The Founding Myths of Israel - Nationalism, Socialism, and The Making of The Jewish State by Zeev

The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State by Zeev
Sternhell
The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State.
by Zeev Sternhell
Review by: Nachman BenYehuda
American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 104, No. 6 (May 1999), pp. 1817-1819
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Book Reviews
Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condi-
tion Have Failed. By James C. Scott. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 1998. Pp. xiv445. $35.00.
Michael Mann
University of California, Los Angeles
The power and pleasure of this polemical book come from its case studies,
90% of the text. The rst describes 18th-century Prussian forestry, impos-
ing regimented reforesting plans, riding roughshod over existing complex
ecologies, producing environmental degradation followed by reduced tim-
ber yields. The last case study is of high modernist agricultural methods
imposed during 194575, regardless of terrain, ignoring the practical
knowledge of local farmers. This led to overreliance on fertilizers, sterile
hybrid plant strains, and vulnerable monoculture, ultimately worsening
the farmers lot. The other case studies attack modernist city planners,
from Haussmann to Le Corbusier, and scientic socialists, from the
Leninist vanguard party through Soviet collective farms and the Chi-
nese Great Leap Forward to compulsory village resettlements in Tan-
zania.
James Scott detects four causes of disaster in these schemes: forcing
administrative order on a nature and society that are highly variegated,
relying on state coercive power to effect innovation, a civil society too
weak to resist, and high modernist Enlightenment ideology seeing scien-
tic rationality as the only source of truth. The main villain is the modern
state, falsely believing it exists above society, able to perceive and make
legible the contours of nature and society laid out beneath it and able
to grandly reorganize them with its standardized formulas.
So the book is part of the global reaction against early and mid-20th-
century theories, seeing the state as the bringer of social, economic, and
moral improvement to the world. Yet, it is not written from the political
Right. Scotts sympathies lie with the poor farmers of the global South,
the true purveyors of practical rationality, their experiments strongly dis-
ciplined by their need to survive by respecting their small piece of nature.
Their practical reason is thus a superior form of knowledge to that of
high modernist science.
Scotts scholarship is formidable, his insights many, his rich detail usu-
ally stilling criticism. I did groan at poor old Diderot and his 18th-century
Parisian friends being blamed yet again for the follies of the 20th century.
I groaned again as Jane Jacobss city of spontaneous self-diversication
was lauded yet again over Le Corbusiers city as a machine for living
Permission to reprint a book review printed in this section may be obtained only from
the author.
AJS Volume 104 Number 6 1813
American Journal of Sociology
and as Rosa Luxemburgs working-class spontaneity was again lauded
over Lenins vanguard partyboth being given a feminist slant here,
good gal versus bad guy. Actually, when Lenin thought the workers were
supporting him, he reversed his position. Lenin was more opportunist
than high modernist. And when modernist city planning included gar-
dens and generous living space, as in the British Garden Cities and
New Towns movements (denigrated by Scott), it improved the quality
of life for large numbers of peopleas did welfare states in general. But
these are empirical quibbles.
Yet, I also have more theoretical doubts. Scott exaggerates the indepen-
dence of the state. Like the states he criticizes, his state seems to oat
above society (as in simpler elite theories of the state). Who actually runs
such states so that modernist plans can be implemented? He does mention
that the market, large-scale bureaucratic capitalism, and the prot mo-
tive may also be instruments of high modernist folly. But he presents no
case studies on their role, and to do so might force revision of his title
and his four main arguments. In all the non-Communist case studies,
though capitalism looms in the background, it is absent from the fore-
ground. His Third World peasants and laborers seem exploited by state
elites but not by landlord classes. He blames not large capitalist farmers
but agricultural engineers (i.e., modernist technocrats) for the fetish of
industrial farming taking hold of American agriculture during the period
191030. He discusses urban planning as if it was run by state elites.
But sociologists like Castells and Molotch have shown that planning is
dominated by city growth machines centrally involving developers, cor-
porations, and banks. We learn about legibility tools of the state (like
censuses and maps) but not about those of capitalism (like the organiza-
tion chart or accountancy).
Nor are states as coherent as Scott (or, indeed, class theory of the state)
believes. Scott emphasizes the inuence of German planning during
World War I, especially on Lenin. Yet it coordinated three distinct
groups, of which state bureaucrats were less signicant than generals and
the heads of large capitalist enterprises. Scott names Walter Rathenau as
the prototype of the rational bureaucrat of this planning system. But
Rathenau was a capitalist, not a bureaucrat. His family owned the electri-
cal giant AEG, of which he was chairman. The generals, Ludendorff
above all, were indeed technocrats, formally employed by the state and
in the military realm modernists. Yet otherwise they were reactionaries,
drawn from the Prussian landowning nobility. Their modernist goal (as
with many of the Red Army and PLO elites important in communist
statist disasters) was less to improve humanity than to kill people more
efciently.
Militarism has been a distinctive form of disastrous modernism yet
makes no explicit appearance in this book. Nor does nationalism, which
(far more than modernism) has been focused on the state. And Scotts
expose s often depend heavily on citations from critical government scien-
1814
Book Reviews
tic reportseven opponents of high modernism inhabit states. States
have many rooms and many constituencies.
Of course, when disasters are driven not by singular states but by mar-
kets or complex congeries of dominant elites or classes exerting diffuse
political inuence, they are generally less visible. The inefciency and
inequity of the U.S. corporate market system of health care, when com-
pared to the statist heath care systems of Europe, is not often seen as a
disaster comparable to Scotts case studies. Yet, it systematically results
in the earlier death of poorer and minority Americans, and we may rea-
sonably attribute it more to class and ethnic exploitation than to Ameri-
can government. Consider the more obvious disaster of the extermination
of the native peoples of North America, legitimated by some of the mod-
ernist rationality noted by Scott. The declaration that the land was
empty (terra nullis)and so could be cleared of its peoplesenabled
surveyors to lay out the rational grid system that still dominates the entire
land surface of the United States. But here genocide was mainly the re-
sponsibility of a white settler society rather than a state. Thus, the sources
and forms of anything we might wish to call high modernism, and its
attendant disasters, were more plural than in Scotts narrative. High
modernist disasters have involved states, armed forces, markets, corpora-
tions, classes, nationalist movements, and so on, all interacting in com-
plex, confused, and often unanticipated ways.
Perhaps it is not states in general but particular types of states that
are implicated in modernist folly. One type is visible in Scotts most terri-
ble case studies: states in backward countries where elites believed that
the future could be plannedsince it was visible in more modern coun-
tries abroad. State-centered late development projects preceded the En-
lightenment proper, as in Peter the Greats reforms (his rebuilding of St.
Petersburg is here cited as part of modernist architecture). Late develop-
ment inspired the industrializing plans of Marxists in Russia, China, and
Tanzania and of nationalists elsewhere. Thus, elites in developing coun-
tries like Brazil sought to build Le Corbusier high modernist capital
cities. Perhaps neither statism nor modernism per se but subtypes might
be the main culprits.
This is a book of powerful case studies and weaker theory. The case
studies allow Scott to attribute many appalling disasters to modernism
overdosing on statism. But the attribution really requires a better theory
of modern states than he possesses.
1815
The Therapeutic State: Justifying Government at Centurys End. By
James L. Nolan, Jr. New York: New York University Press, 1998.
Pp. xiv395. $45.00 (cloth); $18.95 (paper).
John R. Hall
University of California, Davis
Reading about therapeutic legitimations of the U.S. state, I felt a very
strong emotional identication with James Nolans claim that in the lat-
ter part of the 20th century, a therapeutic ethos has seeped into the
nexus of government and politics. How else could one explain that a
family in Hawaii recovered $1,000 in compensation for the emotional dis-
tress incurred from the negligent death of their dog, Princess (p. 62)? On
the other hand, evaluating The Therapeutic State rationally, I found cer-
tain methodological, theoretical, and substantive problems in the analy-
sis. In his defense, Nolan can point to a parallel alternationbetween
the emotional and the utilitarianin the state itself. My own reaction is
anticipated by Nolans analysis of the discourse about which he writes.
Nolan keys his inquiry to David Beethams decomposition of Max We-
bers concept of legitimate domination into three analytic components
technical validity, justication of laws via cultural codes, and popular
consent. In effect, Nolan narrows the problem of legitimation to the ques-
tion of justication. He tackles that issue not by asking about some over-
arching justication, but by exploring the specic justications that state
agents and politicians employ. Quibbles to one side, Nolan convinces that
there has been a fundamental shift in how government justies certain
activities and, concomitantly, carries them out. The transformative code
is the therapeutic ethoscentered in the victim pathologies of the emoti-
vist self interpreted for us by the priestly practitioners of the therapeutic
vocations (p. 17). The state becomes the therapist of last (or sometimes
rst) resort. Convicted drug users, for instance, no longer simply receive
punishment; they often become the targets of counseling, rehabilitation,
and emotional support by people who care. Even courtroom trials be-
come therapeutic encounters. And in prison, inmates are encouraged to
voice their feelings about parents who jacked you around and screwed
you up (p. 122).
The core of the book is a set of case studies exploring justications of
state action in civil law, criminal justice, public education, welfare policy,
and the rhetoric of political debates. For each venue, Nolan examines
how the therapeutic ethos develops historically and how it articulates
with utilitarianism and three classically important strands of justica-
tion in the United Statescivic republicanism, natural-law liberalism,
and Protestant Christianity. Thus, for child welfare policy, The Therapeu-
tic State contrasts religious rhetorics of the early 20th century (e.g., about
the sacredness of the home) with contemporary emphases on the childs
identity, self-esteem, and quality of interpersonal relations (p. 213).
