downplay the significance of
class differences among African-Americans (even as they take pride in
their employment and exclude the unemployed or derelict from the bar),
and the author refuses the distinction between working-class and middle-
class status among the regulars because they share values, ideals, and a
history of discrimination (pp. 32–37). The men deepen their bonds by
recounting experiences of conflict with police, frustration with sex part-
ners, and suspicion of whites. Although in one section May suggests that
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American Journal of Sociology
race talk can also help black men make intragroup distinctions (p. 106),
there are few signs of such internal differentiation in the book.
Sometimes, May argues, race talk does damage. In a provocative dis-
cussion about conflict in the professional realm, May explains that one
consequence of pervasive discrimination in the American workforce is
that African-Americans have no clear way of distinguishing genuine crit-
icism from racially motivated attacks. The regulars often dismiss profes-
sional challenges from whites, but in doing so they occlude possibilities
for self-scrutiny and avoid work on themselves. Though he does not de-
velop this analysis fully, May has hit upon a hidden injury of race.
May is particularly concerned about racial segmentation, but since
whites are absent in the tavern, the most visible division at Trena’s is
between the male patrons and the female bartenders. May listens closely
to the men’s banter for clues about the sources of trouble in African-
American relationships, and when he hears that many are frustrated by
deceptions involved in courtship games or by the pressures of being ac-
countable to a demanding partner, he finds reason for concern. But May
is less attuned to the complications in the relationships he observes, and
what happens in the bar might also offer valuable information about
problems found along the gender line. May’s descriptions show that the
flirtatious, attractive female bartenders employed at Trena’s play instru-
mental roles both as vehicles for social interaction (“patron communication
flows through her” [p. 25]) and as sexual objects (“the female bartender
. . . is the focus of much talk, and her ability to ‘play’ the sexual foil for
the men is a requisite for working at Trena’s” [p. 155]), albeit with enough
agency to use their sexuality to make better tips. Monique, we learn, “is
used as a prop,” and her “central role is as the object of fun and play,
especially during sex talk” (p. 156). May is keenly aware of how men view
female bartenders at Trena’s, yet he characterizes the play across the bar
as “talk that is just talk” (p. 161) and dismisses objectifying accounts of
other women as “stories . . . that amount to little more than their [the
patrons’] effort to interact and enjoy the leisure time that they have” (p.
160). May insists that this kind of rhetoric helps to reproduce traditional
notions of masculinity and sexuality. But whether and how these forms
of tavern sociability influence relationships between men and women
outside the bar remains unclear.
One of the book’s most original contributions is to show how, in the
context of extreme racial segregation, talk about television helps African-
Americans sort out their views of whites. May makes several intriguing
observations about the collective consumption of television in the bar. In
a striking deviation from conventional arguments that television is an
atomizing force in American society, May shows how television can be a
bonding medium that provides Americans with provocative, if often mis-
leading, material for thinking about other groups. Moreover, May finds
that the patrons are skeptical of the representations of race they view on
the screen, and therefore we see that the debates about race sparked by
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Book Reviews
Dalton Conley
New York University
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Book Reviews
The critical question left unasked is why the projects need public rest-
rooms in order to avoid this problem while other urban (middle-class or
wealthy) high-rises do not. In other words, the public feces problem cuts
to the heart of the culture-of-poverty argument. Venkatesh would have
us believe that broken elevators might have been the problem. This is
compelling but not entirely convincing. Had he been there at the time,
he might be able to tell us that the kids who lived on the second or third
floors of buildings did not resort to this method of relieving themselves,
but rather darted up a flight or two of stairs to their own bathrooms (and
whether these kids let others use their restrooms as well). Had he been
there at the time, he might have been able to observe whether the public
messes were worst in the buildings with the most problematic elevators.
But Venkatesh only has residents’ memories to go by. This is not his fault;
it is inherent in social history. It is too bad, though, since it is critical to
know the exact causal chains that led to public urination, as well as to
destruction of protective fences and other vandalism, such as graffiti and
the destruction of park equipment, that ultimately led to the demise of
the projects.
