Living for the Revolution. Black Feminist Organizations, 1968–1980 – Kimberley Springer

Book reviews

Adkins, Lisa and Skeggs, Beverley (eds)Feminism After Bourdieu BlackwellPublishing 2005 258 pp. £17.99 (paperback)

How are we to assess the intellectual legacyof the late Pierre Bourdieu? Few questionsattract greater attention within contempo-rary feminist debate than this. Now, with theappearance of Feminism After Bourdieu, weare fortunate to have, thanks to Lisa Adkinsand Beverley Skeggs, an outstanding set ofnew contributions to the debate whichpromise not only to inform and enrich it, butalso to direct it into the future. In doing so,perhaps one of the most significant achieve-ments of this exemplary edited collection isto show us that seemingly opposed theoreti-cal positions on Bourdieu’s legacy may infact have more in common than might havebeen originally supposed.

In their incisive and highly illuminatingintroductions to the collection, Adkins andSkeggs seek to establish the nature of thepromise which Bourdieu holds for feministscholarship and social theory alike, demon-strating convincingly that both domains arein need of Bourdieu’s insights now, morethan ever. They argue that part of the unex-pected capacity of Bourdieu’s body ofwork to open itself out to contemporaryfeminism paradoxically lies in itsunder-conceptualization of gender as asocio-cultural concept. Adkins and Skeggsconjointly assert the utility, for feministscholarship, of the example offered by

Bourdieu in drawing upon areas of socialthought such as phenomenology and herme-neutics (as aspects of the social), and go onto indicate how they may be brought to bearon central questions about the reconstitu-tion of gender in feminist thought. Aweighty emphasis upon Bourdieu’s concep-tual notion of the ‘social’ (e.g., cultural field,habitus, agency, symbolic violence) as sitesfor action, and the implied and constrainedrole of gendered agents runs throughoutthese important introductory essays.

The essays gathered in Section One of thevolume focus upon the importance of recon-ceptualizing class and gender in contempo-rary times. Terry Lovell reviews theimportance for feminist thought of main-taining strong links between gender andclass, whilst Diane Reay powerfully extendsBourdieu’s notion of capital to the culturalrealm of emotions. Skeggs herself thenmoves forward to historicize the genderednature of selfhood as it has been articulatedwithin political theory and notions of thestate over time.

Section Two explores the ways in whichBourdieu’s vast thinking might be applied tothe study of gendered forms of individual-ization and the intervening role that classplays in this process. The contributors hereargue that feminist theory conceived inbroadly cultural, social and historical termsis not only significant for interpreting thechanging nature of gender over time, butalso reflects important changes in how

© London School of Economics and Political Science 2006 ISSN 0007-1315 print/1468-4446 online.Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden,MA 02148, USA on behalf of the LSE. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-4446.2006.00133.x

The British Journal of Sociology 2006 Volume 57 Issue 4

feminists have come to conceptualize andintegrate aspects of the social into their cul-tural theorizing. McRobbie’s account of theintersection between class, consumption,gender and the dominating role of the mediain regulating and classifying female bodies(and the very nature of gendered embodi-ment) is especially important here, as isLawler’s novel thinking about the culturalarticulations of identity and habitus,Vittelone’s cultural conceptions of the linkbetween gender and substance abuse, andFowler’s Bourdieusian treatment of theobituary as a transformed mode of classifi-cation and stratification also offer highlystimulating treatments.

Section Three sees normative sociologicalconcepts return to the forefront, though inthe dramatically revised form associatedwith the work of Lois McNay. In the currentcollection, McNay’s piece on the role ofagency as a mediating concept for the dividebetween materialist and culturalist accountsof gender stands as a fine example of how wemight work with Bourdieu’s ideas to navi-gate the apparent divisions between cultur-alist expressions of gender within feministtheory and social thought. Similarly instruc-tive is Adkins’ argument that Bourdieu’sidea of reflexivity may usefully be set towork as long as it is uncoupled conceptuallyfrom concepts such as individualization. Pro-byn’s attempt to encapsulate emotionsthrough the concept of the habitus is a cre-ative exercise in rethinking its very logic,whilst Witz’s critical reading of Bourdieu’s‘canonical structuralism’ alerts us to thetemporal limitations of Bourdieu’s thinkingfor feminism.

Feminism After Bourdieu is withoutdoubt one of the best resources currentlyavailable to us for understanding the life-time work of Pierre Bourdieu and itspower and potential for recasting debatesabout gender in feminist thought. It is awork which is noteworthy for its highlyinnovative intellectual scope, and for theimpressive extent of its reach in covering arange of conceptual work ‘mark[ing] newterritories not just for feminist inquiry, but

for the social and cultural theory fields ingeneral’ (p. 3). A defining strength of thework is that its contributors do not seek toground their arguments in any one disci-pline, or to offer easy answers to the ques-tion of how feminist theory might workwith Bourdieu or vice versa. The work alsogives short shrift to any idea of Bourdieu asa dangerous intellectual temptation whichmay end with the conquest of feministthought by social theory. Quite the reverse:Bourdieu is instead here presented as anenduring possibility rather than as a theo-retical threat or potential enemy to femi-nist thought.

If we are to build further upon the accu-mulated achievements of feminist theoryacross recent decades, then sustained atten-tion to the seminal work of Pierre Bourdieuwill remain of central importance for eachone of us, and rightly so. And in takingforward this collective task, each of us willalso recognize our indebtedness to thescholars who have contributed to thisimmensely important and inspiring volume.

Jo-Anne DillaboughUniversity of British Columbia, Vancouver,

BC., Canada

Aspers, P. Markets in Fashion. APhenomenological Approach Routledge2006 240 pp. £75.00 (hardback)

Can fashion photography be treated as amarket instead of an art? Can the sociologi-cal study of markets gain insights from thistreatment? Moreover: can a phenomeno-logical analysis of fashion photography con-tribute to a better understanding of howmarkets work? These are challengingquestions. While there have been some veryvaluable recent studies of art markets, nonehas, to my knowledge, focused on the pro-cesses of art production as intrinsic tomarket transactions. In its turn, phenom-enology has certainly influenced the study ofmarkets, as witnessed in several recent pub-lications; yet, we had missed a broader andmore systematic study conducted from this

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© London School of Economics and Political Science 2006 British Journal of Sociology 57(4)

perspective. In this re-publication of thebook published in 2001 by Stockholm’s CityUniversity Press, Patrik Aspers sets aboutfilling these gaps by examining how Swedishfashion photography is constituted into asystem of economic exchanges grafted uponsocial networks. It is an entertaining, instruc-tive, methodical book, offering readers awealth of insights into the (from this read-er’s perspective) distant world of fashionphotography. Aspers, who has a backgroundas a part time professional photographer,has firsthand knowledge of the field,enriched through ethnographic observationand in depth interviews. In his study he com-bines ethnographic and statistical methodswith the bulk of the empirical evidencecoming from ethnography’s side. While thestudy itself is theoretically rich, it is comple-mented by an extensive appendix on socio-logical phenomenology.

Pausing on the theoretical perspective ofthis book for a moment, it should be men-tioned here that phenomenology is not theonly approach used in framing the author’sanalysis. In fact, the introductory chaptersdeal mainly with the network-structuralapproach (which I see as an innovativeversion of systems theory) championed ineconomic sociology by Harrison White andJoel Podolny, among others. In this systems-theoretical perspective, markets are struc-tured networks of actors who monitor eachother’s actions. The structuring takes theform of internal and external status hierar-chies; the participants use reciprocal moni-toring in order to infer knowledge aboutthe other side of the transaction (i.e., theconsumers). The market appears as amirror or an interface in which the imageof the consumer is re-constituted from thereciprocal observation of producers. Conse-quently, we encounter two main theses:first, in markets, status is everything.Second, reciprocal observation is a keymechanism for maintaining or adjustingstatus.

Aspers’s study both confirms and discon-firms these tenets. Yes, in fashion photogra-phy markets status is everything. And no, in

these markets photographers do not onlymonitor each other, but also their custom-ers, be they fashion editors or art directorsof advertising companies. It appears thatmarkets with a limited number of major,well-known buyers are structured differ-ently from anonymous consumer markets.Very much revolves around status in thisbook, both in the ethnographic analysis ofmarkets and in the theoretical framing, aninnovative move which shifts the spotlightfrom resource allocation, need and utilityas constituting the finality of market pro-cesses to identity and status as the market’sultimate driving engines. This is a genuinenon-functionalist perspective and Aspers’sbook contains a number of very interesting,yet unexplored theoretical statementsabout markets as unintended outcomes ofidentity-building processes, or about pricesas epiphenomena of status distributions. Ihad the strong feeling that these are trulyproductive starting points for a sociologicalexploration of markets; their detailed theo-retical elaboration would have been morethan welcome. One aspect which somehowslips out of view in this rich and rewardingethnography is pricing. In opposition toother recent investigations of art markets,Aspers spends relatively little effort onresearching the mechanisms for pricingfashion photographs, mechanisms whichcould involve sets of social routines, as wellas procedures for translating aestheticperception into price tags. Nevertheless,Markets in Fashion is an original, empiri-cally detailed and theoretically rewardingbook, which shows how a micro-analyticalapproach can advance our understandingof economic phenomena.

Alex PredaUniversity of Edinburgh

Baudrillard, J. The Intelligence of Evil orthe Lucidity Pact Berg 2005 215 pp. £35.00(hardback) £9.99 (paperback)

Jean Baudrillard is one of the best-knowntheorists (or in his own terms, anti-theorists)

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British Journal of Sociology 57(4) © London School of Economics and Political Science 2006

of hyperreality in contemporary socialtheory. His intellectual odyssey has rangedacross the spectrum of radical social and cul-tural analysis from an early Marxist phase(c. 1960 to 1968), the criticism of orthodoxMarxism (in his influential For a Critique ofthe Political Economy of the Sign (1972) andThe Mirror of Production (1973)), a criticalengagement with modern consumerism inThe Consumer Society (1970) to reflectionson symbolic exchange (Symbolic Exchangeand Death, 1976) and contemporary massmedia, virtual reality, and the realms ofhyperreality (in Simulations (1983) and sub-sequent writings).

Baudrillard’s intellectual task throughoutthe 1980s and 1990s was to document the‘end of the Real’ and its displacement bysimulated hyperreal worlds. ‘Hyperreality’refers to ‘the generation by models of a realwithout origin or reality: a hyperreal. Theterritory no longer precedes the map, norsurvives it . . . it is the map that engendersthe territory’ (Simulations, 1983 p. 2). As aself-conscious intellectual provocateurBaudrillard’s aim was to explore the factthat after the ‘end of the Real’ we have cometo inhabit an epoch where the Code rulessupreme, where the real is generated fromcoded models, stored in memory banks anddigitalized technologies manipulated byglobal power networks.