In his conclusion, Nolan contemplates the admixtures by which a ther-
1816
Book Reviews
apeutic ethos and a utilitarian ethos become conjoined and how these
admixtures mediate the relationships between a Giddensian high mod-
ern state and an increasingly postmodern culture. Given countertenden-
cies such as the backlash among religious fundamentalists against thera-
peutic intrusions, Nolan is no doubt wise to hedge his conclusions about
how long therapeutic justications of the state will endure. Instead, he
closes by invoking Michel Foucault and expressing concern about a post-
modern padded cage (p. 306).
Nolan writes well and within a distinguished tradition of analysts who
have sought to discern the basic cultural contours of American life, from
Tocqueville to Daniel Bell, Philip Rieff, and Robert Bellah and his col-
leagues. Yet readers will want to reect carefully on how far his analysis
shows the therapeutic ethos to have infused the modern American state,
thus offering the state an alternative source of legitimation (p. 21). Nolan
rightly poses this as a question, not a claim. Yet The Therapeutic State
sometimes portrays the therapeutic ethos as an almost free-oating geist,
to be discerned in various discourses that invoke it, but having an autono-
mous telos of its own. Though Nolan shows the agency of people who
employ therapeutic discourse, he does not much explore the kinds of
power gained (and by whom) when it is invoked (for this question, bring-
ing in Foucault more strongly and much earlier would have been useful).
Moreover, justication is a slippery concept that can slide away from
legitimation: therapeutic discourse within government programs is differ-
ent from the rhetorics of justication for those programs, and these local
rhetorics of government do not always work as proxies for justicatory
legitimation of the nation state as a whole. On this front, the choice of
sites in which to examine legitimating discourse loads the analysis in fa-
vor of demonstrating the rise of therapeutic discourse. The book gives
scant attention to state legitimations in commerce, geopolitics, national
security, environmental pollution credits, and corporate antitrust law
arenas that do not seem especially prone to therapeutic justications. But
these considerations should not overshadow the substantial contribution
of Nolans book. The Therapeutic State documents an important emer-
gent underpinning of legitimation in emotions talk. Anyone interested in
state power today ought to read it.
The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making
of the Jewish State. By Zeev Sternhell. Translated by David Maisel.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998. Pp. xiii419. $29.95.
Nachman Ben-Yehuda
Hebrew University
Sternhells book presents a passionate (he does not shy from expressing
his views or from grading politicians) and sympathetic yet critical history
of the ideological and political disputes that have accompanied the cre-
1817
ation, and shaping, of Israel. The analysis focuses on how the newly
emerging state blended socialism with nationalism, thus creating an
interesting ideological concoction in which nationalism quickly gained
ascendancy over everything else. This meant that both socialism and cap-
italism were manipulated into playing a role in the main drama that was
the national revival of the Jewish state. Sternhell reveals that while those
I call the Totemic Fathers of the state used an external rhetoric of
equality and socialism (but not freedom), the translation of this rhetoric
into reality culminated in at least two contradictory directions.
First, an unequal distribution of resources (and a limited form of capi-
talism) and a replacement of socialist ideas with nationalistic concepts
took place. The name of the book reects these astute observations: the
rhetoric used (the myth) versus the reality that was as far from the
rhetoric as one could possibly imagine (Sternhell even shows how Israels
famous sociologist S. N. Eisenstadt accepted the myth [p. 288]). In this
respect, Sternhells book presents a powerful and successful debunking
of popular misconceptions about Israels ideological and political past.
Still, one must remember that most of those Totemic Fathers were not
philosophers or university professors; they were people of action, deeply
immersed in the act of creating a new state with new national and per-
sonal identities. Nationalism may have been the only route to statehood.
Second, Sternhell provides a penetrating and sobering look at the per-
sonal practices of some of the early Totemic Fathers (e.g., Ben-Gurion),
showing not only that genuine democracy and tolerance never gained
priority on their main agenda but that they were personally corrupt and
cynical in their abuse of public funds. Chapter 6 is utterly fascinating
and amazing. For example: In the best traditions of nationalist socialism,
the lowest sector of society received psychological compensation. Its ex-
alted status was supposed to compensate for difcult living conditions,
low income, exploitation . . . and its lack of social mobility (p. 296). Thus,
while preaching equality, purity, and modesty for and above all, empha-
sizing the supremacy of agricultural work and downplaying the role of
good quality education, Ben-Gurion never saw any inconsistency in the
fact that his apartment . . . with its four large, attractive rooms . . . cost
him two or three times the monthly salary of an agricultural worker. . . .
His children attended the prestigious Gymnasia Herzliya where fees were
[very high] . . . and took piano lessons (p. 295). This, at a time when
very few could afford any of the above and when the ofcial ideology
preached exactly against the lifestyle Ben-Gurion was practicing.
Sternhell denitely mastered the relevant history. His view is impres-
sively informative, and this meticulous book is packed with information,
anecdotes, insights, and quotations, almost to the point of creating an
effect of fatigue and exasperation on the part of the reader. Moreover,
appreciating this book certainly requires prior (and reasonably good)
knowledge of (not to mention interest in) Israels ideological history.
Sternhells contextualization of Israels ideological and political history
within major ideologists and movements in Europe integrates its argu-
1818
Book Reviews
ments within a larger global view. Along the way, we have to master a
decent amount of terms (e.g., nationalist socialism, romantic nationalism,
constructive socialism, democratic socialism, experiential socialism, tribal
nationalism, integral nationalism, etc.). Eventually, I found this concep-
tual forest too distracting.
Sociologically speaking, I missed the translation of the political/ideo-
logical dimension to other dimensions. Since the book is focused on the
ideological and political history of an emerging state, it turned a blind eye
to many other important developments that may have been inuenced by
the disputes in the ideological dimension. For example, the military, po-
lice, higher education, crystallizing personal and collective identities out-
side the ideological/political complexities, authentic music, poetry, litera-
ture, ethnicity, sport, popular culture, gender, and the worst internal
conict facing Israel nowthat between religious and seculars. More-
over, the translation of the nationalistic ideology to such everyday prac-
tices as living accommodations, marriage, divorce, food, transportation,
and dress and to institution building (e.g., political, the law, civil service)
or to social construction (and substitution) of elites is missing altogether.
While Sternhell uses the term myth as a central device, his only refer-
ence to theories of myths in the political context is to ancient Sorel. This
innocently blithe disregard for the rich (and relevant) scholarly literature
about myth (and collective memory) since Sorels work is irritating (e.g.,
Henry Tudors Political Myth [Macmillan, 1972]).
Knowledgeable students of Israel, interested in its political and ideolog-
ical history, will nd Sternhells book both highly useful and indispens-
able. While reading the book requires time and patience, it is a rewarding
experience. At Israels ftieth birthday, ending with a quote from
Sternhells sobering introduction seems highly appropriate: Those who
wish Israel to be a truly liberal state or Israeli society to be open must
recognize the fact that liberalism derives . . . [from separating] . . . religion
from politics. A liberal state can be only a secular state, a state in which
the concept of citizenship lies at the center of collective existence (p. xiii).
Governing with the News: The News Media as a Political Institution.
By Timothy E. Cook. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Pp. xi289. $48.00 (cloth); $17.97 (paper).
John Zaller
University of California, Los Angeles
Journalists view themselves as members of an autonomous profession
that serves the public by reporting information impartially and by pro-
viding an independent check on government. In Governing with the
News, Tim Cook argues that the news media are a political institution
that relies on government subsidies for much of the information it reports
and is an integral part of the process of governance. For these and other
1819
reasons, Cook maintains that news is biased in ways that often make for
bad public policy.
Cooks purpose, however, is not to disparage journalism. It is to estab-
lish the political character of the news media as a basis for new and, as
he believes, more sensible government policies toward them. In Cooks
view, these would-be policies encourage journalists to be more open to
alternative sources of news and the media to be more accessible to ordi-
nary citizens.
The rst of the books three main sections traces interactions between
press and government from prerevolutionary times to the present. The
key argument here is that American journalism has never been as inde-
pendent of government and governing elites as it would like to believe.
In the 20th century, Washington has, as a favor to the big players, consis-
tently used regulation to hold down the level of competition among news
providers. Most important, government has developed a public relations
infrastructure in the form of press ofces and media events that, in ef-
fect, subsidize journalists efforts to ll their daily quotas for the produc-
tion of news.
The second section of the book works its way (somewhat tediously)
through the elements of a standard denition of political institution to
make the point that the news media qualify as one. It also makes the case
that the news values of journaliststimeliness, drama, conict, among
otherslead to biased news. The production values of the news direct
[reporters]and ustoward particular political values and policies: not
so much pushing politics either consistently left or right as toward of-
cialdom and toward standards of good stories that do not make for
equally good political outcomes (p. 91).
The third section of the book, Government by Publicity, shows how
each of the major institutions of national government attempts to achieve
its goals by using the news media to convey its story to the public. The
theoretical point is how deeply journalism is implicated in the normal
process of governance. Even the Supreme Court, according to Cook, has
a media strategy, since how decisions are communicated matters for the
impact of the court (p. 160). This section ventures the hypothesis that
media strategies become increasingly useful means for political actors to
pursue governance . . . as the disjuncture between the power of those
actors and the expectations placed on them grows (p. 119).