Such genre-related limitations aside, American Project is a must-read
for all urban and poverty scholars. The book is strong on local-local
politics, erasing the common view of public housing residents as (take
your pick) monolithically victims or uniformly deviants. Rather, he dem-
onstrates a rich political life in the inner city that would make even Alexis
de Tocqueville proud. Like much good sociology, it raises more questions
than it can answer. These unanswered questions should be the launching
pad for a dozen more dissertations, for while the Robert Taylor Homes
may be becoming a piece of social history, the problems of public housing
in America are still with us for the foreseeable future.
John Wilson
Duke University
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has expanded this inquiry into a full-length treatise. It tells a story of the
countervailing forces of technological change on the one hand and the
“stickiness” of culture on the other. Marx predicted that the forces of
production, driven by competition to maximize efficiency, would break
down conventional boundaries and spur on the movement of globaliza-
tion. According to this logic, it is only a matter of time before soccer, a
truly global sport, becomes popular in the United States. The social re-
lations of production, on the other hand, tend toward protection and
parochialism. “This is a fortiori true for culture—including sports cul-
ture—that remains ‘sticky’ and local” (p. 242). According to this logic,
Americans would cling to their favorite sports and accord only second-
class status to alien pastimes such as soccer.
In the authors’ view, culture’s “retarding nature,” combined with the
“structural power of incumbency” that creates high barriers to entry for
new cultural forms and practices, is sufficient to explain why the tech-
nological and economic forces of globalization have not created the ho-
mogeneous global culture anticipated by Marx. In the language of insti-
tutional theory, there is path dependence in the evolution of a society’s
sports culture. “Early arrival does not guarantee late survival, but it most
certainly helps, because choices are very rapidly narrowed once sport
spaces become filled both quantitatively and spatially, and qualitatively
in that any newcomer must exert a great deal of power and expend major
resources to be given . . . a seat at the restaurant’s increasingly limited
tables from which few want to depart” (p. 15).
The concept of “social space” is crucial to this argument. According to
the authors, there is a finite amount of social space in a society. There
are only so many sports people can follow at one time. Their second
contention is that “sport spaces in virtually all of the advanced industrial
countries were frozen by the end of World War I” (p. 19). Putting these
two ideas together, we arrive at the following proposition: “Whichever
sport entered a country’s sport space first and managed to do so in the
key period between 1870 and 1930, the crucial decades of industrial pro-
liferation and the establishment of modern mass societies, continues to
possess a major advantage today” (p. 15). The failure of soccer to take
root in the United States can thus be attributed to its not having estab-
lished itself early enough. Much of the book is taken up with explaining
why this happened. This is a matter not only of showing how baseball,
football, and basketball were established first but also of showing how
soccer made a number of crucial organizational mistakes and thus rele-
gated itself to minority status. For example, early advocates of the sport
adopted the same freewheeling, capitalistic approach to sport organization
found in the other major team sports and balked at control over the game
imposed by international sports authorities. With the collaboration of the
NCAA, they insisted on creating an American version of the game, thus
marginalizing American soccer in the international arena.
While the authors’ thesis concerning path dependence is relatively un-
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controversial, the idea that social space is limited and therefore latecomers
have no place to go is more troubling. The authors seem to assume that
the structure of the sports economy and the structure of the entertainment
economy will remain the same. There simply is not room in this economy
for another major sport. But these economies are marked by very rapid
change. For example, mass marketing is giving way to pinpoint marketing
directed at unique customers in many areas of the modern economy. This
is just as true in entertainment as it is in the footwear industry. Network
television audiences are diminishing as cable and satellite companies com-
pete by offering more specialized programs. Perhaps space is not so limited
after all. The authors’ argument fits the sports economy of the second
half of the 20th century, when the hegemony of the major networks and
the established leagues seemed unshakable. But where the sport takes
place in a virtual reality, space is potentially limitless. Take, for example,
the authors’ comments on the bifurcation of U.S. soccer into that played
by Hispanic immigrants and that played by suburban, white, middle-class
girls. This is posed as if it were a problem for soccer because it impairs
the sport’s ability to reach a mass audience. This language is redolent of
the age of Montgomery Ward; it assumes a world of mass production,
mass retailing, and mass consumption. Mass audiences for prime-time
programs are no longer the goal. Instead, each program is targeted at a
particular demographic. Soccer can thrive in this economy to an extent
inconceivable in the 1960s. In a supreme irony that Marx would have
loved, the new women’s professional soccer league, a minor sport indeed,
does not have to fight for media access because it is partly funded by
major cable companies.