Chris Turner’s translation of BaudrillardLe Pacte de lucidité ou l’intelligence du Mal(The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact,first published in 2004) makes availableBaudrillard’s most recent ruminations onthe implications of globalized hyperrealityfor contemporary culture and politics life.According to the present book the emergingworld order now raises the logics of simula-tion and symbolic exchange to a truly globalplane.

Like many of Baudrillard’s earlier ‘books’this collection is essentially an ensemble ofshort lectures and essays, each devoted toone aspect of the larger theme of totalvirtualization. The translator provides auseful overview of Baudrillard’s position inhis introduction (pp. 1–16) and the essays

that follow are divided into four groups,each made up of fragmentary meditationson some consequential geo-political eventor phenomenon.

To avoid complicity with conventionalcritical enquiry Baudrillard forges an alter-native genre of non-sociological, non-philosophical ‘theory-fictions’. What groupsthese fragments and fictions is a concernfor the resilience of ‘evil’ (which hereappears as an image of whatever resiststotalization – or what Baudrillard now calls‘Integral Reality’ in contemporary life). Inplace of critical research on the dynamicsof virtualization and globalization Baudril-lard resorts to aphorisms and ‘sayings’(‘Reality has fallen prey to Virtual Reality’,p. 27; ‘Integral Reality is a utopia. And yetthis is what, by gigantic artifice, is beingimposed upon us’, p. 31; ‘There is no hiddentruth’, p. 61; ‘There is no objectivity’, p. 39;‘. . . we move from the mirror to the totalscreen of Virtual Reality’, p. 42). The cumu-lative effect of these incantations is whatwe might call the Matrix view of virtualiza-tion – Integral Reality is all ‘there is’,whatever is Real is now manufacturedin a seamless, wall-to-wall operationof simulation (‘the domination of theVirtual’, p. 82, ‘the policing of events isessentially carried out by informationitself’, p. 121).

Of the collection as a whole we can saythat the occasional tangential points atwhich Baudrillard’s reflections meet theactual socioeconomic, political and culturalprocesses of globalization is the nearestBaudrillard comes to critical research on thedynamics of the new world order. In place ofcritique we are left with the ‘apocalyptical’aftermath of philosophy (or anti-philosophy). Yet Baudrillard’s apocalypticalreflections on the end of society, the end ofhistory, the end of art, the end of ends, etc.are still animated by an ethical concern, theconcern to reveal the truth about total vir-tualization and to resist totalization in thename of truth. Unfortunately as this idea ofa truth beyond the Virtual has no name andremains untheorised it can only be indicated

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by the empty gesture of an ‘intelligence ofEvil’.

Barry SandywellUniversity of York

Bevir, Mark New Labour: A CritiqueRoutledge 2005 224 pp. £19.99 (paperback)

Given that some of the material in thisshort book has already appeared in jour-nals, it is not surprising that it seems a littledated in places. We might not read it forinformation on current New Labour policybut do need to know what it has to sayabout the relationship between NewLabour and social science. Bevir arguesthat New Labour has relied on expert solu-tions which are unhelpful, even damaging.The problem is not that these are thewrong expert solutions but, rather, exper-tise cannot accomplish what it claims anddoes not deserve the prominence it hasbeen given in government.

Some of the early parts of the book aretaken up with attempts to position theauthor, and the sources of expertise that hewishes to critique, within political science.We are also told that New Labour’s seduc-tion by expert solutions was not simply amatter of adopting an agenda of marketiza-tion or new public management inheritedfrom the New Right. The expert solutionswhich Bevir wishes to target are, rather, thenew institutionalism (networks rather thanhierarchies and markets, and joined-up gov-ernance) and communitarianism (some-times including social capital theory). Now itbecomes clear that Bevir’s analysis is as rel-evant to sociologists as to political scientists:the crucial break between the New Rightand institutionalism or communitarianismlies in the importance attached to socialityand solidarity. We might be forgiven forwondering if the sins of New Labour couldbe laid at the door of a whole tradition ofsociology rather than one or two prominentsociologists.

Bevir’s analysis seems pertinent andfresh when he critiques the imperatives of

global competition and the supply-sideemphasis in New Labour policy. If NewLabour is finally getting the message aboutthe supply-side emphasis on skills, the ideathat institutionalism is responsible for NewLabour’s commitment to the transforma-tive power of clusters and networks stillhits the nail on the head. Bevir’s analysis ofNew Labour values – particularly theemphasis on responsibility and duty ratherthan rights – which derive from communi-tarianism is also just as relevant as ever, butthere is plenty to be learned here that canbe applied beyond New Labour as well.Objectification is identified as the founda-tion of all the claims which are made forthe supremacy of expertise: institutions andorganizations are objectified by the institu-tionalists, communities and their sharedvalues are objectified by the communitar-ians. The examples of objectification maychange but this is a lesson for critics ofother governments and other policies.Unpacking the process of objectificationmakes the whole New Labour project seem‘contingent and contestable’.

Bevir argues for ‘pluralism against objec-tification’ but he runs into problems whenpersuading us that this can be more than aslogan. Whatever Tony Blair may feel aboutpluralism, there have been more attempts toinvolve associations in governance whileNew Labour has been in power than Bevirallows for. Nor does he warn us that plural-ism can easily misfire because of the apathyof the large majority who do not joinassociations. Bevir wants to ‘attach moralvalue to . . . situated agency’ but this must bea common conviction amongst the citizenry,as well as amongst social scientists, for plu-ralism to work in the way he wants. Withoutit, New Labour can bring associations intogovernance but they will still represent evenfewer people than can be persuaded to votefor them at elections. Bevir is scathing ofthe communitarian emphasis on virtue butperhaps we need it if the majority are ever tobe bothered to deliberate?

Ralph FevreCardiff University

Book reviews 713


Brown, Jacqueline Nassy Dropping Anchor,Setting Sail – Geographies of Race inBlack Liverpool Wiley 2005 306 pp. £13.95(paperback)

More than ever, this book demands that thereader bears in mind the insights fromliterary/cultural studies that we all read froma position and as a part of a collection ofreaders. At first encounter, this seems to bean anthropology of the black population(s)of Liverpool, so I tried to read it from myposition as a white sociologist who attemptsto stand outside and against racist discourse.Simultaneously, I wondered how my blackfriend, who left ‘Liverpool 8’ (Brown insistson these quote marks) for London manyyears ago, would read this book. Just as I wasbecoming entranced by this complex,layered, theoretically informed, beautifullywritten ethnography I started an email cor-respondence with an expatriate LiverpoolBorn Black (Brown explains the genealogyand importance of this ‘LBB’ formulation)whose academic work on Liverpool is occa-sionally referred to here. He explained whyhe did not share my admiration. So I had tore-think my response, and this review shouldexhibit the re-readings that I was forced toundertake.

Jacqueline Nassy Brown explains herintentions in various ways: it is a book (by ablack American ‘outsider’) ‘about England/Britain as glimpsed from the vantage pointof Liverpool’, where ‘Liverpool’ is itselfunderstood as a ‘production of a nationalpolitical culture concerning place’ (p. 245).More specifically, Brown wants to demon-strate that, for black people in Liverpool, itis ‘place’ which produces ‘race’. She lines upwith, and applies to ‘Liverpool’, the argu-ment about Englishness made by IanBaucomb (1999: 4), which she quotes:‘Englishness has consistently been definedthrough appeals to the identity endowingproperties of place’ (p. 12). She regardsplace as ‘an ideological abstraction whichcommands legitimacy’ (p. 100), and a ‘discur-sive construct’ (p. 133) which, through the‘reification of the local . . . Black identifica-

tion’ in Liverpool is produced (p. 265 fn 14).It is this diligent exposition of the specificityof ‘place’ which justifies Brown’s use of‘geographies’ in the book’s title.

The application of what my LBB emailfriend calls ‘postmodern’ theory will incitecritique from some sociologists. In so far asthe book eschews conventional historiogra-phies of the economic imperialism whichdrew African seamen to Liverpool morethan a century ago; says little about thebitter racism that excluded them and theiroffspring from mainstream life in the city;and wears its politics very lightly, such oppo-sition is understandable. But the geogra-phers and sociologists whose work seems tome to underlie Brown’s analysis – DoreenMassey, David Harvey, Paul Gilroy – are notproperly defined as postmodern, and each ofthem have been at the forefront of theradical, critical, and politically progressivedevelopments in their disciplines. At least,that is how I read them. But I now see hownegative uses of the term ‘postmodern’might encapsulate the view that some aca-demics have retreated from the full assaulton racism that should be expected of us.

Bearing this in mind, I would still arguethat this book makes an important contribu-tion to the history of Liverpool, includingsignificant work on the infamous FletcherReport (1928) and the 1981 riots; it includesa profound discussion of the field ofdiaspora studies; it disguises interestingobservations on method with the amusingconcept of ‘fluidarity’ (p. 260 fn 2); and itmanages to completely avoid a chapter titleincluding the word ‘identity’. But it is undera heading like ‘identity’ that we find some ofBrown’s most useful insights. Her nuancedaccount of the difference between LBB menand LBB women in their constructions ofblack American servicemen in Liverpool isboth informative and poignant. She showshow the ‘decoupl[ing] of race and body’(‘one of Black Britain’s most radicalmoves’) (p. 197) has taken place inLiverpool. Admitting that she was ‘amazedand confounded’ (p. 71) when she firstencountered the political definition of

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Blackness introduced by the LiverpoolBlack Organisation, she reveals that a whitewoman who has a black child is accepted asblack by LBBs. (Nevertheless, she is alwaysalive to the contest over this de-couplingprocess, and alludes to those who continueto essentialize race in phenotype.) Brown’sinvestigation of ‘whiteness’ includes aremarkable account of the ‘momentous andtransformative . . . cosmopolitan desires’ (p.237) and ‘ethical worldliness’ (p. 218) ofwhite women in Liverpool.

Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail is ademanding read in the best possible sense ofthe word ‘demanding’. It must play a majorrole in helping us understand ‘Blackness’and ‘Whiteness’ in Britain – and the pecu-liarities of the local configurations of both ofthese intricate and intimate constructions.

Max FarrarLeeds Metropolitan University

Collins, Randall Interaction Ritual ChainsPrinceton and Oxford: PrincetonUniversity Press 2004 440 pp. £35.95(hardback) £24.95 (paperback)

If a central problem of social theory is topose the question ‘what holds societytogether?’, then one classic (Durkheimian)answer is that of social ritual – and this is thefocus of Randall Collins’s latest magnumopus. For many years, he has been suggestingthe bridge between Durkheim andGoffman, and the ways social analysisshould lie not just on the macro ritual (suchas waves of national solidarity), but alsoupon the myriad local pockets which engulfeveryday life situations. Collins adopts thestance of the radical microsociologist, blend-ing together the works of Goffman and theinteractionists with those of Durkheim, hesuggests the central importance of emo-tional rituals as underpinning societythrough what he calls ‘the interaction ritualchain’ (IR). IR chains motivate – and likemarkets, they push and pull people fromsituation to situation. Throughout historythese chains have many different forms and

energetic drives. Hence, this is not a bookabout the more specific emotions such asrage or envy so topical these days; rather itsfocus is upon what Collins calls EE – emo-tional energy.This can vary from great inten-sity, enthusiasm and focus through to muchweaker, slackened and less focusedemotionality. For Collins, EE seeking is ‘themaster motive across all institutional arenas’(p. xv). It aims to provide a ‘theory ofmoment to moment motivation, situation bysituation’ (p. 45). And thinking itself isalways charged with these emotions.