If the news media are a political institution sustained in signicant part
through government policy, and if media performance is problematic, it
is, as Cook argues in his concluding chapter, both legitimate and prudent
to consider adopting new policies that promise better performance. One
suggestion is that subsidies to the news media should be continued, but
increasingly expanded and targeted toward more economically vulnera-
ble news outlets and news organizations (p. 187). For example, he argues
that the federal government should auction off access to the new digital
TV frequencies to the big media players and use the proceeds to subsidize
smaller ones, especially ones that promise to empower ordinary citizens.
1820
Book Reviews
Because politicians regard news policy as a hot potato, and because
they want to keep big media around for their own purposes, I would
be surprised if Cooks argument leads policymakers to promote further
fragmentation of the mass audience than is already occurring. But I
would not be surprised to nd scholars of mass communication, many
of whom are as critical of big media as anyone, to take up Cooks general
argument. Citizen access to the media is the tame child of the 1960s
slogan of power to the people, and academics are ocking to it.
I would like to mention one dissent from Cooks argument. Cook is
not the rst to argue that the news values of journalists lead to bias, and
he is one of a vast legion of critics decrying the inuence of the prot
motive on news. Yet he also wants journalists to be more responsive to
what the public wants. I see a contradiction here. What Cook and others
pejoratively call journalistic values or production values are, in many
cases, barely disguised rationalizations for giving the public what it wants
out of the news. Similarly, the pressure to maximize prots is not so dif-
ferent from pressure to make the news interesting to as many people as
possible. Cook closes by writing that it is now time to work toward get-
ting the kind of news, and the kind of politics, that we want and that
we deserve. But it seems quite possible that much of what Cook sees
as wrong with the news is precisely that the public already is getting
what it wants and deserves from the news.
Language Policy and Social Reproduction: Ireland, 18931993. By Pad-
raig O
Riaga in. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. xv297.
$80.00.
Monica Heller
University of Toronto
This is an interesting, challenging contribution to studies of language pol-
icy and language planning in general, as well as to our understanding
of Irish-English bilingualism in Ireland. O
Riaga in sets out explicitly to

challenge some of the prevailing models in studies of bilingualism, spe-
cically those based on the concepts of domain and of network, both of
which currently inform language policy in a number of countries. He
argues, in essence, that both suppose a degree of homogeneity of language
practices that cannot be empirically supported, and that both suffer from
being essentially descriptive, rather than explanatory, concepts. He pro-
poses instead to examine the relationship between Irish-English bilin-
gualism and Irish language policy historically, from a political economic
perspective based on Pierre Bourdieus concepts of capital and market.
This means asking what kinds of political economic conditions give what
kinds of value to Irish and English and for whom.
The book focuses mainly on the period 192693 (with a briefer account
of the period 18931926). It is exclusively based on a consideration of
1821
census and survey data. The author rst examines census results, which
in Ireland, as in many other multilingual countries (notably the United
States and Canada), are usually the basis of language policy. By compar-
ing census and survey data, he shows that the picture of the depth and
breadth of use of Irish looks quite different depending on what questions
you ask. He argues that the census gives a skewed picture, portraying
Irish as being too concentrated and too geographically restricted. The
reality, he claims, is much more heterogeneous and diffuse, both within
the so-called Gaeltacht and without.
The rest of the book is devoted to an analysis of the relationship be-
tween Irish-English bilingualism, language policy, and socioeconomic
change. The author claims that in 1926, the use of Irish was mainly linked
to a regionally concentrated small-farm-based economy. By 1993, the use
of Irish is spread more evenly across Ireland, but there are fewer monolin-
gual Irish speakers; that is, most Irish speakers also speak English. Also,
these bilinguals are mainly found among schoolchildren or families with
school-age children. What happened?
The author sees an explanation in a combination of socieconomic and
political changes. On the economic side, it is necessary to take into ac-
count the shift from a rural to an urban economy and the growth of an
Irish middle class. The political dimension of Irish nationalism is clearly
linked to these processes; the state was able to clear the way for a growing
urban middle class. Its pro-Irish language policies not only legitimized
its actions but created a protected economic space for the middle class.
Irish language policies, according to O
Riaga in, had in this respect a real

effect, through the creation of a linguistic market.
For him, 1973, the year the state repealed its language legislation, is
a watershed. He argues that the state gave up in the face of the growth of
the importance of private sector corporate capitalism and globalization. It
is interesting in this regard that Ireland now seems to be the major Euro-
pean locus of international call centers. Yet at the same time, it is neces-
sary to account for the persistence of Irish, albeit in a new mode. The
author seems to retain a modernist, nationalist perspective, according ma-
jor importance to home and community as the only real sources of lan-
guage reproduction. He discounts the power of school and work, the sites
where Irish is actually used these days, to accomplish the reproduction
of Irish. Of course, the Irish that is reproduced is not the Irish that was
once spoken on small farms in western Ireland, but only the modernist
nationalist perspective requires that nostalgia as a basis of legitimization.
O
Riaga ins own data show that what is important now is some form
of credentialization of knowledge of Irish, for a certain, mainly middle-
class, segment of Irish society. What we need to understand is why this
is so and what implications it has for relations of power within Irish soci-
ety and between Ireland and the rest of the world. In order to accomplish
this, it is necessary to move beyond the use of surveys and to engage
in more anthropologically informed research based on ethnography and
analysis of situated language practices. It is also useful to compare this
1822
Book Reviews
case to that of other linguistic minorities; O
Riaga ins account converges

with some recent research on French in Canada, for example, and proba-
bly would nd echoes in other linguistic minority areas of Europe. The
book thus contributes to the development of hypotheses about the fate
of linguistic minorities in the modern world; their oft-announced disap-
pearance seems not to be imminent, and yet their transformation poses
serious challenges to the nationalist ideologies that, in some sense,
spawned them. This is a rst glimmer of the rethinking that needs to be
done.
Durable Inequality. By Charles Tilly. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1998. Pp. xi299. $29.95.
David B. Grusky
Stanford University
In the postwar period, sociologists of the Parsonian persuasion assumed
that inequalities of race, gender, and class background were all forms of
ascription that would together wither away under the market pressures
of capitalism and the rationalizing logic of modernity. The obvious effect
of such theorizing, and not an altogether unintended one, was to reduce
class analysis to the study of background effects, thereby subsuming it
under a putatively more general theory of ascription. The subsequent rise
of neo-Marxian scholarship restored class analysis to a central position;
indeed, by treating categorical forms of inequality as mere hindrances to
the grand showdown between competing classes, it was effectively as-
sumed that class-based loyalties were in the end fundamental. In recent
decades, the discipline has clearly turned full circle, with the class-cen-
tered stories of the neo-Marxian past giving way to new multidimension-
alist accounts emphasizing the distinct interests and subcultures formed
by the intersection of race, class, and gender categories. Against this
intellectual backdrop, Charles Tilly has sought to provide a unied
framework with which to understand all forms of inequality, thus sharing
with Talcott Parsons and other postwar theorists the conviction that as-
criptive processes must be studied of a piece but breaking with the com-
plementary view that they are mere residues of our gemeinschaftlich past.
The core claim of Tilly is that categorical forms of inequality assist in
solving common organizational problems and are therefore durable and
entrenched rather than functionless vestiges. There are four related pro-
cesses at work here:
1. The extraction of surplus value from subordinate workers within a
rm is rendered more legitimate and defensible insofar as these workers
are drawn from subpopulations that, in the wider social system, are corre-
spondingly subordinate (e.g., females, blacks, immigrants). In effect, such
stafng practices press preexisting relational structures with wider insti-
tutional backing into service for the organization, thereby avoiding the
1823
potentially high cost of developing new structures and legitimating ideol-
ogies from scratch.
2. The same line of argumentation accounts for the well-known ten-
dency of immigrants, women, and other categorically dened groups to
dominate particular occupational niches in rms or the labor market
more broadly. This form of social closure, which Tilly dubs opportunity
hoarding, emerges because (a) information about job openings travels
through networks that are categorically segregated and (b) managers
choose to rely on such informal networks because it is cheaper to harness
preexisting organization than to devise it afresh.
3. There is good reason to doubt that managers have independently
discovered in rm after rm the efciency of deploying categorical in-
equality for the purposes of exploitation and recruitment. To the con-
trary, Tilly argues that such organizational isomorphism proceeds in part
from simple emulation, whereby rms end up defaulting to widely dis-
seminated routines and models (e.g., the female sex-typing of secretarial
work) rather than experimenting with new ones.
4. The durability of the resulting arrangements can be understood, -
nally, as arising from the elaboration of social routines and relations (e.g.,
on-the-job friendships) that most workers, even those who are exploited,
come to value and hence strive to maintain.
Although the preceding processes are perhaps revealed most obviously
in work organizations, the great contribution of Tilly is to demonstrate
that categorical inequality operates under similar principles in all organi-
zational contexts. We are thus treated to masterful interpretations of the
South African system of exploitation, the Catholic Emancipation in Great
Britain, the development of market niches for Italian emigrants, and the
emergence and maintenance of occupational sex segregation in the United
States. The resulting book is a tour de force that works equally as a gen-
eral treatise on the sources of inequality and a substantive study of the
more spectacular forms of existing inequality.