Sports sociologists will look to this book for soccer material and also
for the authors’ fresh conceptualization of sports culture. Sociologists with
more general interests in culture and institutional analysis might also find
it useful and informative as a case study. However, the authors’ analytical
arguments frequently get lost in a mountain of tedious detail. This is
forgivable where the topic is soccer, because this is the first adequate
sociocultural history of the sport in the Untied States, but we should have
been spared a retelling of the institutionalization of the other three major
team sports, a story that has been told innumerable times. Does the ev-
olution of the commissioner system in baseball need to be described again?
Do we need reminding that Naismith invented basketball? Ironically, a
book that began as a brief exploratory essay has grown too big for its
subject and would have made a more persuasive argument at two-thirds
its current size.
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American Journal of Sociology
Jeffrey K. Olick
Columbia University
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Book Reviews
Judith Adler
Memorial University of Newfoundland
The first of a planned series of three on the rise of consumerism, this book
by a professor of cultural studies declares its upbeat mood from the outset.
“My method, if you can call it that, is historical, my tone celebratory” (p.
ix). “The fieldwork,” the author continues (this time without the qualifying
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American Journal of Sociology
clause), “was done, first and heartily, on holiday” (p. x). An unvaryingly
positive mood is this book’s most distinctive feature—even, one might
hazard, its argument, for the author’s reiterated affirmation of holiday
culture as, among other things, an arena where the promises of liberalism
are redeemed, is thrown as a challenge to what he takes to be the “cur-
mudgeonly” (p. 145), disdainful, moralizing posture of much cultural
theory.
But after several chapters of normative cheeriness, sprinkled with apol-
ogies for any glancing reference to realities discordant with the mood, a
reader may come to feel that this strictly disciplined positive orientation
toward holiday culture not only is the author’s point of departure but
also reveals the preplanned, overly managed point of arrival of an intel-
lectual journey that is never open-ended enough to yield the excitement
of a quest. In short, like many works designed for use as undergraduate
texts, this one is replete with summary, declamatory references to a host
of loosely related ideas while remaining short on questions. In a style
whose informal chattiness and occasional lack of clarity suggests the use
of a Dictaphone, Inglis throws out numerous suggestions about the “uses,”
psychological, cultural, and civic, of holiday making. His data and ideas
are gleaned from eclectic, well-chosen reading and personal experience.
But to the extent that this work falls short of its promise, it does so by
failing to hold its assertions in an argument of any sustained tension, by
lacking a sense for social institutions and organizations (in contrast to
culture), by neglecting the literatures of disciplined ethnographic field-
work, and—most of all—by failing to call attention to what is not yet
known in the fields of its explorations. Hence, we have a book that focuses
almost exclusively upon the cultural traditions of English-speaking hol-
idaymakers, to the neglect of the populations that serve them, a book that
examines sex tourism with reference only to the voices of the clients, a
book, in short, without a reliable feel for the unsuspected pluralities,
ambiguities, and contradictions of culture or for the inherently conflictual
aspects of organized social life. Perhaps this is cultural studies, unsobered
by sociological or anthropological discipline.
Indeed, seemingly addressed to a readership that is confidently assumed
to share a commonality of experience as holidaymakers and consumers
rather than as scholars, this work has some of the quality of a tour man-
aged by an upbeat cicerone. The intellectual territory over which the
reader is whisked in wide and “stimulating”; nothing is studied or bela-
bored to the point where it might tax a weak attention span; interesting
factual details and fresh aperçus abound; and the whole is even spiced
with the lightest touch of pornography (in the form of a short quotation,
prefaced by the author’s self-distancing disclaimer) from another
writer—cum prostitute’s client, cum sex tourism’s participant-observer
(pp. 146–47.)