A full half of the book is given over toempirically grounded case study materials –of sexual interactions and smoker cultures,of conflict and stratification (and the wayspeople are jolted up and down with esteem),and of cultures which seem to be very low inrituals – cultures of individualism. Sexuality,for example, is one case study in the book –a theory of sexual interaction, which looks atthe what people actually do in erotic situa-tions and how moments become eroticized.Critical of socio-biological accounts, Collinsplaces sexualities into contexts of interac-tion ritual chains (a ‘concatenation of IRchains’), and suggests that ‘In sexual desire,as everywhere else, human beings are pro-grammed from the outside in’ (p. 370),‘sexual drive and sexual objects are con-structed situationally’ (p. 250). There is noprimordial sexual urge awaiting repression.And for him, this now means we haveentered the most sexualized society theworld has ever known. In this chapter hediscusses the various pre-conditions thathave brought this society and the sexualinteraction it brings into being – from mediaand youth cultures to gay ‘scenes’.

Collins may well be Goffman’s heir appar-ent as the world’s leading micro-sociologist,and he certainly has strong views on the roleof micro-sociology. These days concernswith the interaction order per se are decid-edly unfashionable. But Collins sees it asalmost the foundation of sociology. Hewrites tellingly of the weaknesses of ‘macro-sociology’ which fails to convey an accuratepicture of the social world; for him ‘Nothing

Book reviews 715


has reality unless it is manifested in a situa-tion somewhere’ (p. 259), and macrostruc-tures only have reality in so far as they are‘patterned aggregates that hold acrossmicro-situations or networks of repeatedconnections’ (p. 259). And these micro-situations always have a historical linkage.Collins wants to produce the elements of aradical micro-sociology, but one that is fullyaware of histories, wider structures andhistories. For him, ‘we are all socially con-structed: all historically shaped’ (p. 372). Heargues that the kinds of selves we have aredeeply historical, as indeed are the rituals welive through. Much seems derived fromSimmel: it is as if historical momentsdevelop forms of ritual and their linkedchains. Rather than the focus on personality,we are treated at regular intervals to highlysuggestive ideal types of character forms:sometimes substantive – ‘work obsessedindividuals’, ‘social excluded people’, ‘alien-ated introverts’, ‘solitary cultists’ and others(pp.351–62).Types such as these appear fromconcatenations of space and time: buildingssuch as factories, monasteries, churches, uni-versities and their organizations such asstairwells, windows, doors, bedrooms.

Part of the book starts to sketch a ‘newsocial ecology of kinds of interactions’ thathave shifted our identities and everydayexperience (p. 290). Drawing fromLuhman’s ‘functional specialization’ andHabermas’s ‘colonization of the life world’,Collins suggests the bridges across interac-tion and segments of the social world. Akey example of this is that of stratification.This is so often at the core of macro-sociology, and indeed measurement sociol-ogy. But for Collins, what we lack and whatwe need are situational surveys. Heattempts what he calls a ‘micro-translationof the Weberian dimensions of class, statusand power’ (p. 263). Here, deference isespecially important (as it was in the earlyGoffman), and he makes a plea for studiesof how such deference works across socialsituations in contemporary society. Forinstance, economic class is broken into anumber of ‘Zelizer circuits’ (as circuits stay

close to their origins) where materialwealth is distributed. Life routines involveritual chains with like minded in similar cir-cuits: financial elites, highly paid middleclasses, entrepreneurial classes, celebrities,occupational markets, illegal circuits, and alower class on the outside who are almostoutside of these kinds of circuits – thehomeless, beggars, scavengers – but whonevertheless have their own circuits.

I have only scraped the surface of a bookwhich itself leaves so much more to answer.Over-generalized statements abound; gapsare striking; there is much to disagree with.Yet this book is long, detailed and endlesslysurprising. Photographic images are pro-vided – unusual in a theory book – whichbring alive some of the chains as exemplars.Examples proliferate. There is the sense of amind working on this project for a long time.It is not a theory book which simplyre-clothes old ideas, but one which with luckwhich could become an influential and origi-nal approach for a new generation of soci-ologists, who may be challenged to takesome of its arguments seriously and fleshthem out. It harbours a massive and impor-tant research agenda for the micro-sociologist. In the flood of books beingissued these days, I hope it can make itsmark.

Ken PlummerUniversity of Essex

Cook, D. The Commodification ofChildhood: The Children’s ClothingIndustry and the Rise of the ChildConsumer Duke University Press 2004 224pp. £16.95 (paperback)

The role played by commercial markets inthe lives of children and their parents is asubject of much popular and academicdebate. Dan Cook’s foray into this realm isan important counter-weight to the causal,sometimes casual, relationship often drawnbetween consumption and the contamina-tion of ‘childhood innocence’. Cook’s argu-ment is convincing: to understand the

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construction of social categories, such as‘childhood’ and ‘adulthood’, requires asocio-historical analysis of markets, whichare ‘cultural sites where consuming selvesarise, transform and grow to the point ofco-creating other consuming selves’ (p. 145).Childhoods and adulthoods are rendereddynamic through the iterative relationshipbetween markets, consumption and broadersocio-economic and cultural conditions – forexample pedagogical discourses of childdevelopment, changing labour markets, andsocio-demographic shifts. Cook demon-strates these processes through intricatecataloguing of how marketers latched onto,cultivated and created discourses of childneeds. He does so in a manner which leavesthe reader in little doubt that the develop-ment of commercial markets has played afundamental role in our often ambivalentunderstandings of contemporary childrenand childhood.

Taking the emerging market of ready-made child clothing in the first half of twen-tieth century North America, Cook detailsthe relationship between childhood as asocio-historical yet context specific socialconstruct, and how market actors (mer-chants, manufacturers and advertisers)appropriated and reconfigured thisconstruct. The opening chapters succinctlyweave together existing scholarship in thesociology of childhood and the empiricalanalysis of children’s wear. Positioning itselfwithin a moral economy of child (and moth-er’s) welfare, the clothing industry producedsuccessive refinements of a children’s con-sumer culture. At the turn of the centuryretail spaces increasingly acted as forums forpublic discussion of child developmentissues, and marketers developed acuteawareness of the concerns of middle-classmothers. Such concerns were graduallytranslated into market segmentation alongthe lines of age and gender. By the 1930s thecategory of ‘toddler’ emerged within mar-keting parlance. Chapter 4 details the signifi-cance of the toddler in the creation of childconsumers. Coining the concept of ‘pediocu-larity’ to capture a shift towards the ‘child’s

point of view’, Cook shows how ideals oftaste and individual choice were extended tothe youngest members of society. Consump-tion becomes a principal means throughwhich children develop a sense of person-hood; and their guardians become respon-sible for nurturing their independent sensesof self.

The demarcation of age and size in rela-tion to gender and femininity is the subjectof chapter 5, while chapter 6 illustrates howmarket creation is often the consequence ofthe coalescence of social, cultural and eco-nomic changes as much as they are the resultof insightful entrepreneurs. For it was the‘baby boom’ of the 1940s and 1950s thatmade children’s consumption profitable, andthe efforts of marketers in the 1920s and1930s merely set in place the infrastructurenecessary to react to an unpredictable socialtrend.

This is a fascinating book which makes acritical intervention into debates aboutchildhood and consumer culture. It is beau-tifully written and engaging from the firstword. It is a slim book and its main weaknessis that its detailed analysis ends in the 1950s.The period after receives scant and some-what generic attention. As a result fewobservations are drawn about the implica-tions of this study for theories of contempo-rary social change.This book could say muchabout ‘risk society’ and ‘late-modernity’,consider contemporary conceptions offatherhood (and motherhood), and examineresistance to children’s consumer culture.Perhaps such issues are beyond the scope ofthe empirical data, but they are testament tothe wide application of the concepts andtheories that Cook develops. What remainsis a crucial tension: the child as innocentversus the agentive and empowered child.This is a tension demanding of furtherresearch and Cook sets the foundations. Amust read for scholars in the sociologies ofchildhood and consumption, and a book thatwould be embraced by under- and post-graduate students.

Dale SouthertonThe University of Manchester

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Dickens, P. Society and Nature: ChangingOur Environment, Changing OurselvesPolity 2004 286 pp. £55.00 (hardback)£17.99 (paperback)

This book, sold as a student text, states thatit is different from others on this subjectbecause ‘it considers people as part ofnature’ – and Dickens cites the central ques-tion as being ‘how, as society transforms itsenvironment, are people’s own naturesbeing transformed?’ Herein lies a reviewdilemma; if this book is for students thenstudents of what? Social sciences, primarily,but the book will appeal to others interestedin environment and society includingnatural scientists.

Dickens looks upon the relationshipbetween society and nature as being itera-tive and symbiotic: society influences nature,yet nature in turn influences society.The dis-tinction is a blurred one. He notes that therole of science as the driver of progress (p.10 onwards) is being questioned and thisthesis will interest sociologists of science. Heoffers critical relativism as a way of under-standing this change whereby: knowledge isa process as well as a product, science is apeculiar form of knowledge, knowledge canbe stratified, and experiential knowledgecan critique evidence-based knowledge.Thus Dickens is calling for a more reflexiveand reflective understanding of knowledge.

The book has a useful section of furtherreading on history and philosophy of scienceand social theory of the environment whichis particularly useful to newcomers trying toget to grips with the substantive subject areafor the first time. Each chapter has addi-tional lists of further reading. Whilst theseare relatively up to date there are somepeculiarities:Yearley 1996 is cited as ‘recent’and there are some notable exceptions, forexample no mention, that I could see, ofHannigan’s influential Environmental Soci-ology (1995). Indeed the book avoids socialconstructionism in its ‘key themes’ sectionhaving dismissed it in the introduction (p.19). None the less, it deals with evolutionaryideas well and in an interesting way (but not

so well for undergraduates as Bowler’s(1983) classic Evolution: the History of anIdea now in its 3rd edition) and the keythemes section in general is brief and inter-esting, dealing with, alongside evolutionaryideas: community, globalization, moderniza-tion and risk.