It is nonetheless possible to manufacture the requisite criticism. In this
regard, stylistic problems loom large, most notably the decision by Tilly
to position his work as yet another attack on individualistic approaches
to inequality. While the rhetoric of anti-individualism is a tried and true
formula, it would have been intellectually more valuable had Tilly sought
to defend his approach against other relational approaches that emerged
either before or after the heyday of methodological individualism. As
hinted above, closure theory may be the most obvious competitor here,
emphasizing as it does precisely those Weberian forms of monopoly con-
trol that Tilly relabels as opportunity hoarding. The principal distinction,
it would seem, is that closure theorists conventionally emphasize the sim-
ple facts of exclusive control over property and occupational niches
(equating these with exploitation per se), whereas Tilly suggests that ex-
ploitation is often best realized by coupling such control with categorical
forms of inequality. It is unclear, however, why an entirely new language
is needed to represent this elaboration, all the more so because it appeared
1824
Book Reviews
long ago in simpler form in the neofunctionalist work of Leon Mayhew
(Ascription in Modern Societies, in The Logic of Social Hierarchies,
edited by Edward O. Laumann, Paul M. Siegel, and Robert W. Hodge
[Markham, 1970]). That is, Mayhew argues that the staying power of
ascription is attributable to its cheapness, with rms thus saving much
in organizational costs by opting for existent pre-established structure
. . . rather than creating a new specialized structure for the same pur-
pose (p. 313). If Tilly is thus anticipated by Mayhew, he also parts way
in assuming that the savings generated by ascription are captured by
organizational elites rather than more broadly distributed; and, in this
limited sense, Durable Inequality may be seen as a case of Mayhew
meeting Marxism. The key question is, of course, whether this synthesis
is empirically sustainable, since it is at least plausible that subordinate
workers will themselves prot from their own subordination. Indeed, if
a great many organizations nd it advantageous to hire categorically
subordinate workers, then the accordingly heavy demand should drive
up wages and allow these workers to recapture some of the exploitative
transfer.
The foregoing all goes to show that, in characteristic fashion, Tilly has
opened up fascinating new lines of inquiry. It is always cause for celebra-
tion when Tilly publishes a book, but the present one is especially impor-
tant because it outlines a general theory of inequality that may well re-
shape the eld. This is classic Tilly, and surely we can ask for nothing
more.
Just Institutions Matter: The Moral and Political Logic of the Universal
Welfare State. By Bo Rothstein. New York: Cambridge University Press,
1998. Pp. xv254. $59.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).
Duane Swank
Marquette University
Bo Rothsteins new book is both a strong defense and an excellent empiri-
cal analysis of the universal welfare state. Rothsteins principal aim is to
provide a constructive theory of the welfare state where normative theory
about what the state should do is combined with an appreciation of what
the state can do. As to normative theory, Rothstein draws heavily on
John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, and others to articulate a rights-based
liberalism in which a neutral state adheres to the principles of equal
concern for all citizens and equal respect for the preferences and choices
of rational and autonomous individuals to pursue their life projects. To
realize these values, the state must also provide basic capabilities
through social protections and services that enable all to fully and equally
act on their preferences and participate. Rothstein argues that this lib-
eral moral base of the universal welfare state is not only normatively
desirable but, contrary to many claims about the universal welfare state,
1825
is also empirically important in the development of (Swedish) social
policy.
As to what the state can do, Rothstein offers a highly useful critique
and synthesis of the implementation literature, concluding that most dif-
culties in implementation involve problems of substance or process in
the areas of policy design, organization, and legitimacy. Crucial to this
analysis is the argument that broadly targeted policies that address static
problems (e.g., at-rate pensions) are much less prone to failure during
implementation than interventionist policies that target dynamic prob-
lems (social services for specic needy groups); universal programs are
simply easier to implement. However, even in the case of dynamic inter-
ventionism, successful implementation is possible with careful attention
to the structure and process of the organization of public services (i.e.,
selecting the right organizational form and technique) and to program
legitimacy (e.g., incorporating citizen participation and choice). The rela-
tive success and legitimacy of Swedish health care and active labor mar-
ket policies attest to what the state can accomplish.
Rothstein blends normative and empirical concerns in an analysis of
the political and moral logic of the (Swedish) universal welfare state. Ac-
cording to Rothstein, support for the welfare state hinges on the contin-
gent consent of strategically self-interested and moral citizens. In turn,
this consent is dependent on citizens appraisals of the substantive, proce-
dural, and distributional fairness of the welfare state. The political logic
of the universal welfare state weds the self-interest of the poor, working
class, and middle class through universal social insurance and services.
The electorally crucial middle class receives substantial benets and in-
surance against risks in return for signicant tax payments. The situation
is just the opposite in selective (predominately means-tested) welfare
states: the political logic of the residual welfare state is division and dis-
trust and, in turn, a highly vulnerable welfare state. However, for
Rothstein, the explanatory power of models grounded in self-interest falls
short. Indeed, a substantial part of the book is devoted to highlighting
howcontra rational choice and cultural theorydemocratic institu-
tions generally, and welfare state structures specically, cultivate values
and norms in society. As to the universal welfare state, the moral basis of
equal respect and concern, broadly targeted universal benets, carefully
adapted delivery organizations, and participatory administrative pro-
cesses achieve relatively high levels of contingent consent. Solidarity,
trust, and condence in state intervention are promoted. In selective wel-
fare states, problems related to substantive justice (e.g., conicts over de-
ning the deserving poor), procedural justice (perceptions of bureau-
cratic aggrandizement and waste), and a fair distribution of burdens (e.g.,
constituency fraud) are endemic.
Overall, the book makes the best case for universal social policy I have
seen; it is also an insightful analysis of the politics of universal welfare
states. However, I believe the book could have been improved on three
counts. First, systematic material on levels and trends in income replace-
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Book Reviews
ment rates, eligibility standards, social service spending, and the like is
missing. This omission leads to some errors in generalization. For in-
stance, Rothstein (p. 155) claims that even during Scandinavian bourgeois
governments of the last 20 years, one cannot discern a reduction in wel-
fare expenditures or a change to a more selective social policy. However,
to give just one example, in Denmark, the early 1980s bourgeois coalition
reduced spending for social services (relative to GDP) and pursued a vari-
ety of neoliberal policies (see my Social Democratic Welfare States in a
Global Economy: Scandinavia in Comparative Perspective, in Global-
ization, Europeanization, and the End of Scandinavian Social Democ-
racy? edited by Robert Geyer, Christine Ingrebritsen, and Jonathon Mo-
ses [Macmillan, 1998]). While Rothstein is certainly right in emphasizing
the resiliency of these welfare states, there have been more neoliberal
reforms than the book suggests or documents. Second, it is surprising that
there is little about the formation (as opposed to the persistence) of the
universal welfare state other than brief reference to the well-known work
of Esping-Andersen on the formative role of social democracy. Rothstein
could have drawn from recent comparative historical and contemporary
quantitative analyses to provide readers with a better understanding of
the causal roles of social democracy, trade unions and corporatist institu-
tions, and strategic working- and middle-class alliances. Third, while
Rothstein does a good job assessing the welfare state consequences of the
rise in demands for individual autonomy, he has little to say about the
welfare state pressures of demography, economic crises, or international-
ization. Integration of the burgeoning work on these issues would have
been useful.
Despite these criticisms, this is an excellent book and can be highly
recommended to scholars of social welfare policy, Scandinavia, and com-
parative politics. It is appropriate for advanced courses in the areas of
social theory, public policy, and European and comparative politics.
Bold Relief: Institutional Politics and the Origins of Modern American
Social Policy. By Edwin Amenta. Princeton N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1998. pp. xiii343. $39.50.
Jeff Manza
Northwestern University
Many readers will be surprised by Edwin Amentas title. New Deal social
policy would seem to have been neither bold nor to have provided much
relief. The subtitle also gives pause. Was it institutional or political
factors that were primarily responsible for the shape of social policy out-
comes during the New Deal? But the book delivers compelling replies to
each set of questions, accompanied by a generous set of Depression-era
photographs by Works Progress Administration artists such as Ben
Shahn and Dorothea Lange.
1827
Bold relief? In his opening chapter, Amenta nicely reconstructs the
logic behind the patchwork of social programs that dened the domestic
New Deal. Reformers envisioned a combination of programs in which
there would be something for everyone, hence, cumulatively universal.
At the heart of this agenda were the job creation programs of the WPA
and other New Deal agencies. A variety of other programs were designed
to provide income support for the rest of the (nonworking) population.
The entire lot were known as relief programs, without any intentional
separation of social security and welfare programs. This would come
only later, as the New Deal stalled in the 1940s.
The advance of the core New Deal agenda in the 1930s was startling,
all the more so given the well-known limitations of social provision in
the United States up to that time. Spending levels provide at least one
useful comparative measure of welfare effort. Amenta shows that by
1938, amazingly enough, the United States was spending more than any
other country in the world on social programs. Reformers hoped that such
state-building successes in the 1930s were merely a prelude to their fur-
ther development in the 1940s. But it was not to be. Why? Here Amenta
advances what he characterizes as an institutional politics model to ex-
plain social policy outcomes in the United States at the national and state
levels and (in a brief comparative chapter) in Great Britain. The model
has three legs: the constraints and opportunities provided by political in-
stitutions and previous policy legacies; the size and strength of pro-
reform forces in Congress and state legislatures; and pressures for reform
from social movements from below and from bureaucratic actors from
above.
Amentas institutional politics model places at its center an analysis of
the political power of reform forces (in this case, northern Democrats).
Program expansion occurred when the Democratic advantage was enor-
mous (e.g., 193538) and rarely at other times. This is a simple point,
and it is almost tautological. Yet much of the recent debates over the
New Deal and other episodes of state building had centered on controver-
sies about the relative inuence of business, social, and labor movements
from below and the reform initiatives of professional policy experts from
above. The causal importance of party strength is often ignored.