But by the end of the journey, the unflagging speed of coverage given
a wide assortment of topics (history of the holiday, invention of tourism,
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Book Reviews
seaside resorts, cultures of leisure and luxury, the holiday home, the at-
traction of danger, the industrialization of mobility, sex tourism, imagery
of the city, ethics of tourism, and resort development) raises the specter
of boredom from another direction. Some readers may be left with the
thought that next time they would prefer to return to just some man-
ageable portion of this intellectual itinerary, to take a sustained look at
objects that blur beyond reach of active engagement, outside the sealed
windows of an educational vehicle that reduces its passengers to passivity.
For such readers, the book’s enticing bibliography will prove a useful
aid.
Inglis makes a persuasive argument that the metaphor of consumption
is inadequate to the examination of cultural practices involving the cre-
ation of subjectivities. He is at his very best when illustrating the pop-
ularization of cultural styles of travel founded in other media: invoking
the manner in which hard-won ideas, philosophies, national literary
traditions, and epic exploits become sedimented as unreflectively main-
tained habits of mass tourism (chap. 5). He returns again and again to
mark out historical continuities in the ethos of the English gentlemanly
traveler (though, relying largely upon self-report, he idealizes the type).
References to early leisure-focused British social movements and associ-
ations (Youth Hostel Association, Ramblers) will be fresh to a North
American readership and might spur interesting comparative historical
research.
Richard Madsen
University of California, San Diego
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American Journal of Sociology
a particular time and place, his insights are relevant to present-day so-
ciological concerns. As at the beginning of the 20th century, China is now
once again passing through a liminal period which old political structures
and cultural principles are collapsing and the future remains indetermi-
nate; and new forms of nationalism and civil society are once again
emerging.
The Chinese Protestant leaders whom Dunch describes were under-
going what Theodore Von Laue would have called an “anti-Western West-
ernization” (Theodore H. Von Laue, The World Revolution of Westerni-
zation, Oxford University Press, 1987). Their embrace of a Western
religion actually deepened their sense of Chinese nationalism. Their ex-
perience within the churches gave them the language and the motivation
to criticize Western imperialism sharply. In 1906, for instance, it was
students in Fuzhou’s mission schools who took the lead in organizing
boycotts of American products in protest of racist American “exclusion
laws.” Moreover, the Protestant use of hymns and flags helped to provide
models for the development of national anthems and flags to symbolize
the Chinese nation.
Protestant organizations, especially the YMCA, also provided models
of self-organized, voluntary associations in China’s cities—a new form of
public life, which we today might consider to be the beginnings of a
Chinese civil society. Finally, the American social-gospel Protestantism
that became influential in China at the turn of the last century commu-
nicated a vision of progressive, modern, democratic citizenship. It was a
vision of citizens with strong moral character, whose religious beliefs were
fully compatible with modern scientific progress, who cared strongly about
social justice and were committed to governing themselves through a
vigorous associational life. The emphasis on moral cultivation resonated
with the Confucian tradition, while the optimism about scientific progress
and the enthusiasm about voluntary association fitted the aspirations of
emerging new classes of merchants and professionals in cities like Fuzhou.
Revolutionary leaders like Sun Yat-sen were Christian, as were some of
the most prominent intellectual, business, and political leaders in Fuzhou.
“By and large,” writes Dunch, “Chinese Protestants . . . interpreted the
political changes since the beginning of the century and the current un-
precedented levels of interest in Christianity among their compatriots as
confirmation of the impending ‘ultimate triumph of Christianity in the
land’—if only the Protestants could rise to the challenge presented by the
opportunities of the day” (pp. 178–79).
But it was not to be. In his last chapter, “Why Not a Christian Re-
public?” Dunch leaves behind historiography and carries out a largely
theoretical analysis of the conditions for the development of civil society
and a public sphere and of the role that a progressive, modernist Chris-
tianity might have played in such a development. It is this chapter that
will be of greatest interest to sociologists and to China scholars who do
not specialize in late Qing or early Republican Chinese history.