The substantive chapters (Ch.2 onwards)cover the relationship between society andnature in more detail exploring how indus-try and meeting our physical needs impactson and is impacted upon by theenvironment. Functionalism, Marxism andmodernity all give rise to the Risk Society asthe boundary between humans and the basisupon which we survive – i.e. the environ-ment – grows more distinct. This distinction(or problem) is most noticeable inmegacities. The commoditization of theenvironment is also covered, including thedistinction between private and publicconsumption. The consumer society is posedas the final stage of social evolution, therebylinking back to the earlier evolutionaryecology. Dickens concludes that the rise ofconsumerist, industrialist society has createdas many problems as it has solved. He thengoes on to examine the various theoriesinfluenced by evolutionary psychology usedto understand the relationship betweensociety and nature and looks at the conceptof community in the twenty-first century andits relationship to individual biology andthen individual citizenship. Each section isrelated back to the theme of risk. Dickens’book will be a useful addition to the book-shelves of anyone who has even a passinginterest in the new governance of the envi-ronment, not just students.

John ForresterUniversity of York

Halsey, A. H. A History of Sociology inBritain: Science, Literature, and SocietyOxford University Press 2004 279 pp.£50.00 (hardback)

A. J. P. Taylor once famously wrote that‘history gets thicker as it approaches recent

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times’. He assuredly did not have in mindBritish sociology, or its history, when hewrote this and, if he were to have done, onewonders whether he might have intended amore or a less flattering of the several meta-phorical meanings of ‘thick’. Charitably,Chelly Halsey – among the most distin-guished, if not the most so, of the immediatepostwar cohort of British sociologists – doesnot approach his account of the Britishhistory of the subject with this trajectory atits forefront.

It is the early chapters of his book that arethe most interesting. The later ones, chroni-cling in much empiricist detail such mattersas the degree and quality of quantification inmainstream sociology articles, are worthy asstatements of historical record, but are oth-erwise of some banality. Many of the person-ages in the history of the British disciplineabout whom Halsey writes, often at length,in his early chapters will be wholly unknown– either in person or through their writings –to almost all contemporary British sociolo-gists below a certain age. Halsey uses hisbook in part to deliver his trenchant viewsupon some of these major figures who couldhave been considered rebarbative or self-opinionated: e.g., David Glass, PerryAnderson, Donald MacRae, the last for thefinal eight years of his career the MartinWhite Professor of Sociology at LSE andsurely one of the more inexplicably over-promoted figures in the history of the Britishdiscipline. On Edward Shils, Halsey is kinderand more ready to recognize the genuinemorality of his conservatism, although thelikelihood of his CIA connections must tainthis reputation from most contemporaryperspectives. Halsey is also kind aboutLeonard Hobhouse and about the seeminglylugubrious Morris Ginsberg, whose kindnessother former students recall.

Although Halsey does discuss the philo-sophical and epistemological approaches ofthe major figures whom he introduces intohis narrative, the history is remarkablylacking – and perhaps this is a mercifulrelease – of any mention of the non-Britishfigures who were faddishly and trendily

picked up by so many in the discipline in the1960s and 1970s, enthusiasms that undoubt-edly contributed to the tribulation visitedupon British social science by the earlyThatcher government.The book contains nomention of, for example, Antonio Gramsci(who did deserve his intellectual following),nor of French ‘Golden Delicious’ importssuch as Louis Althusser (an intellectualcharlatan who did not), or Nicos Poulantzas(Greek in origin, but who none the less pub-lished initially in French and whose oeuvrewas often theoretical glosses heavily depen-dent upon his secondary analysis of otherwriters, often historians). Of overseas ‘genrefigures’, Michel Foucault (whose earlierworks are, to this reviewer, worthy anderudite, but whose later writings tend to thebizarre), Jürgen (variously spelt as ‘Jörgenand Jurgen) Habermas, and Pierre Bourdieuare among the few recent Europeans toreceive substantial coverage as ‘celebratedsociologists’.

Delightfully, Halsey must live in a rarefiedworld of intellectual self-confidence that heseems to assume is universal: ‘every under-graduate is taught to avoid the ecologicalfallacy’, he writes (p. 81) in his discussion ofShils’ work, thus displaying either ironichyperbole or a touching narrowness ofvision. One only wishes that this were so:most sociology undergraduates these daysdoubtless graduate without knowing whatthe ecological fallacy is, let alone how toavoid it! Some are more likely to think it acritique of Greenpeace!

The book contains a number of minorfactual errors. Thus, Ernest Gellner actuallydied in 1995, not 1997 (p. 99). Strictly speak-ing, the first Martin White Professor at LSEwas not Hobhouse, who assumed the full-time post only from late-September 1907,but Edvard Westermarck, who had accepteda part-time fixed-term Martin White Profes-sorship nearly two months earlier. Also, it isa little unfair to say that Liverpool’s teach-ing of sociology began only in 1909. ASchool of Training for Social Work – albeitintended for just that, training socialworkers – was established from 1905, and by

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1907, but essentially the same, it was callingitself the School of Social Science and ofTraining for Social Work.

The book has a substantial quantity ofediting errors, most of them small but ofsuch a nature that a publishing house withthe self-aggrandizing and smug pretensionsof the Oxford University Press ought tohave ensured had been removed from thefinal text. A ‘theoretician’ mispelt as ‘theori-tician’ (p. 83), a ‘their’s’ for ‘theirs’ (p. 93).And among some of the titles in the text andtheir corresponding entries in the Refer-ences there are numerous minor mistakes:an error of preposition in the title of CharlesBooth’s best-known work, an errant andintrusive indefinite article in the title, in itsEnglish publication, of Ralf Dahrendorf’sbest-known early work, the rendition at onepoint of ‘Shils’ as ‘Still’ [!], and the attribu-tion to the present reviewer of a piece actu-ally single-authored by an LSE colleague.Sadly, there are other such errors, toonumerous to mention; one hopes thatOxford University Press took greater edito-rial care in the preparation of its OxfordDictionary of National Biography!

However, dwelling upon these is cavilling.Halsey has written a history of the Britishdiscipline that, at least in its early chapters,reflects on his rich academic experience, hisworthy prejudices, his good sense, and hisstrong moral commitment to the purpose ofhis subject. This reviewer asks no more thanthat!

Christopher T. HusbandsLondon School of Economics and Political

Science

Harper, Sarah Families in Aging Societies:A Multidisciplinary Approach Oxford 2004224 pp. £47.00 (hardback)

Standpoint is not often something that isconsidered by quantitative researchersdealing with large samples. However ageingin western industrialized societies, and itsrelation to the family, is an area of researchwhere standpoint can have a major influence

on results. Views differ. For some it may beaxiomatic that family change in the west issynonymous with family breakdown, or thatthe old are a burden on the young, or thatintergenerational competition is a majorsocial force. Others see these axioms asageist, or as examples of bad research wherewhat passes as ‘common sense’ has beenallowed to bias findings. The contributors tothis volume are distinguished researchersand many chapters could be seen combatingageism or the demonization of the modernfamily, even though the authors are limitedby the ‘significant deficit of direct informa-tion’ and the prevalence of small samples ofpeople over 60 or 65 where statistics exist.

Two chapters specifically address familychange in relation to senior members.Murphy concludes from a survey of familycontact in developed countries that thereare indeed differences between countries inthe amount of face to face interactionbetween adult children and their parents,and that these differences persist over time,even though there has been an overall dropin face to face interaction in recent decades.However these results fall on a continuumand there is no evidence of catastrophicbreakdown or overall loss of family contact.Dimmock et al. focus on stepfamilies andthe newly constituted relationships acrossgenerations.They conclude that the family isnot in crisis but that it is too soon to say howintergenerational relationships will developas the members of reconstituted familiesage.

Other chapters focus on the need ofelders for support. This is a biased approachin that it does not allow much space for thecontributions of older people. The hard factis that ‘burden’, psychological, financial, orother, is easier to measure than the mainlyunpaid contributions that older peoplemake to their families and societies. Languses the Berlin Ageing Study of 516 highlyresearched respondents to show that familysupport is more than just parent–childinteractions. He assesses the importance ofwider family within and across generations,and theorizes his results in terms of ways of

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mobilizing support. Again we have no evi-dence of family breakdown as far as supportfor old age is concerned.

Economic theory has had considerableinfluence on the way population ageing isrepresented in academia. The cost of pen-sions and the failure to acknowledge orcount unpaid labour, have been combinedwith the well publicized burden of elder careon women to present the elderly as a drainon family and national resources. Thewelfare state is then seen as transferringunfair amounts of resources from youngto old. Finch implicitly contradicts thisapproach in her discussion of the flexibilityof inheritance transfers and the growingpossibility of conflict between passing onwealth and paying for long term care, whileAchenbaum explicitly states that there islittle empirical evidence of intergenera-tional conflict, even in America where thetheory has been most developed.

The relation between unpaid care forolder people and paid work is discussed byAnderson for Europe and Johnson and LoSasso for America while Kendall et al.present the shift towards private as opposedto state provided care in the UK. Harper’sintroductory chapter pulls all these themestogether and also makes the important pointthat knowledge of demographic ageing itselfbecomes an input to social, economic andpolitical developments. This point is not fol-lowed up which is a pity, but this is a main-stream book rather than a contribution tocritical theory. As such it is very good andwill be a useful source for sociologists whowant to look beyond the immediate confinesof the discipline.

Gail WilsonLondon School of Economics

Hirst, P. Space and Power: Politics, Warand Architecture Polity 2005 260 pp. £55.00(hardback) £16.99 (paperback)

Setting his approach against modish andover-general theories, particularly thosewhich elucidate postmodern conceptions of

space and perpetrate sweeping conceptsabout globalization, the late Paul Hirst wasconcerned to promote an interdisciplinaryapproach in this book drawing upon ideasfrom architectural theory, politics, sociology,geography and history amongst others toexplore the relationship between space andpower. This wide-ranging volume is particu-larly impressive in its broad historical sweepwhich highlights the specific historical con-texts through which space is configured bypower and becomes a resource for power.Such an approach denies any notions ofspatial fixity and thwarts any meta-theoretical, all inclusive notions about therelationships between space and power. Italso implicitly foregrounds a practical, con-textualizing consideration of how forms ofspatial(ized) power might be challenged.More specifically, Hirst concentrates onthree spaces organized at different spatialscales, the nation, the city and the building,subjects that are discussed in three thematicsections. The first section explores politicalinstitutions and their spatial exclusions andinclusions, and their impact upon nationaland city formations. Despite many contem-porary assertions to the contrary, he main-tains that the nation-state and the city are ofcontinuing salience. In the case of the latter,he identifies the importance of the nation-ally embedded city as channel and nodeof power in a global economy but alsoacknowledges the challenge to the urban bynew, albeit geographically specific, exurbandevelopments, and the new urban formsevolving in the enormous, growing citiesoutside the west.