Another contribution of the institutional politics model lies in its deter-
mination to make sense of the contexts under which social movements
do or do not inuence policy outcomes. Here, Amentas articulation of
the interaction between institutions and political struggles is especially
helpful. When movements made demands that were consistent with those
of previous programmatic initiatives in the context of a large proreform
group in Congress, they were able to exert some leverage. In other con-
texts, their inuence was more muted. At best, in hostile climates, even
powerful movements typically achieve little more than altering the distri-
bution of spending patterns in those regions where they had strength.
This pattern generally appears to hold across the states as well as at the
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Book Reviews
national level. Amentas empirical tests of his model are unusual in his-
torical sociology and generally convincing.
I have only a few concerns. Amenta conclusively rejects two sources
of New Deal state building that other analysts have emphasized: the De-
pression and business inuence. But it is hard to completely accept either
of these claims. The Depression certainly was a necessary, if not suf-
cient, condition for the New Deal to have happened, if for no other reason
than its contribution to the election of an overwhelmingly proreform Con-
gress in the 193236 period. New evidence of business inuence on one
crucial program, the old-age insurance (OAI) provisions of the Social Se-
curity Act, has been developed in recent scholarship by Steven Sass, G.
William Domhoff, Colin Gordon, Peter Swenson, and others. In particu-
lar, it is almost impossible to believe that the successful expansion of the
OAI program after 1935 could have been achieved in the absence of con-
siderable business support and only modest opposition. Amenta does not
challenge any of this newer evidence directly, merely restating (or citing)
previously published work. I wish he had explored these issues more sys-
tematically here.
The New Deal vortex was complicated, and the prospect of unraveling
it has excited many sociological imaginations. Not all issues are (or indeed
could be) convincingly treated in a single volume. Still, this elegantly
written study delivers more than enough insights to serve one-stop con-
sumers of the political sociology of the New Deal well.
Whose Welfare? AFDC and Elite Politics. By Steven M. Teles. Lawrence:
University of Kansas Press, 1996. Pp. x226. $29.95.
Alexander Hicks
Emory University
This book tells the story of U.S. Aid for Dependent Children (ADC) and
Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) policy from the for-
mers 1939 normalization (or sharpened differentiation from old-age
and survivors insurance and its widow benets) through mid-1996. It
adds, in my estimation, more to our understanding of AFDCs troubled
history than any recent work, and it provides a compelling and compre-
hensive interpretation of that history.
Teless core thesis is that politically fueled elite ideological polarization
and deadlock brought U.S. poverty-reduction policy to its present nearly
ruinous (but not entirely hopeless) state (chap. 1). Elite political dissensus
did so despite a popular consensus on individual work requirements and
federal work guarantees that provided potential grounds for reform.
Teles frames his discussion of elite and mass ideological dissensus in
terms of three cultural types (intermingled for two centuries in the United
States) that he draws from work by Mary Douglas and collaborators (see
1829
chap. 1). The types are hierarchists, who are high on group (or in-
group identication) and grid (or interpersonal connectedness and inter-
dependence); individualists (low on both group and grid); and egalitari-
ans (high group, low grid). This theoretical framing of, in effect, social
conservative, libertarian and left-liberal ideological groupings is al-
most as elliptically presented by Teles in Whose Welfare? as it is by me
(for want of space) here. Indeed, the Douglas framework is rather unsys-
tematically applied to Teless otherwise superb historical account.
Teless 1939 normalization of AFDC (chap. 2, p. 34) refers foremostly
to the 1939 transformation of old age insurance into old-age and survivors
insurance (and secondarily to the 1950 congressional prohibition of ADC
funds for any recipients of old-age assistance). These legislative turns sig-
nicantly weakened AFDC (actually still ADC) as a program for general
widows relief and largely sealed AFDCs eventual labeling as a pro-
gram for the undeserving, and African-American, poor (pp. 3436). By
the 1962 metamorphosis of ADC into AFDC, black Americans counted
for nearly one-half of AFDC beneciaries, and the programs political
marginalization was complete.
Teles convincingly documents that popular opinion shifted after the
early 1960s from a consensus favoring income maintenance for female
household heads to one favoring governmentally assisted work (chap. 3).
He argues that development of a popular jobs policy consensus was
accompanied throughout the 1970s and 1980s by three trends (chap. 4).
First, hierarchist/conservative criticism of AFDC for undermining the
two-parent family (and the social order more generally) proliferated, gain-
ing popular exposure. Second, individualist/libertarian criticisms of
AFDC as a labor market distortion (and federal intrusion) did likewise.
Third, egalitarian/left-liberals, increasingly oriented toward litigative
struggles for entitlements, championed the principle of income mainte-
nanceand income rights (chap. 5). Both AFDC criticisms converged
contra AFDC, though hierarchist ones often pointed to program reform
needs, while libertarian ones tended toward laissez-faire (i.e., welfare
policys revocation). Conicting communal, free-market, and entitlement
goals lost a rare chance for legislative reconciliation with the 1969 legisla-
tive deadlock and death of Nixons (negative income tax) Family Assis-
tance Plan by an unlikely legislative alliance of social conservatives and
left-liberals (Dixiecrats and the National Work Relief Organization in
particular).
Throughout the 1970s, continued elite (and legislative) deadlock drove
pro-welfare activist in search of looser benets, eligibility, and monitor-
inggoals that never gained popular support and that suffered some
Reagan-era legislative reversals (chap. 6). Throughout the Reagan-Bush
years, while benets continued a slow post-Nixon decline, conservative
structural programs emerged in the form of federal waivers of AFDC
guidelines to states that convincingly proposed experimental revisions,
under constant funding, of AFDC. According to Teles, extra-legislative
waivers swamped federal workfare proposal and legislation (e.g., the
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Book Reviews
1988 Family Support Act) in importance during the 1980s, much as court
battles had swamped legislative action during the 1970s. The waiver
process created a taste for increased autonomy among state-level policy
reformers, right and left (chap. 7). The new elite inclination for state au-
tonomy put Clintons welfare reform proposals at risk: calls for the end
to national welfare could look forward to political cover from the ag of
state autonomy. (Indeed, Clinton milked waivers for reform ideas and
support, inadvertently strengthening the state-level reform alternative.)
In the wake of Clintons troopergate- and health-careinduced collapses
of support (and Clintons indiscriminately rousing end welfare as we
know it), Clintons serious workfare (plus day care) initiative came to
be easy prey to a defederalization of U.S. policy. Clinton had helped pre-
pare the state-level understudies for AFDC.
In short, Whose Welfare? concludes that poverty reduction policy in
the United States fell victim to the ideal (i.e., ideological) interests of the
U.S. political elites and to the potent symbolic uses that welfare policy
rhetoric had for these elites electoral contests. Clinton made efforts to
mobilize the centrist, work-centered consensus, which had fallen victim
to political gaffes and bad timing. However, the opportunity for a coher-
ent federal policy solution to the welfare mess was lost. Teles culturally
turned democratic-elitist perspective should be highly suggestive to politi-
cal sociologists, sociologists of the welfare state, sociologists of culture
and public opinion, as well as to political scientists and historians special-
izing in American public policy. Its timely historical account of AFDC
should interest the entire reading public of persons interested in U.S. so-
cial policy.
Through My Own Eyes: Single Mothers and the Cultures of Poverty. By
Susan D. Holloway, Bruce Fuller, Marylee F. Rambaud, and Costanza
Eggers-Pierola. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997.
Pp. x245. $35.00.
Judith Stacey
University of Southern California
Cultural stereotypes about the pathological dependency of poor single
mothers permeated the outburst of hand wringing over declining family
values that fueled the national backlash against welfare. Through My
Own Eyes hopes that conveying the perspectives of actual poor mothers
to ensure that mothers and their young children living at the edge of
poverty will no longer be faceless strangers (p. 2) will help to diminish
public hostility to welfare recipients. Positioning themselves between
what they regard as structural economism on the left and individualistic
moralism on the right, the authors seek to integrate cultural and struc-
tural analyses of poverty.
A team of psychologists and sociologists collaborated on this qualita-
1831
tive study of the values and meanings of parenting and work among poor
mothers living in deprived neighborhoods in Boston. During a three-year
period, three authors conducted extensive semistructured interviews with
14 Latina, Anglo, and African-American mothers of young children who
had received some AFDC support. The fourth author studied corre-
sponding views held by teachers in neighborhood preschools. Honoring
the popular humanist commitment to give voice and agency to research
subjects, the book portrays these women as self-conscious actors whose
culture is neither completely determined by structural constraints nor
the product of mindless replication of tradition. Rather, mothers co-
construct childrearing values and strategies with those educators and so-
cial service workers who gain their condence and treat them respectfully.
The authors creatively supplant that disparaged concept, the culture
of poverty, with a pluralistic understanding of competing cultures of
poverty (p. 5). They nd signicant variations in childrearing and work
attitudes among poor mothers from even similar ethnic origins. Some
mothers are sterner disciplinarians, others are more child centered; some
have strong attachments to the labor force, others wish they could be
home with their children. There is no single culture of poverty. There
are many, (p. 6) the book argues, and no one best way to raise children
or to foster upward mobility. To succeed, antipoverty programs should
aim to strengthen the indigenous social foundations of womens lives
(p. 207). The book offers some creative policy recommendations to this
end, such as tax incentives to reward valuable forms of intergenerational
kin support. Along with cultural diversity, the study does nd important
common values among the women. For example, the mothers consider
it culturally legitimate to resort to welfare for brief periods but share the
publics disapproval of long-term dependency. In fact, the majority
found paid employment crucial for self-esteem as well as for income.