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Book Reviews
Mark Juergensmeyer
University of California, Santa Barbara
The very title of this book echoes the voice of Max Weber, and for good
reason. The author attempts in one volume to revisit at least some aspects
of Weber’s great project on world religions. He covers both theory and
description. In the first several chapters Sharot lays out a comparative
framework based on Weber’s analytical scheme of religious action—the
distinction between the sort of religious activity that offers the ends of
salvation and the sort that provides the means of worldly goods. The
former, Sharot calls “transformative” religion, and the latter, “thauma-
turgical.” He adds to this two other comparative categories from Émile
Durkheim and Karl Marx: “nomic” religion, based on sustaining the nat-
ural order, and “extrinsic” religion, aimed at providing entertainment and
social status. The basic Weberian distinction Sharot focuses on, however,
is that between elites and the masses, and this is the leitmotiv of the rest
of the volume, in which he provides an overview of the basic ideas and
practices of both formal and popular religion in chapters on China, India,
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American Journal of Sociology
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Book Reviews
Andrew Greeley
University of Chicago and University of Arizona
One rarely reads good news about the religious behavior of young people,
particularly about the religious behavior of young Catholics. Thus it is
surprising to learn in Young Adult Catholics that most young Catholics
like being Catholic and cannot imagine themselves being anything other
than Catholic. Moreover, the four strongest components of their Catholic
identity are “belief that God is present in the sacraments,” “charitable
efforts toward helping the poor,” “belief that Christ is really present in
the Eucharist,” and “devotion to Mary the Mother of Jesus” (these latter
findings were recently replicated in a study in Ireland).
While the centrality of their Catholic identity to their lives may be open
to question—their knowledge of Catholic teaching is problematic and their
institutional activity is weak—they are still Catholic. One might almost
say they are irredeemably Catholic. Moreover, they are apparently much
less angry at the church than their predecessors were.
All of this is very good news indeed for Catholicism. Unfortunately, it
is good news in which one cannot put much trust.
The book is the product of a series of grants from the Lilly Endowment
to researchers at the Catholic University of America. It suffers from defects
that affect much of this research tradition. The sample is hardly random.
Other existing data files are not used for longitudinal and cohort analysis.
Change over time is not measured by repeating items from previous re-
search by other scholars (such as the NORC/Knights of Columbus study
of young Catholics in 1980, of which the authors are apparently unaware).
Such weaknesses make it difficult for one inclined to agree with the
study’s basic findings—and perhaps even to celebrate them—to emit more
than one weak cheer for the book. One cannot understand how reputable
social scientists can be guilty of such mistakes.
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American Journal of Sociology
The most serious weakness is sample design. Half of the dioceses se-
lected were chosen randomly (the nature of the randomness is not spec-
ified); the other half were chosen for convenience—because they were
near the homes of the researchers. Parishes were selected in consultation
with the local chancery offices. Within parishes, young people were chosen
from confirmation records. The authors admit that they do not know
what proportion of young Catholics are confirmed.
Not to put too fine an edge on the matter, this sample is worthless.
Conclusions drawn from it (save for the Catholic identity items cited in
the first paragraph, which came from research administered by the Prince-
ton Survey Research Associates) have no value at all. One hates to say
it of an effort that involved a lot of hard work by many dedicated people,
but the dictum “garbage in, garbage out!” must be applied to the project.
Moreover, even if much more care had been devoted to the selection
of primary sampling units, the final stage of the design—selecting young
Catholics who have been confirmed—introduces an intolerable bias into
the results, since those who have not been confirmed are the most likely
to be on the fringes of the church. One hates to say it, but poring over
confirmation lists has the smell of the medieval about it. Presumably it
was not done by candlelight. Before one can draw conclusions about
young Catholics—much less make recommendations, as these authors
do—one must know more about the proportion that has not been
confirmed.
This reviewer has never been able to understand the bias in Lilly-
funded studies against probability sampling. Obviously, probability sam-
pling costs more. But it produces results about which one can speak with
some confidence. The research team could have paid some reputable sur-
vey organization to screen young people on religion and on age and then
conduct either phone or mail interviews with the selected respondents.
How much more would it have cost to pursue such a research design?
Would it have been impossible to do the project if the researchers had
approached Lilly with such a budget? Do the Lilly officers and trustees
really think they are getting their money’s worth from such “inexpensive”
research?
Some will argue (but not readers of this journal, one hopes) that Young
Adult Catholics tells us something about the population it attempts to
study. Something, it could be said, is better than nothing. Professional
social science must respond that no, it is not. Something can be worse
than nothing.
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