The second section considers the spatialdimensions of war, focusing upon changingspatial and territorial divisions which orga-nize war, the fluidity of imperial and militaryfrontiers in different historical periods,ranging from the Roman Empire to theAmerican push westwards, and the impactof technologies on war and space.An impor-tant factor is the continuing impediments tosocial action, and communication – particu-larly exemplified through the limitations ofmilitary campaigns which are spatially

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over-extended, as indeed, the current Iraqiadventure seems to be, despite the hugenumbers of American troops present. Hirstalso takes particular issue with writers aboutmilitary campaigns and strategy war whochampion new hyper-technological militarysolutions, particularly denying the hyper-bolic depictions of total power envisaged bythe champions of the ‘revolution in militaryaffairs’ who espouse such faith in informa-tion systems and surgical strikes withoutcomprehending the role of individual humanagency and fallibility. Such over-estimationsof military capability ignore the potential forthe use of mobile, informational technolo-gies by the weak against the powerful in anincreasingly networked world. He furthersuggests that perhaps the enormously expen-sive strategies of installing extensive militarycapabilities in extra-terrestrial space mightsecure the reign of the powerful USA for atime but this can certainly not be guaranteedin perpetuity, partly because it requires suchcolossal financing – and economic conditionsmay not always be favourable to the amass-ing of such funds.

The third section shifts focus to investi-gate the effects of buildings through aFoucauldian perspective, charting the trans-formations through which buildings havebeen apprehended according to the power–knowledge axis provided by the discursiveformations organized around medievalchurches, panoptical prisons and artilleryfortress – the latter only recently supersededby more mobile military technologies inwhich military power is not so spatiallyconfined.

Space and Power does not present a holis-tic, sequential or over-arching argument, forkey themes are treated in contrasting waysand modes of analysis are diverse, yet thecontemporary and historical variations bywhich power in manifest in space arecogently analysed through the consolidationof multiple perspectives. Paul Hirst haswritten a challenging, accessible andextremely thought-provoking volume whichraises a plethora of critical questions aboutthe future of space and power that ought

to cause geographers to question too-comfortable theoretical suppositions.

Tim EdensorManchester Metropolitan University

Kallen, Evelyn Social Inequality and SocialInjustice: A Human Rights PerspectivePalgrave Macmillan 2004 216 pp. £ 17.99(paperback)

As its title suggests, this book tackles persis-tent issues of social inequality and socialinjustice by advocating a human rightsagenda. In so doing, it seeks to drawtogether work on a wide range of instancesof discrimination in order to show how theseexemplify violations of human rights.Written by an eminent author in a clearstyle, the book has much to recommend it –being particularly suited for use on any uni-versity course concerned with human rights.

The problem with the book is that, whilstit is quite rightly very critical of many socialpractices, it is so uncritical of the idea ofhuman rights itself. It is tempting to dismissthis concern with the thought that ‘it’s in agood cause’ and overlook any objections,but present experience, for example inBritain, should make one pause beforedoing so.

The crucial moves in the book are madeearly on. Simply by taking a human rightsperspective, it is assumed that human rightsconstitute the only significant feature of themoral landscape. This allows human rightstheorists to assume the role of moral legis-lator on all matters, just as the Utilitariansonce did with their principle of utility.

Again, the familiar concentration onhuman rights abuses in democratic societiescompared to the ‘allegedly’ (sic) moreserious situation in non-democratic societ-ies, is justified by the wildly improbable fearthat ‘if all human rights scholars shifted theirattention away from democratic societies,what could happen is that we will neglect to“clean up our own back yards” ’.

Another crucial step is to separate humanrights from natural rights which, while

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justified by the more expansive claims of theformer, ignores the genealogical linkbetween the two. In turn, this insulateshuman rights from all the problems whichearlier critics found in natural rights – manyof which are carried over into the successorconcept. These critics include people asdiverse as Burke, Marx, Bentham and T. H.Green and, since little criticism of humanrights enters from any other source, theconcept consequently appears to be largelyunproblematic as a result. When problemsdo emerge they tend to receive short shift.

One problem, for example, which is thetendency for human rights to conflict withmore communitarian ways of viewingsociety, is met with the assertion thatthe relationship ought to be ‘symbiotic’,although human rights seem to have the lastword here and elsewhere where a conflict isadmitted.

Further, the very pressing problem of theclash between human rights as a westernideal and the ideas of other cultures is simi-larly played down. So, from the manyexamples given of the clear contravention ofhuman rights perpetrated by societies is metwith the assurance that the spread of humanrights is a process. The, perhaps overly com-forting, implication is that if there is aproblem here it will gradually disappear.With similar assurance, religious beliefswhich do not accord with the contemporaryhuman rights doctrine espoused in the bookare simply dismissed as ‘pseudo-religions’.

A problem that is discussed at length,however, is the conflict between two differ-ent human rights. The conflict between thehuman rights of people not to be harmedby things like the publication of hate mate-rial, and the human right of free speech is aparticularly sensitive one. But, here, onlythe undeniable harm done to the victims ofsuch hate is elaborated in the book. Noopposing case in made out for freedom ofspeech, and the harms its restriction cancause, and so censorship appears to win bydefault.

Inevitably, the human rights of minoritiesare the main concern of the book. However

the conflicts between these rights and thehuman rights of the majority need to betaken seriously. Of course, these conflictscan be settled either by a moral judgment infavour of minority rights, as happens in thebook, or left to the courts. The latter resolu-tion, and the incorporation of human rightsinto law, none the less means that judges ineffect have the last word – rather thandemocratically elected representatives. Putbluntly, human rights and democracy are notthe same thing and, at times, can be incom-patible in practice.

Although the book seeks to explain theviolation of human rights in democratic soci-eties which have formally recognized them,the explanation offered is one reliant on thefamiliar machinations and abuse of power.But having excluded the possibility of anyother moral considerations, the failure ofsocieties to give complete recognition tohuman rights must, by default, result fromexpediency, or immorality, or both.

A human rights agenda might be the bestway forward for advancing the situation ofmany disadvantaged minorities, and it seemsto be the way favoured in practice by manyat present. However, we need a wider rangeof moral concepts than human rights andthose immediately related to them.

Terry HoptonUniversity of Central Lancashire

Keith, Michael After the Cosmopolitan?:Multicultural Cities and the Future ofRacism Routledge 238 pp. £19.99(paperback)

This is a theoretically sophisticated, empiri-cally grounded, account of the questionableconcept of the cosmopolitan, as it is manifestin urban spaces. Keith begins with the salientpoint that cosmopolitanism has been theo-rized outside of the domain in which it ismost present, that is the space of the city.While there is a certain amount of compara-tive literature in the book, the main focus isLondon and more specifically South EastLondon. Indeed, the chapters which are

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most illuminating are those that coverspecific incidents and events in Spitalfields,Tower Hamlets and Newham. This is not tosay that these are not theorized in a usefuland illuminating way, just that the ethno-graphic detail provides insights whichcomplement the acrobating through theliterature. And there is an impressive arrayof academic and policy literature covered inthe book signifying the interdisciplinarynature of the subject area and the need to bebroad to understand the processes at play.

Spread over ten chapters, Keith uses keytropes of the city as a way of organizing hisargument. In this manner, we are takenthough the debates about the ‘ghetto’;Ideas of the ‘the street’ as a site of authen-ticity and contestation; Graffiti practice as away of capturing the commoditized urbanspace and the contradictions betweenethnic entrepreneurs and street rebels inthe way in which the inner city is repre-sented. Keith offers a book about the citywhich attempts to shift between Adornoand Benjamin, and ‘attempts to explore theuncertain cartographies of the post-colonialcity in a way that avoids both instantempirical anachronism and the sort ofprivileged speculative theoretical exegesisAdorno advocated’ (p. 168). To do thisKeith offers us the ‘plan’ of the urban spaceas a way of bringing together visions of thecity with public policy practice and theactivities of dwellers. Central to these con-cerns is the way in which multiculturalismor the multiculture fits or not into the plansof urban designers and planners.

Indeed, one of the main themes runningthrough the book is how the politics of raceand the responses of multiculturalism andcultural diversity work though the spaces ofthe city. In that sense the urban context iscentral to understanding how ideas such asracial division, intercultural dialogue, andthe cosmopolitan are formed and enacted. Itis this dimension that is neglected accordingto Keith by those who offer cosmopolitan-ism as ‘both an ethically progressive way ofbeing and an aspirational goal of becoming’(p. 169). Rather the city is a contested zone

in which racialized difference is lived andpracticed in some ways at a distance fromthe force of the nation state. It becomes pos-sible to think outside of the equationbetween people and nation. For Keith thecity is the space of the global, it is possible totalk of London as a ‘global’ city in a waywhich makes no sense when evoking the sig-nifier of the nation. Central to this are thetransnational connections that are routinelylocated through global cities such asToronto, Sydney, Dhaka etc.

The book is organized in a fairly argumen-tative manner with Keith offering a series ofpropositions in the opening chapter whichare matched by principles and an approachto the city space in the final chapter. Howsuccessfully this kind of approach works canbe demonstrated by considering one of theopening starting points: ‘Race thinking andthe city’ in which Keith challenges some ofthe ways in which migrants in the city havebeen written about and their historiesrepresented. In the conclusion, he offers theprinciple of: ‘mimetic urbanism’ (p. 181), inwhich the performances of migrant groupsin the space of the city is seen as a subvervi-sive and disruptive force, not reducible tothe ethnic monitoring targets of the urbanplanners. In some ways the book itselfattempts to weave a complex path betweenthe concerns and necessities of planning theurban multiculture (in Keith’s terms) butconstantly recognizing the ethnographicimpossibility of the task.

Virinder S. KalraManchester University

Mann, Michael The Dark Side ofDemocracy: Explaining Ethnic CleansingCambridge: Cambridge University Press2005 580 pp. £45.00 (hardback) £17.99(paperback)Mann, Michael Fascists Cambridge:Cambridge University Press 2004 429 pp.£40.00 (hardback) £15.99 (paperback)

Michael Mann has deservedly earned therespect and esteem of his colleagues in many

724 Book reviews


disciplines. His two exceptionally ambitiousrecent undertakings on fascism and ethniccleansing will only reinforce his standing,though a few reviewers have been morebewildered than bewitched. Mann bemoansthat ‘social theory in our materialist age hasoften seemed obsessed’ by ‘economic powerrelations’ and ‘pacific economistic theories’prominent since World War II (Fascists, pp.49, 64). This is not merely a casual aside, it isa reflection of Mann’s view that rational-choice theory, Marxism and economic inter-pretations in general are inadequate toexplain these twentieth-century events. It isthis not-so-subtle subtext that pervades bothof these volumes.

Fascists discusses why northwest Europewas relatively immune to the virus thatswept through so much of Europe, who sup-ported fascism and, most brilliantly, how astrategy of paramilitary violence helpedfascism to conquer by silencing and by exter-minating their enemies. Perhaps the overrid-ing theme of Fascists is that although theBolshevik threat was over by 1920, elites insouth, central and eastern Europe ‘reachedfor their guns too soon’ (p. 61), an ‘hystericaloverreaction’ (p. 63) allowing fear and loath-ing to override their rational ‘instrumentalcapitalist interests’ (p. 357).

Mann’s assurance that Bolshevism wasaverted early on has a certain appeal.However, revolutions were as difficult topredict then as now, even Lenin could not doit. With revolutions in Russia, Hungary,Bavaria, Spain – widely viewed as accom-plished by small conspiratorial cliques – andmassive strikes in Italy, why would propertyowners not insure their property?‘The possessing classes and panicking oldregimes’ (p. 61) were arguably rational justnot clairvoyant.