Likewise, because the mothers view respect and respectability as en-
twined, they have both moral and instrumental motives for making
teaching children respect one of their central childrearing goals.
Although this book makes argument against the formidable opinions
of a hostile political climate, one can hope that its sympathetic rendering
of low-income mothers will help to chip away at meanspirited images of
welfare recipients. Unfortunately, moralists on the right will be able to
nd sufcient aws in the study to rationalize dismissing its humanist
message. Most serious are aws in the denition of the studys sample.
The book never makes clear whether its subject is poor mothers or poor,
single mothers, as the subtitle proclaims. In fact, not all of the mothers
were single; four of the 14 were cohabiting with their childrens fathers
when the study began. Moreover, the sample is skewed toward the work-
ing poor, most of whom came from, and remained embedded within,
strong extended families (p. 103). Indeed, these mothers relied exten-
sively on their network of families and friends to augment their own ef-
forts (p. 103). Such a sample builds in its comparatively positive out-
comes, because as researchers like Elaine Bell Kaplan (Not Our Kind of
1832
Book Reviews
Girl [University of California Press, 1996]) demonstrate, such networks
are both especially valuable and much rarer among young black single
mothers than was reported earlier.
Many on the left, in contrast, will take exception to the books unwit-
tingly patronizing stance. At root, this is a work of cultural translation
written by and to some of us about and for some of them. Inherent
in the effort to give voice to the women, paradoxically, is the presump-
tion that it is theirs (ours) to give. At moments, the authors democratic
veneer slips revealing an allegiance to the social engineering prerogatives
of the professional middle classes: If we are to improve the odds that
these women will rise out of poverty, . . . we must devise more effective
ways to guide them along preferred paths (p. 204; my emphasis). Thus,
although one could use this book in undergraduate sociology courses on
social welfare or poverty, it will likely nd more receptive audiences
among communitarian politicians and in courses offered by social work,
public policy, and education schools. A more accurate title might be Their
Words through Our Own Eyes.
Culture Moves: Ideas, Activism, and Changing Values. By Thomas R.
Rochon. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998. Pp. xix282.
$39.50.
Leo dAnjou
Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam
Social and political changes are natural to modern life. One only need
compare, as Thomas Rochon does, todays society with that of ones
youth to realize how much it has changed and how rapidly these changes
have come about. In his well-written book on cultural change, Rochon
takes on the difcult task of nding some answers to the question of
where these tidal waves of change come from. In his view, many social
and political transformations are responses to the recurring changes in
the cultural values typical of modern society. And so he probes the origins
of these cultural changes and the processes by which the altered values
are diffused. His study is organized into three parts and contains an at-
tractive mix of theory and empirical ndings throughout. The theoretical
elements come from a variety of books and papers on culture, cultural
change, and social/political movements and from the data of important
case studies such as the ERA campaign, the Civil Rights movement, and
the Hill-Thomas hearings.
Rochons basic argument rests on his assessment that political and so-
cial transformations come about because people are no longer satised
with the situation in which they live and that they would like to have
that situation changed. This demand for change proceeds from the fact
that people have come to view things in life differently or, as Rochon
puts it, because their cultural values have changed. This change of val-
1833
uesthe root of rapid social and political transformationdoes not come
about automatically but is the product of a two-stage process of value
generation and diffusion. This process is elaborated in the rst part of
the book, which begins with the concept of cultural values. These are
seen as temporally and spatially bound ways of thinking about what is
right, what is natural, and what works. Changing such values does not
mean merely adapting them to altered social conditions but fundamen-
tally transforming the basic categories of thought and perception that
make people think in a different way (p. 21).
Such changes, however, will only occur if familiar patterns of thought
are called into question. At this point, Rochon introduces a very valuable
concept: the critical community. This term refers to a (primarily informal)
network of critical and relatively independent thinkers who initiate dis-
courses about situations they designate as problematic. In addition to
problem identication, they analyze the sources and provide solutions,
thus generating new ways of looking at familiar situations. Their ideas
may become new cultural values if they are brought to a wider audience
and become accepted as valid points of view. The diffusion of new values
is the work of social and political movements as they attempt to bring
about cultural as well as structural changes. Movements do not only con-
front established society with the ideas of the critical community, they
also reformulate and repackage them in formats that are suited for mobi-
lizing people into action. Movements make their own crucial contribution
to change in society by modifying ideas into issues and, what is more,
by transforming the particular discourse within the critical community
into a public discourse about such issues. Rochon completes his theoreti-
cal perspective with an analysis of the different ways in which new cul-
tural values become accepted in society.
In the following parts of the book, Rochon develops in more detail his
ideas on cultural change and the agential role of critical communities
and movements therein. First, he examines how people are brought to
participate in collective actions (i.e., by creating and strengthening group
solidarities) and how these actions are made effective by instilling politi-
cal will and the learning of political skills. Second, he analyzes how struc-
tural changes have altered the conditions in which critical communities
and movements grow and prosper. Finally, in the closing chapter, Ro-
chon unites these lines of reasoning and considers what his study reveals
about the direction in which modern society is heading.
By interweaving theory with empirical ndings, Rochon arrives at a
rmly grounded theory on one of the most intriguing aspects of modern
life. Moreover, the structure of his reasoning and his lucid style make
such difcult subjects like culture and change widely accessible and al-
most simple to comprehend. On the other hand, the attraction of using
broad denitions of concepts like values and movements hinders making
sharp and precise distinctions. Another less favorable aspect is that struc-
tural change depends, by denition, on changes in cultural values. This
1834
Book Reviews
would preclude nding that the causal sequence might run the other way
around.
Nevertheless, Rochon has written an important book that is a very
welcome contribution to the scholarly discourse on movements and cul-
ture, particularly because it focuses on the cultural effects of movement
activities, a topic that deserves more attention than it has received since
the cultural turn of movement studies. This book is a must for scholars
in the eld of cultural studies and social movements and will be very
helpful to students of these subjects.
The Art of Moral Protest: Culture, Biography, and Creativity in Social
Movements. By James Jasper. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1998. Pp. xv514. $35.00.
Robert D. Benford
University of Nebraska, Lincoln
Once in a great while a book comes along that fundamentally changes the
ways we think about a topic. I am condent that James Jaspers deeply
theoretical and richly illustrated The Art of Moral Protest will have such
an impact on social movements scholars. Indeed, its impact could extend
well beyond a single substantive area to inuence the way sociologists
view structure, culture, and agency and the relationships among them.
Few writers since C. Wright Mills have so cogently articulated the inter-
section of social forces and biography.
Perhaps the greatest single contribution Jasper makes is to bring full-
edged human actors back into the spotlight of social movement analysis.
These are not the irrational and apprehensive individuals of the crowd
theories who mill about mimicking one another or who are occasionally
whipped into a collective frenzy by the vicissitudes of rapid social
changes. Nor are they the hedonistic, mostly self-interested, prot max-
imizers of the rationalist and mobilization theorists. And Jaspers move-
ment actors are certainly not relatively helpless pawns of their political
and economic environments as the process theorists often imply. Nor are
movement actors suffering, as some new social movement theorists sug-
gest, from a postindustrial-induced identity crisis. And nally, they are
not simply the dispassionate, strategic manipulators of public discourse
and meanings, as often implied by framing theorists. While Jasper ac-
knowledges that under some conditions movement actors may in fact re-
spond in one or more of the foregoing ways, they tend to be much more
complicated and multifaceted than classical and contemporary move-
ment theorists depict them.
Movement actors, according to Jasper, are thinking, artfully creating,
feeling, moralizing human beings. They are thinking actors who behave
strategically and artfully, aware of what they are doing, making plans,
1835
developing projects, and innovating in trying to achieve new goals, all
the while learning from their mistakes as well as from the mistakes of
their opponents. But they are also feeling beings, whose protests are moti-
vated by anger, fear, dread, suspicion, indignation, outrage, and hope,
among other emotions. Far from rendering their actions irrational, emo-
tions supply much of the motivational impetus for individual and collec-
tive action.
And most of all, movement actors are moral beings. Their protests
are frequently inspired by moral outrage sometimes from experiencing
a moral shock such as news of the catastrophe at Three Mile Island.
Protesters subsequent actions are typically predicated upon moral princi-
ples as are their critiques of the conditions they wish to alter and their
visions and hopes for a better society. In one of many provocative pas-
sages, Jasper asserts that moral protest provides individuals with a rare
chance to probe their moral intuitions and articulate their principles
(p. 367). He observes that contemporary institutions provide few opportu-
nities for exploring, voicing, and pursuing moral visions. Indeed, for Jas-
per, the importance of protesters . . . lies more in their moral visions
than in their practical accomplishments (p. 379).
The second signicant contribution Jasper makes is to synthesize vari-
ous concepts associated with cultural/constructionist perspectives, while
selectively drawing on constructs from the more established resource mo-
bilization, political process, and new social movements perspectives as
well as literature from psychology, philosophy, anthropology, history, po-
litical science, and communication studies to creatively fashion a holistic,
compelling approach to analyzing protest dynamics. In constructing this
synthesis, Jasper critically assesses the major theoretical approaches, be-
ginning with classical theories and ending with various contemporary
paradigms. This is not the ritualistic exercise in theory bashing consum-
ers of social movement monographs and articles have grown accustomed
to reading. Rather, for each theory, Jasper carefully identies not only
the problematic dimensions but also its enduring contributions. A recur-
rent theme in this critique is the idea that many of the elds core con-
cepts suffer from theoretical and empirical overextension (p. 41) due in
part to the fact that our main paradigms are surprisingly metaphorical
(p. 17). Resources, political opportunity structures, collective identities,
and framing are all asked to do more work than is warranted. Jasper
insightfully species each constructs limitations and the contexts in
which each would seem to be applicable.
Jasper then identies four basic, that is analytically autonomous, di-
mensions of protest: resources, strategies, culture, and biography. After
demonstrating the essentiality of these four constructs, he explains why
one contender, structure, is analytically reducible to culture and re-
sources. Once the four dimensions are fused with artfulness (agency),
they can be analyzed dynamically rather than statically. Most of the re-
mainder of the book is an elaboration of the interrelationships among the
basic dimensions, often richly illustrated from case studies of the anti
1836
Book Reviews
nuclear power, animal rights, and environmental movements Jasper and
various collaborators have spent the past two decades studying.
The Art of Moral Protest dees adequate description in such limited
space. Readers will nd something of interest on almost every page of
this well-written monographcogent observations, theoretical insights,
provocative assertions, original research hypotheses, and pearls of wis-
dom. Serious students of social movements should place it at the top of
their reading list. Beyond that, I highly recommend that all scholars inter-
ested in the human condition partake in this artful scholarly creation.
Agrarian Reform and Class Consciousness in Nicaragua. By Laura J.
Enrquez. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1997. Pp. x206.
$49.95.
Carlos M. Vilas
CEIICH-UNAM
Agrarian reform was a most relevant ingredient in the Sandinista strategy
for revolutionary change. With regard to the peasantry, it was addressed
to the fulllment of three basic, interrelated objectives: furthering eco-
nomic development through both productive differentiation and the pro-
motion of cooperative organization; improvement of peasants well-being
by means of access to credit, productive inputs, technical services, and
so on; strengthening peasants political support to Sandinismo. Enriquez
discusses the performance of the reform along these three avenues. She
focuses on the shifts in the Sandinista regimes approach to the role of
peasants in economic development and the impact of these shifts upon
peasants attitudes toward both the government and the opposition. Two
additional ingredients played a decisive role in the development of the
peasantrys political attitudes toward Sandinismo, which Enriquez also
deals with in detail: the class origins of specic segments of the peasantry
(i.e., poor and landless peasants, minifundista peasants, and others) and
the type of productive organization (collective ownership of land as well
as of production; individual/family ownership of land together with coop-
erative management of credit, commercialization, or specic inputs; and
so on) promoted by the revolutionary government.
Through two case studies, Enriquez concludes that, despite the agrar-
ian reforms economic success (output growth and differentiation, techni-
cal improvements, and so on), its ability to feed political support toward
Sandinismo was mostly conned to former poor and former landless peas-
ants, while small producers, enjoying some access to land prior to the
reform, tended to be less politically enthusiastic. In turn, the specic types
of peasant organization, pushed forward by policy makers, acted in dif-
ferent segments of the peasant class to favor either an increased political
involvement in the revolution, a pragmatic acceptance of specic policies
while rejecting others, or an increasing shift toward political opposition.
1837
In spite of Enriquezs attempt to link her subject to processes of transi-
tion to socialisman option that she accepts to be quite controversial
her conceptual discussion refers to the relation between economic devel-
opment and politics and to the role Third World peasantries tend to play
with regard to radical socioeconomic and political change. Enriquez con-
tends the hypothesis of an essentialist conservative bias in peasants; her
case studies show there is no political essentialism in class identities and
that, in order to reach relevant conclusions, differentiations inside the
peasantryin terms of access to land and other resources, as well of the
specic histories of particular segments of the peasantry and the institu-
tional environment where these factors operatehave to be acknowl-
edged. The discussion of plan Masaya (chaps. 5 and 6) points to the
many elements prompting for a stregthened political commitment of
peasants to the revolution, while her presentation of the Los Patios
project (chaps. 3 and 4) stresses the factors conducive to a conservative
reorientation of the projects beneciariesin spite of economic goals of
the agrarian reform being achieved in both projects. Enriquezs conclu-
sion points also to the relevance of effective peasant participation in pro-
cesses of radical socioeconomic and political change in societies where
the peasantry makes up a larger segment of the subaltern classes. Yet,
the book does not explore the reasons why participatory democracy has
confronted so many shortcomings in so many dimensions of the Sandini-
sta agrarian reform. A discussion of the class extraction and ideological
commitments of Sandinista policy makers drawing agrarian reform poli-
cies could have helped readers to understand the frequent conicts be-
tween public ofcials and political leaders on the one side and peasants
on the other.
While relating Sandinismo to transitions to socialism, neither reduces
nor increases the relevance of Enriquezs discussion of the agrarian re-
form failures and successes, and the inclusion of class consciousness in
the books title is misleading. What one sees is a number of peasant
groups that share a basic attachment to land as the means to survive and
advance in life: some of them became strong supporters of Sandinismo,
yet others moved toward political opposition. Furthermore, political
cleavages or allegiances do not oppose different kinds of peasants. Enri-
quez nds Sandinistas together with oppositionists in each of the two
projects; there are pro-Sandinistas among the small owners involved in
Los Patios, as there are in more proletarianized beneciaries of Plan Ma-
saya, as much as there are also supporters of the opposition in both proj-
ects. Since there is no conceptual discussion of class consciousness and
its role in the books subject, the purpose of referring to it in the title is
not clear.
Despite these marginal critical comments, the book is worth reading
for graduate students with a basic knowledge of Nicaraguas recent his-
tory, as well as for readers interested in processes of structural change
in peasant societies. It makes an important contribution to both peasant
studies and the comparative analysis of revolutions.
1838
Book Reviews
Ethics and Activism: The Theory and Practice of Political Morality. By
Michael L. Gross. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Pp. xiv305. $59.95.
Laura J. Scalia
A man rushes into a burning building to free a child trapped inside. Cer-
tainly, if this rescuers good conscience selessly guided him, his act de-
serves to be termed moral. However, what if the child was the mans
only son? Alternatively, suppose the saver was a reman, handsomely
paid to put out blazes and rescue trapped inhabitants, or suppose he was
an aspiring politician, seizing a photo opportunity to enhance his chances
of electoral success. Would the good deed still be deemed moral? Michael
L. Gross, in his new book Ethics and Activism, asks us not to extend
praise only to high-minded, principled acts. His rationale is simple: Most
do not risk their lives for the good of abstract mankind; most seek to
benet themselves and their close friends when doing so-called good
deeds. Why not extend moral credit to this majority?
Grosss essential quest is to put a moral soul onto the actions of individ-
uals like the father, reman, and aspiring politician, who, though mostly
concerned with themselves and their immediate relations, nonetheless do
great deeds for society. Specically, he studies to what extent ethical in-
tentions motivate ordinary folk to participate collectively in those every-
day causes that invigorate and preserve democracy. To do this, Gross
examines two moral conceptions, which he then thoughtfully operationa-
lizes by integrating aspects of social, psychological, and rational choice
theory. These interdisciplinary tools are subsequently used to determine
which moral construct better explains popular engagement in just causes.
Underlying the analysis is a normative aim: to develop a theory of politi-
cal morality consistent with empirical evidence (p. 18). To the author,
Knowing how individuals can act helps us understand how they ought
to act (p. 19). Given his overall methodology and normative aspirations,
Gross deserves the ear of empirical theorists, especially those interested
in collective action and moral philosophy.
Part 1 discusses two views of morality: the strong, which assumes only
principled actions deserve to be termed moral and which Gross seeks to
overturn as empirically naive, and the weak, which deems interests and
localized concerns viable bases of moral action and which the author sees
as realistically reecting human behavior. Part 2 operationalizes these
views, outlining alternative motivational theories. (Herein are scattered
helpful gures explicating how different factors are thought to inuence
political action.) Among the factors described are incentives that rational
choice theorists emphasize, including monetary and solidarity incentives
as well as normative, nonmaterial stimuli. Also incorporated are inu-
ences that cognitive psychologists stress, including a persons way of mor-
ally reasoning, from dogmatically choosing as self-interest and authority
dictate, to selecting provincially or nationalistically as a good community
1839
member or citizen might, to autonomously relying on universal principles
that transcend communal norms. All variables seek to measure whether
activists are morally weak or strong, self-seeking or high-minded.
Part three carefully examines specic cases of activism: Dutch and
French rescuers of Jews during World War II, Americans in the pro-life
and pro-choice movements, and Israeli supporters of retaining or re-
turning occupied lands. Each chapter provides brief but adequate back-
ground about the ethical cause and its historical particularities. Each
looks at the participants themselves, their cognitive level of moral devel-
opment, the available social networks, and the obtainable incentives ac-
cepted. Although differences exist, in each case, the vast majority of polit-
ical activists are found to be weak moralists, cognitively parochial or
nationalistic, motivated by monetary and solidarity incentives.
These ndings certainly illustrate that even individuals engaged in
deeply ethical issues mostly fail to satisfy the model of strong political
morality. Less obvious is whether that discovery merits rejecting the
model. First, the empirical evidence is somewhat biased. The book exam-
ines rank and le members, whom elite theorists would consider follow-
ers, not societys best guardians. Gross never investigates the motivations
of leaders: the initiators of underground rescue, the original mobilizers
for and against abortion, or the rst organizers for Middle East peace.
He analyzes why ordinary individuals join and remain attached to estab-
lished organizations and causes, not what drives founders to cultivate
ethical movements. If originators were the seless, principled, autono-
mous agents of strong moral theory, then perhaps the model is less empir-
ically naive than the author suggests.