As far as Hitler’s demonic war plans areconcerned, John Keegan has maintained,that Hitler could have easily won the war: ifit was winnable, was it so economically irra-tional? Indeed, Hitler considered theUkraine as the ‘Reich’s India’ and hisdreams for Lebensraum, mass starvationand serial genocide in the east could have

yielded untold riches and minerals, invest-ment opportunities, cheap labour, and asKeegan suggests (in Robert Crowley’s WhatIf, 1999), even Middle-East oil was ripe forthe plucking. Mann also does not considerwhether conquest paid. Peter Liberman did(Does Conquest Pay, 1996, p. 66), concludingthat in Germany’s occupied European coun-tries, ‘conquest permitted profits far beyondgains from trade.’ Fascists may have been asirrational as Mann suggests, but his thesiswould involve a wider investigation.

Mann mounts a strong case againstMarxist theories of fascism pointing out fas-cism’s cross class appeal, but weakens hiscase when he concludes by stating howfascism would not have surged without theprior surge of Bolshevism and furthermore,how fascist parties were aided into power byan ‘elite conspiracy’ and ‘backstairs plots’ of‘upper-class and elite groups’ in Italy,Germany Austria, and Romania (Fascists,pp. 194, 229, 292). Try as he might tore-define issues in a less class-centeredformat, a faintly Marxist vision lingers on.

In Dark Side of Democracy, Mann main-tains that perversions of democracy canincubate lethal (organic) nationalisms thatlead to the expulsion or the extermination ofminority ethnic groups. Paramilitaries ariseboth independently and aided by politicalleaders.The descent into barbarism does nothappen at once – mass annihilation is onlyrarely the act of evil men plotting the demiseof an entire ethnic group: ‘not even Hitlerdid so’ (p. 7); neither Milosevic nor Tudjmanever intended things to go so far (p. 424); the‘Armenian genocide was not as coherent,organized and premeditated as is usuallyargued’ (p. 139). Unintentionally, plans goawry, and when milder schemes (i.e., expul-sions) are frustrated, extreme final solutionsmay follow.

Mann is quite convinced that economicconcerns have a decidedly secondaryimportance in twentieth-century genocides,which are primarily about politics and ide-ology. Mann also, emphatically insists that‘one ethnic group must be seen as exploit-ing the other’ (p. 6). Minorities may

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establish ties with other countries and theprospect of foreign intervention to stopinternal abuse can in fact be counter-productive and may incite a pre-emptivestrike. Not finished yet, Mann examineswhich individuals are apt to become thekillers who perpetrate the final deeds andwhy border areas produce a higher propor-tion of perpetrators. Readers will beunequivocally impressed by Mann’s vastreading and immersion in these problemsand others too numerous to list. Neverthe-less, there are many queries that surface inresponse to Mann’s contentions.

Firstly, is his contrast between economicand utilitarian colonial genocides andtwentieth-century ideological ones ade-quate? Mann writes: ‘Unlike the other casesdiscussed in this book, underlying the ethnicconflict was a direct economic conflict overwho should possess and use the land’ (p. 71).However, the Fascist slogan was ‘Blut undBoden’ (Blood and Land) and Lebensraum,as noted earlier, was every bit as avariciousas the colonialist intentions of Westernempires. Furthermore, pre-twentieth-century genocides were every bit as ideo-logical as twentieth-century ones, from theBiblical justification for the destruction ofthe Canaanites to social Darwinism in thenineteenth-century.

Is Mann justified in further claiming that‘economic interests are rarely the maincause of ethnic conflict’ (p. 31), and that ‘infact economic seizures are usually secondaryin cleansing and rarely important in itsorigins, appealing disproportionately to low-level perpetrators once the cleansing isunderway’ (p. 32). Doesn’t this ignore howall classes might grow wealthier from Leb-ensraum’s opportunities? Doesn’t it alsooverlook the situation in Rwanda, wherealmost all inhabitants were subsistencefarmers and farms had shrunken from threeacres to one in recent decades? Why assumethe conflict was not over land? Land-conscious Turkey, the ‘sick man of Europe,’had lost fifty per cent of its empire andfeared further losses (i.e., Armenianindependence).

Thirdly, it is strange to see Mann wrigglingto distance himself from Edna Bonacich’sclassic ‘middleman minority’ theory andfrom Amy Chua’s popular account of domi-nant economic minorities, since their posi-tion is so similar to his own. ‘Unlike Chua, Ido not believe [middleman] conflicts under-lie the most serious cases of ethnic cleans-ing’ (p. 517). However, what Mann calls the‘most serious cases’ must surely include theArmenian and Jewish genocides, both con-sidered ‘middleman minorities’ by WalterZenner. William Rubinstein has also consid-ered the Holocaust from this perspective(Jewish Journal of Sociology 2000). Mannsimilarly rejects Chua’s interpretation of theRwandan conflict in this light as ‘rather far-fetched’ (p. 31). Maybe not: the Tutsi case,while certainly not representing a typicalmiddleman entrepreneurial situation, doesbear one critical and striking structuralresemblance to the Jewish case in medievaland modern Europe. Some Jews were taxcollectors and administrators, in effect,‘instruments of power’ for the Europeannobility. (Lewis Coser, Greedy Institutions1974) The Tutsi became, like the Jews, privi-leged functionaries of the Belgian colonialregime, inciting resentment and rage amongthe Hutu.

Notwithstanding, the foregoing interroga-tions, Mann’s provocations will inevitablyinspire further investigation and continue toreinvigorate historical sociology.

Rosaire LangloisToronto

Miller, A. G.(ed.) The Social Psychology ofGood and Evil The Guilford Press 2004498 pp. £46.00 (hardback) £23.00(paperback)

The Social Psychology of Good and Evilincludes chapters from renowned research-ers and will be widely read by followers ofexperimental social psychology. The authorsreview research that is based largely onquestionnaires and/or behavioural manipu-lations and address cognitive biases,

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self-processes, helping, empathy, and routesto aggression. There are also chapters onsexual violence and lying and readers will beparticularly interested in Miller’s analysis ofwhether Milgram’s work can be generalizedto real atrocities.

Zimbardo sets the tone of the book withhis chapter on situationist perspectives, high-lighting the fallacy of relying on purelydispositional explanations of evil andemphasizing the importance of theexperiment. However, do people reallybecome evil by ‘turning on or off oneor another social situational variable’?Zimbardo states his position in this fashion(p. 22) and later develops a homily thatequates people with fruit in a barrel (p. 47)(‘a barrel filled with vinegar will always turnsweet cucumbers into sour pickles’).Perhaps, but humans are not fruit. Zimbardocites Bandura, Underwood, and Fromson’s(1975) research to show that circumstancesinduce people to obey and become moreaggressive. He neglects to mention the 8people who resisted Bandura et. al’s situ-ational forces by refusing to participate inthe first electric shock experiment (leadingto an eventual withdraw of 24 participants).These defiant participants’ actions areimportant manifestations of personal agencyin the face of strong social pressures. Yet,their conduct fell outside Zimbardo’sextreme situationist perspective of peoplebeing responsive fruit in a barrel and theyare written out of the history of socialpsychology.

Previous experimental work has high-lighted the influence of situations in bothgood and reprehensible behaviour, butexperiments are limited in as much as theyare used to investigate what the researchercan control and predict. In contrast to manyof the famous studies mentioned in Miller’sbook, people in real social contextsoften create and seek roles and are notmerely assigned roles by authoritativeexperimenters. It would be valuable to gainan insider’s perspective of the decisions andexperiences of individuals in real life. Thesepeople often ruminate for prolonged

periods before acting (rather than respond-ing rapidly to laboratory manipulations orquestionnaire items) and they can experi-ence meaningful personal and social transi-tions as a result of their chosen behaviour.These experiences are not addressed suffi-ciently, but Staub does provide a valuablesummary of the basis of his interventions inRwanda and draws together his own previ-ous work on situations of conflict.

Miller’s introductory comments indicatethat readers will learn of perpetrators’ per-spectives and victims’ perspectives. Asidefrom Aronson’s inclusion of personalaccounts of victimization from high schoolstudents, Baumeister and Vohs briefly attendto college students’ written descriptions ofbeing made angry and making others angry(the authors acknowledge that such acts arenot evil but assume the underlying processesextend to evil interchanges). Overall, thereis a distinct lack of narrative from perpetra-tors and victims in the book and it is theresearchers’ theoretical and methodologicalperspectives that dominate the text.

Fully half of the authors draw reference tothe attacks on September 11th 2001, andsome critique the response of the Americangovernment. It is surprising then that widerresearch is not cited that addresses how vio-lence can become seen as a legitimateresponse by previously peaceful victimizedindividuals, or how real people may becomeinvolved in terrorist groups.

This book will provide a useful resourcefor anyone interested in a synthesis ofexperimental research on the topicscovered. As with any research, readers willbe advised to consider the limitations andbiases of the work they read.

Mark BurgessOxford Brookes University

Pink, Sarah Home Truths: Gender,Domestic Objects and Everyday Life Berg2004 158 pp. £14.99 (paperback)

This study explores how individualsapproached ‘homemaking’ creatively and

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‘how . . . people’s experiences and under-standings of . . . the aural, tactile, olfactoryand visual elements of their homes figure inthe way they performatively negotiate theirgendered identities in this space’ (p. 10). Itanalyses 50 interviews with women and menin England and Spain from two projects forUnilever Research.

The focus is explicitly on individuals,although reference is made to cultural dif-ferences between England and Spain; to thedifferent types of housing represented in thestudy and to statistical analyses of shiftinggender patterns in the performance ofhousehold tasks in both countries. The focusis on change – rather than continuities. Forexample in Spain statistics are quotedshowing that, between 1993 and 1996, theamount of housework done by womendecreased by 22 minutes to 4 hours 24minutes per day, while that done by menincreased by 9 minutes to 37 minutes per day(p. 14). However, it is slightly puzzling, thatthe total amount of housework apparentlydecreased by 8 minutes to 2 hours and 30minutes (p. 14).

The survey material quoted also showsdifferences according to household type andsocial class and not just individual attitudes,(with Spanish women in ‘lower class nuclearhouseholds’ carrying the main burden ofhousehold responsibilities, for example (p.14) but the interview sample itself is notanalysed in this way. There is much interest-ing detail from the interviews but scant ref-erence to class or other social or economicgroupings, although the descriptions sug-gests that the sample is mainly middle class,and that these ‘intentionally’ are predomi-nantly people without young or dependentchildren (p. 21).

Home Truths rejects the approach takenby Anne Oakley (The Sociology of House-work, 1974 [1985]) and myself (The Politicsof Housework, 1980 and 1995) stating thatwe saw ‘the housewife’ as ‘bored’ and ‘iso-lated’ and ‘situated in a political structurethat naturalizes her feminity’. It cites in pref-erence (p. 87) the formulation of ElizabethSilva (The Politics of Consumption@Home

2000: 24) that ‘women might become “activeagents in the family and its consumptionpractices” and thus “operate as consciousagents of change in the sphere of intimacy”‘.However what is common to both thesetypes of analysis, though not present in thatof Sarah Pink, is the belief that, as Silva says,the ‘invisible’ labour of caring is a ‘deeplydevalued social activity’. Certainly my ownapproach would have sought to revalue thelabours of caring partly by offering – ordemanding – that they be shared by bothmen and women, which would necessarilyinvolve men sharing and participating inhousework and ‘home making’ in its fullestsense.

Feminists of the 1970s and 1980s mayhave overstressed the drudgery associatedwith housework, but I don’t think that weoverstressed the isolation that it often didand does entail, especially for women withyoung children in nuclear families – andmore especially for those without the mate-rial resources to obtain help in the house orthe social back-up in the form of child care(though that has now become more avail-able than it was then).

The question is not whether women andmen can enjoy many aspects of housework/home making, but whether society can orga-nize the care of children and the home sothat it offers genuine egalitarian choices, tomen and women of all classes and back-grounds on how they arrange the ‘materialand social contexts of domestic life’ and lifeoutside the home.

That may appear utopian – and, althoughthere have been some welcome changes, it isone not much nearer to realization for manywomen or men than it was in the 1970s.

Ellen MalosUniversity of Bristol

Preda, Alex AIDS, Rhetoric, and MedicalKnowledge Cambridge University Press2005 276 pp. £45.00 (hardback)

I opened this text with much anticipation,assuming that at last I would be in

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possession of a contemporary critique ofHIV in the spirit of earlier contributors suchas Paula Treichler and Donna Haraway butwith a more update and appropriatelyadjusted analytic. Possibly the emphasis onAIDS rather than HIV or HIV/AIDS in thetitle should have been a warning that thefocus is on the period leading up to, but notextending to, the watershed that has takenplace whereby the advent of HIV combina-tion antiretroviral drug therapies is con-sidered by many to have potentially trans-formed HIV from a terminal infection to achronic disease. Indeed, the book opens witha description of advertisements promotingthe use of condoms in Germany and,remarkably, fails to provide a date. From theoutset, it seems Preda is unaware that his-torical context matters in a discussion ofHIV science. But I shall come back to thispoint. Putting aside the need for contempo-rary critique of HIV biomedical interven-tions and how we might evaluate their riskof iatrogenic disease and the challenges theyare now argued to pose to safe sex cultures,Preda’s book does offer an elaborateaccount of how ‘medical AIDS discourse’has been forged through rhetoricalprocesses. In setting out an array of varyingphenomena – for example, Kaposis sarcoma,Pediatric AIDS, alloantigenic sperm, prosti-tutes, homosexuals, female sexual partnersconstructed as sites or sources of risk – hehas provided an expert guide on how toundertake rigorous discourse analysis thatcould be adapted to expose forms of sensemaking that prevail in many areas besidesHIV/AIDS. Beginning with a discussion ofthe centrality of ‘risk’ in understandings andpractices – national and international – toHIV/AIDS, he reveals HIV/AIDS as not arisk in itself but, rather, a biomedical epi-demic shaped in our imaginaries andthrough associated practices based on con-ceptual determinants of ‘risk.’ Classificatoryprocesses produce rules for seeing things.Hence, classificatory systems along withunderstandings about space, place – espe-cially as these are the charge of the disci-pline of epidemiology – inform and, indeed,

in many ways are the basis of our dealingswith HIV. Contrary to conventional science(or at least the natural/biological sciences)and some sections of social science, Predareveals risk as conceptually devised andmobilized for the ordering and legitimatingof medical knowledge.As he explains, as riskbecomes our way of seeing it also becomesour future.We make the world what it is to asignificant extent by acting according to howwe understand its substance. This point,however, returns me to my concern aboutthe lack of attention to change within theepidemic and the ‘big’ question to be lev-elled at rhetorical analysis: how can orshould we understand what is now alsoapparent for those within HIV that, throughrhetoric, science does achieve? The reasonwhy Preda is able to overlook the majorchanges that have occurred over more thantwenty years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic isbecause he uses a style of social construc-tionism that understands language as ametaphysical contributor whose work takesplace apart from the matter it speaks of(rather than to some extent coterminous).Rhetorical conventions are dealt with hereas if they precede rather than, as he himselfclaims, are invariably entangled with thematter they organize.Although we are madeexplicitly aware of how HIV as an object ofstudy and intervention has been shaped bycertain unquestioned conventions of think-ing and doing in the laboratory and in thefield, some readers may be left with thequestion of ‘so what?’ Why is rhetoricalanalysis important now that science has soradically decoupled HIV from its otherwisenear inevitability of AIDS?’ As a text forthose who want or need a close handaccount of how we mistakenly confuse theempirical as apart from our interventions,this book is to be recommended. Indeed, Iwill be very pleased to offer it to under-graduate and postgraduate students of soci-ology of medicine. But for those who wantsomething more and, more specifically,which deals with how science works toproduce not just categories of phenomenabut is entangled in dynamic palpable bodies,

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viruses, drugs, tests and more, it may bedisappointing.

Marsha RosengartenGoldsmiths College, University of London

Schepard, Andrew I. Children, Courts andCustody: Interdisciplinary Models forDivorcing Families Cambridge UniversityPress 2004 224 pp. £45 (hardback) £16.99(paperback)

Parental disputes following divorce, and thepolitical and policy debates about the role oflaw in resolving them, are a rich and criticalsite for exploring a wide range of issues:gender (in)equality; changing family struc-tures; the concepts of childhood and chil-dren’s rights; domestic violence; alternativedispute resolution; the interaction and ten-sions between the legal and psy-discourses;and the legitimate role of the state in regulat-ing ‘private’ family life. Schepard’s analysistouches on all these issues but his perspectiveis not that of a critical sociologist or socialtheorist, but, rather, that of an empiricallyinformed practical family lawyer passion-ately concerned with the well-being of chil-dren and their parents. Consequently theimplicit underlying questions he asks are:‘what is wrong with the current system’ and‘what works best for children and their fami-lies’? In answering these questions Schepardprovides an overview of past developmentsand sets out an explicit agenda for reform.While focused exclusively on the USA, hisaccount resonates closely with the currentlaw reform debates in England and Wales.Moreover, the federal nature of US familylaw, and the highly distinctive approachadopted by different states, inevitably lendsitself to a comparative approach.

Schepard’s analysis of the failure of thecurrent systems makes what for many is nowa familiar critique of the adversarial legalprocess: it increases conflict, and at timesactually creates it, and costs too much andtakes too long.A key premise underlying hisapproach is the belief that parental conflictharms children; consequently alleviating

conflict must be the primary aim of law, andparents unable to resolve disputes withoutexternal help must be assisted. The solutionhe proposes, equally familiar to scholars inthis area, is that traditional legal processesneed to be redirected towards or replacedby Family Courts where the emphasis is onmediation and parental education. Arguingthat legal institutions and lawyers need todevelop interdisciplinary coalitions he sug-gests that ‘the message that lawyers shouldsend to parents should be similar to that thatmental health professionals send to parents:Reduce your conflict, and cooperate witheach other if it is safe to do so’ (p. 176).

Schepard’s analysis, however, is notlimited to procedure. Rather he links devel-opments in legal doctrine with proceduralreforms. In charting what he considers to bea progressive development, he argues that‘the paradigm of the child custody court hasshifted from ‘sole custody’ and ‘adversarialcourtroom combat’ to mediation, education,and self determination that aim to involveboth parents in the post-divorce life of theirchild’ (p. 175). Schepard argues for a pre-sumption of joint decision making andargues that sole legal custody should only beordered ‘as a last resort’ (p. 167) where alter-native dispute resolution programmes havefailed. Moreover he argues that sole custodyshould be awarded ‘to the parent who seemsto be more cooperative with the other parentin making decisions for the child’ (p. 167).

While this approach is problematic, forreasons explored below, it is important toemphasize that Schepard’s analysis is farfrom crude. Drawing on an extensive rangeof empirical studies detailing the complexrealities of family life he rejects the populardemand made by some parts of the Fathers’Rights movement for a presumption of equalphysical custody (the 50/50 option). Simi-larly, he rejects the idea that Parental Alien-ation Syndrome is a diagnosable mentalhealth disorder, and he deals at length andsensitively with the reality of domestic vio-lence. Moreover, he also rejects conservativeproposals that would make divorce harderwhere children are involved (demands for

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which are far stronger in the USA than in anincreasingly ‘secular’ Western Europe).

Shepard rejects these ‘ideological’ posi-tions by recourse to an empirically informed‘child centred’ focus, by accepting theunavoidable reality of divorce in modern lifeand by repeatedly focusing on ‘what works’.Yet, while he quotes, supportively, KatherineBartlett’s observation that ‘many questionsto which answers might be sort are not, fun-damentally, empirical questions but rathernormative ones’ (p. 30), the weakness ofSchepard’s approach is a failure to be explicitabout the highly normative nature of his ownproject. This problematic silence is mostapparent in his coupling of support for com-pulsory mediation and education with anespousal of parental ‘self determination’. Forwhile the ‘therapeutic justice’ (p. 4) thatShepard prefers to the traditional adversariallegal justice and traditional conservativemorality may unquestionably help somefamilies resolve conflicts,‘to work’ it imposesand demands the internalization of a particu-lar understanding of responsibility.The resultis a new moral code whereby the parent whois perceived by others to refuse to ‘divorceresponsibly’ is placed in a highly vulnerableposition.

Children, Courts and Custody is a timelybook that provides an enormously rich anddetailed recent history of US divorce law andpractices and provides examples of aplethora of fascinating new innovativemethods and programmes designed to helpresolve parental conflicts. It will be of muchuse and interest to policy makers and practi-tioners (lawyers and non-lawyers alike). Atthe same time it represents both a prescrip-tion for and defence of what Helen Reecedescribes as post liberal form of divorce,where ‘Psychological norms have replacedsocial norms,and therapeutic correctness hasbecome the new standard of good behav-iour’. (Reece, Divorcing Responsibly, Hart,2003, p. 217).

Daniel MonkSchool of Law

Birkbeck CollegeUniversity of London

Springer, Kimberley Living for theRevolution. Black Feminist Organizations,1968–1980 Duke University Press 2005 228pp. £57.00 (hardback) £14.95 (paperback)

Living for the Revolution represents animportant sociological and historical analy-sis of African-American feminist’s orga-nized political activism. Drawing on oralhistory interviews with black feminist activ-ists and the records of black feminist orga-nizations of the 1960s and 1970s, Springercharts the emergence of black feminist orga-nizations against the turbulent backdrops ofthe civil rights movements, black nationalistmovements and the mainstream [white]feminist movement. Springer potentlyargues that black feminist organizationswere significant in shaping the agendas ofthese diverse and intersecting social move-ments, while simultaneously enabling blackwomen activists to craft a cohesive blackfeminist consciousness and identity.

It is ironic, perhaps that despite theappointment of an African Americanwoman – Condoleeza Rice – to the secondmost powerful office on the global politicalstage, black women remain invisible aspolitical actors. This marginalization derivesfrom particular gendered notions of whatproperly constitutes political activity,namely electoral politics, traditionally theprerogative of masculinity. Conceptualizedthus, black women’s informal political activ-ism and agency goes unrecognized. Hence,narratives of the civil rights and blacknationalist movements have for the mostpart, consigned black women to the border-lands of those political struggles. Yet, asSpringer cogently argues, the erasure ofblack feminist activists from the historiogra-phies of post-WW2 American social move-ments on the grounds of their politicaldisinterest can hardly be sustained. AfricanAmerican women can lay claim to a centu-ries old record of engaged involvement inpolitical struggles against race and genderoppression, hewed initially in pre-colonialAfrica and sustained throughout involve-ment in enslaved resistance movements,

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emancipation, reconstruction, the civil rightsera, and into the present day.

Springer deploys the concept of interstitialpolitics, or ‘politics in the cracks’ to denotethe uneasy location of black feminists caughtbetween the sexism of a patriarchal blacknationalist movement, and the racism of apredominantly white middle-class women’smovement. African American women couldfind no easy purchase within either of thesemovements; their experiences of racismdemanded their alliances with black men,butstructural sexism seemed to require theirallegiance to global sisterhood. Springerneatly conveys the sense of ‘unbelonging’experienced by the many African Americanwomen inspired by the struggle against socialinjustice, but who could not be easily accom-modated within either the civil rights, blacknationalist or mainstream white feministmovements. Black feminists responded totheir marginalization by establishing theirown collectivities to organize against race,class and gender oppression. Organizationssuch as the Third World Women’s Alliance(1968), Black Women Organized for Action(1973), the National Black Feminist Organi-zation (1973), the National Alliance of BlackFeminists (1976), and the Combahee RiverCollective (1974) represented the first formalavowedly black feminist organizations in theUSA, bringing together and providing criti-cal space for black feminists to voice theirown concerns and establish their ownagendas. These organizations then, werepivotal in helping to forge the shape of con-temporary black feminist consciousness. Inthe tradition of foremothers such asSojourner Truth and Harriett Tubman, theseblack feminists insisted on the recognition ofthe intersectionality of black women’s livesas a precondition for eradicating social andracial injustices. Black women were notoppressed merely by the patriarchal sexismof white and black men, but by their race,social class, and sexuality.

As they organized together, black feministactivists began to chart a cohesive AfricanAmerican female identity, one that sharplydisrupted long-established racially imbued

social and cultural stereotypes of blackwomen as jezebels, sapphires and mammies,disabusing assumptions that the only legiti-mate spaces for black women were the bed-rooms and kitchens of black and white men,and highlighted instead the essential publicand private roles of black women in main-taining the integrity of both black and whitefamily lives, and their significant socio-economic roles and contributions.

In their lifetimes, these organizationswere a vital forum faciliatating the articula-tion of a black feminist consciousness.Ultimately, commitment alone proved insuf-ficient to sustaining longevity; lack offinance, resources and the burn out of ‘war-weary’ women ‘warriors’ took their toll, andby 1980, all were defunct. Springer argueshowever, that this did not signal the death ofblack feminist organizing, but rather estab-lished the groundwork for a later generationof black feminists. Springer ends by consid-ering the future of black feminist organizing,particularly at the national level, and arguesthe need for the emergence of ‘stars’ toprovide strong political leadership. PerhapsSpringer might also have urged strongerglobal alliances between black women (anironic omission given her location inBritain) but the result of her work is a well-researched study, grounded in strong empiri-cal evidence, that allows us to hear thevoices of African-American feminists whocontributed in myriad important ways to thecivil rights, black nationalist, and women’srights movement.

Cecily JonesUniversity of Warwick

Stinchcombe, A.L. The Logic of SocialResearch The University of Chicago Press2005 354 pp. £31.50 (hardback) £15.00(paperback)

This book is targeted at students and derivesfrom the author’s lectures for graduatestudents. However it is much more than that,presenting an innovative and reflexive viewof sociological research that ignores the

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artificial divide between qualitative andquantitative methods, often moving in asingle paragraph from an example based onethnography to one based on historicalsociology. It is written in a fluent ‘oral’ stylewhich appears easy to read. This is decep-tive, because the text is concise and movesrapidly through the logic of social research.

The book focuses on causal research andassumes that the same logic underlies all thesciences. Stinchcombe’s response to Hume,whom he cites, is that the role of the socialscientist is to identify credible causal mecha-nisms in social phenomena. He argues thatthe logic of causal inquiry is very differentfrom that of descriptive research, and pro-duces a number of strategies for increasingthe effectiveness of causal research. Stinch-combe distinguishes four different types ofmethod: quantitative, historical, ethnogra-phy and experimental. His own backgroundis both quantitative and historical, and heincludes many examples from his researchon Caribbean slavery. However, he treatsthe four methods as complementary, andtries to show how the same intellectual strat-egies can be applied to each of them.

The basic idea behind the book is that ‘thefundamental things we theorize about aredifferences, and when we can manage it, dis-tances’ (p. 11). Distances are differencesbetween differences; causes create differ-ences and in causal research we are trying toexplain differences in one set of observa-tions (the effect) in terms of another set ofobservations (the cause). The book is full ofinsights into causal research and practicalsuggestions for improving the effectivenessof research.

I found the discussion on sampling par-ticularly stimulating. Stinchcombe claimsthat an effective strategy is to oversamplethe extremes because it is here that causalmechanisms are likely to be most apparent.Whereas, he claims, conventional theorysuggests we need the same amount of infor-mation on each member of a population, heargues that extreme cases have moreinformation. He applies this not only to eth-nography and historical sociology, where the

next case should be chosen so as to maxi-mize the distance from the existing sample,but also to quantitative research, wherewhat he calls ‘orthogonal design’ suggestsoversampling those cases that have thegreatest ‘residuals’. Stinchcombe is at hisbest when explaining the exceptions to thisrule (where there is curvilinearity, interac-tion effects or populations with heteroge-neous variances), because he has an intuitivegrasp of causal relationships and theirimpact on research observations.

This sounds rather quantitative, butexamples include Goffman, Becker and eth-nomethodology, and reflect the author’scommitment to a unified logic of socialresearch. The book also contains what hecalls ‘short versions’: paraphrased and con-densed excerpts from his own and otherresearch. Presumably these were a usefulresource for his students. I found them oddlyunsatisfying and somehow less accessiblethan the rest of the book. The book is aimedat students, but it is not suitable as a resourcefor quick reference on a specific topic.This ispartly because the structure is idiosyncraticand also because the book needs to be readas a whole. Furthermore, much of the textonly makes sense in the light of researchexperience. However, reading the bookwould be worthwhile for any active socialresearcher, particularly at PhD level orhigher.

Ruth RettieKingston University

Wooffitt, R. Conversation Analysis andDiscourse Analysis: A Comparative andCritical Introduction Sage 2005 248 pp.£65.00 (hardback) £19.99 (paperback)

Robin Wooffitt’s latest book has a strongpedagogic focus. Taking an omniscient per-spective he guides the reader on a particu-lar journey through different approaches tothe analysis of discourse. The purpose ofthe journey is to extol the value of conver-sation analysis (CA) as a methodologicalapproach to the study of talk, by defending

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it against the criticisms past and presentthat have been mostly issued from certaincritical approaches to discourse analysis(DA). Having taken the same journey overthe last ten years I can vouch for howuseful this book will be to postgraduatestudents, lecturers and those teachingcourses in discourse analysis. While it willnot teach them how to do CA it will givethem an invaluable orienting overview ofwell known and lesser known key studies,past and present issues, and contemporarydebates.

The book is well written although as anoverview inevitably lacks an in-depth treat-ment of some areas. This is compensated forby a useful signposting of further reading. Abook like this cannot hope to cover every-thing, and there is little mention of the workdone on membership category analysis andthe increasing popularity of multimodal andmulti-activity studies of workplace interac-tion in CA. These topics would have pro-vided further points of similarity andcontrast with DA.

To set up his argument, Wooffitt contraststwo key studies, one from CA and one fromDA. His choice is the essential CA text,Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson’s 1974 A Sim-plest Systematics for the Organization ofTurn-taking for Conversation and Gilbertand Mulkay’s 1984 Opening Pandora’s Box:A Sociological Analysis of Scientist’sDiscourse. I am not entirely convinced thatthese studies are an equal match. Gilbertand Mulkay’s book was indeed an importantinfluence in the sociology of scientificknowledge and on what we have come toknow as discursive psychology. However,Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson not only laysclaim to being the most cited article everin Language, it is the key paradigmaticresource not only for students of CA but forevery CA study which builds upon its find-ings in a cumulative way. The disparity maybe a feature of the slow cumulative progressof CA compared to the changes in tack andfocus in DA. This aside, a number of thesimilarities drawn by Wooffitt between CA

and DA were particularly refreshing asthese are usually lost in the focus on theirdifferences.

Wooffitt describes how social psycholo-gists, namely Billig, Potter, Wetherell andEdwards have taken these ideas and runwith them, picking out the strong influenceof CA. A brief tour of the more criticalapproaches to DA is also included to allowthe reader to fully appreciate their critiquesof CA. Throughout his exploration Wooffittgives the reader the benefit of his extensiveknowledge through balanced arguments,often illustrated with analyses of extractsfrom his own data as ‘CA inspired DP’ (Dis-cursive Psychology).

Two chapters are particularly strong. InChapter 8 Wooffitt deals head on with thekey points raised one of the most recentpublic disputes between CA and DA, heldon the pages of Discourse and Society. Hissummary and illumination of the so-calledcontext debate will be welcomed by anyonetrying to make sense of the sometimes tech-nical and sometimes heated issues. Chaptereight is particularly original and exciting inthat Wooffitt presents reanalyses of pub-lished data presented by the critics, as evi-dence for the benefits of a CA approach. It isa shame that Wooffitt didn’t pursue acomplementary reanalysis of some of theGilbert and Mulkay data here.

In chapter nine Wooffitt presents a clearand persuasive overview of three CA studieswhich have explicitly engaged with the topicof power.These chapters go further than anyextant text in getting down and dirty withthe criticisms so often leveled at CA andoffering proof that its practices should notbe considered restrictive in their scope.Overall, then, this is one of those books thatresearchers, students and teachers want tohave on their desks because it answers ques-tions, clarifies confusing areas, and providesaccessible overviews of sometimes technicalwork – and all in prose that is unpretentiousand engaging.

Rebecca BarnesPeninsula Medical School

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Living for the Revolution. Black Feminist Organizations, 1968–1980 – Kimberley Springer

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