Moreover, the normative justication for redening morality is thin.
In his quest to have reality drive theory, the author gives selsh and
seless intentions the same legitimacy, claiming that in politics an ac-
tions good consequence is all that matters. But, is outcome really the
only signicant issue? An accidental killer is not deemed evil, yet the
intentional murderer deserves our strongest reprobation. Malicious inten-
tions can make acts immoral; should not good intentions also impact
judgment? Though the author might agree, his call to reconceptualize
political morality so that only the efcacy of action matters asks us to
divorce intentions from actions, something moralists may nd troubling.
Troubling or not, Grosss analysis forces readers to rethink the issue and
provides them with a novel, interdisciplinary framework for conceptual-
izing the bases of collective action.
1840
Book Reviews
The Sociology of Religious Movements. By William Sims Bainbridge.
New York: Routledge, 1997. Pp. vi474. $74.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).
Rhys H. Williams
Southern Illinois University, Carbondale
William Sims Bainbridge has produced a textbook, in two senses of the
word. First, this is a text on the sociology of religious movements, suitable
for graduate seminars and upper-division undergraduate classes. It is less
survey coverage of the eld than an introduction to religious movements
through concepts and examples drawn from Bainbridges own research
and theorizing. Thus, it is perspectival, committed, and engaging.
Second, this is a textbook case of application of theory to data; Bain-
bridge begins with the theory of religion, which he has developed in
conjunction with Rodney Stark (roughly, a rational choice theory of reli-
gious motivation, based on the provision of supernatural compensators
by religious groups), and applies it to the dynamics of a series of religious
movements, such as the family, the holiness movements, and the contem-
porary new age. As a text (in the rst sense), Bainbridges book will be
useful to many scholars. There is a wealth of empirical data, from GSS
analysis to ethnographic to historical material. As a textbook application
of theory, readers will respond based on their orientation to the grounding
assumptions; as the Stark-Bainbridge theory is central to much of the
rational choice work currently controversial in the sociology of religion,
the response will no doubt be divided.
After an initial chapter that lays out the basics of the guiding theory,
the book is divided into three sections, covering the dynamics of schism
(sects formed from divisions within religious bodies), innovation (cults
formed as innovative new religions within their cultural contexts), and
transformation (dealing with and changing the societal environment).
Each section has an initial chapter covering a general topic pertinent to
the sections theme, followed by three chapters of empirical examples.
The initial orienting chapters in each section are a bit idiosyncratic as
Bainbridge only glances over the literature before developing his own
ideas about the issue in question. The results are uneventhe examina-
tion of church-sect theory works well for the section on schism. However,
a lengthy excursion into Watergate (and another on the Star Wars trilogy
in the conclusion) did not reward the space allotted. As is often true with
rational actor models, individual-level analyses continually rise to the
fore. For example, the chapter on cultural diffusion (orienting the inno-
vation section) spends most of its attention on conversion, and the chap-
ter on morality (orienting the transformation section) discusses the
effects of religious beliefs on controlling deviant behavior such as sub-
stance abuse, larceny, and suicide.
In the empirical chapters, Bainbridge is interested in religious move-
ments because they represent a special form of religion, rather than being
interested in religious movements as a special case of social movements
1841
generally. As a result, he draws few insights from the burgeoning scholar-
ship on social movements and collective action. For example, the chapter
on democratization movements discusses whether religion promotes or
retards democratization, rather than covering the dynamics and history
of particular democratization movements (or the genre).
The concluding chapter argues that religion will continue to renew it-
self into the future through the phenomena of movements. When institu-
tional religion loses touch with the particular needs that initially drew its
adherents, it loses its tension with its host culture and undercuts member
motivation. Religious movements then arise to provide the missing pas-
sion, innovation, and tension with the culture. Thus, religion itself is a
perpetual system that provides the supernatural compensators humans
need to survive. Bainbridge also discusses the factors, both internal and
external, that shape the success of religious movements, dened as organi-
zational growth and continued member commitment.
I must note that the nal chapter also engages in some tiresome com-
petitive comparisons between the so-called new and old paradigms in the
sociology of religion. The new paradigm is represented here by the Stark-
Bainbridge theory of religion, while the old paradigm is a caricature of
secularization theory, represented by a 1950s-era article by A. F. C. Wal-
lace (I suppose ensuring its status as an old paradigm). Then Bainbridge
runs through a series of regressions on data on religious membership,
church growth, and religious variety. New paradigm-based predictions
are pronounced winners when they explain more variance than old par-
adigm assumptions.
The usefulness of this exercise eludes me. I do not understand what is
gained for sociology as an intellectual enterprise through this wins-and-
losses logic. Further, the credit that might accrue to the Stark-Bainbridge
theory is undercut both by the simplistic version of secularization theory
used as foil and by the overidentication of the new paradigm with ratio-
nal choice models. There is something of a chest-thumping tone to the
effort. One wonders to what end.
William Bainbridge has much to teach us about the emergence, suc-
cess, and dynamics of religious movements, and this book is rich reading.
Of course, those not persuaded initially by Bainbridges approach may
well remain unconvinced, and that should be a net gain to the eld
whether developing or disputing this work, future research is sure to
follow.
1842
Book Reviews
End of Millennium, vol. 3 of The Information Age: Economy, Society,
and Culture. By Manuel Castells. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers,
1998. Pp. xiv418. $69.95 (cloth); $29.95 (paper).
John Boli
Emory University
We live in the network society. Relationships of production have shifted
in fundamental ways, with exible production and network-based global
structures becoming ever more central. Production is primarily informa-
tionalism: the control, manipulation, and distribution of information as
both product and means of organizing other types of products. Power
has become primarily a matter of symbolic manipulation; elites are
ephemeral and situation specic, while classes decline in signicance. In
opposition to the Net (the realm of real virtuality generated by globally
interlinked nodes of informational production) stands the self, that is, the
individual dened and self-dened increasingly in terms of primordial
identities (gender, race, religion, ethnicity) and engaged in identity move-
ments that have become the central arena of political struggle in this end-
of-millennium time.
Such are the claims of Manuel Castells, a polyglot and much travelled,
productive scholar who in many ways epitomizes the global information
producers conceptualized in his analysis. Castells knows the world well,
and his sharp observational sense has been honed through extensive eld
work in numerous countries. In this book, the third wing of his sprawling,
complex edice that attempts in exceedingly ambitious form to make
sense of our world, he draws out the implications of the analysis in the
rst two volumes (The Rise of the Network Society and The Power of
Identity [Blackwell, 1996 and 1997]) for major political and economic
changes in recent decades.
The book ranges widely, from a detailed dissection of the collapse of
the Soviet Union (and, by extension, of the failure of statism) to analyses
of the immiseration of the socially excluded (the Fourth World that
includes pockets of misery in the developed countries), the rise of global
criminality, the Asian economic surge led by the developmental state,
and European unication as a defensive response to American and Asian
economic domination. All of these topics are handled with great authority
and considerable insight.
Despite Castellss prodigious knowledge and effort, I nd it difcult
to know what to make of this book and of the three-volume series as a
whole (readers are advised at least to skim the rst two volumes; volume
3 does not stand easily alone). In a blurb on the back cover of the paper
edition, Giddens does Castells the disservice of unwisely suggesting com-
parison with Webers Economy and Society. Against that extraordinary
work, End of Millennium hardly measures up; Castells offers little of the
institutional and historical incisiveness so characteristic of Weber.
Castells nds his main inspiration in the work of Daniel Bell and Alain
1843
Touraine on postindustrialism, along with Nicos Poulantzass neo-Marx-
ist writings. To my mind, the book also recalls Galbraiths The New In-
dustrial State (New American Library, 1967), and volume 2 clearly builds
on Roszaks The Making of a Counter Culture (Doubleday, 1969). The
series is, then, a grand-sweep analysis that is decidedly contemporary and
clearly intent on coming to grips with emerging and increasingly domi-
nant trends in the social development of the past three decades. For gen-
eral readers, and even many specialists, it has much to offer in this high-
level sense.
Yet, End of Millennium and its companions are a good deal less illumi-
nating than I had hoped. Castells warns us early on that he chose to
eschew grappling intensely with the theoretical and empirical complexi-
ties of the many literatures upon which he draws, and that choice has
regrettable consequences. In treating religious fundamentalism, for exam-
ple, he accepts without question the Martin Marty line that fundamen-
talists are always reactive, reactionary, so the insights of alternative in-
terpretations of fundamentalism are ignored and a too-neat-and-tidy
view of fundamentalism emerges. The same sort of problem characterizes
Castellss treatment of identity movementsthey are interpreted as ei-
ther reactions against the impersonality, vapidity, power, and voracious
appetite of the Net or as proactive efforts to construct various forms of
idealized community (nonpatriarchal, pristinely natural, ethnically au-
thentic . . .) outside of or as protection against the informational core.
That identity movements might be about such boring perennial issues as
gaining power and wealth, the imposition of quasi-religious beliefs on
others, or rampant individualism raised to an obsessively narcissistic
level are interpretations that go begging here.
What bothers me most about End of Millennium specically is that
the ve substantive chapters generally lose sight of the core ideas devel-
oped in volumes 1 and 2. For example, while informationalism is the
dominant theme of Castellss analysis, it is prominent in volume 3 only
with respect to explaining the collapse of statism, which Castells shows
to have been unable to adapt to informational production and applica-
tion. In the other chapters, informationalism is hardly visible.
Overall, Castells is much less explanatory than descriptive. His de-
scriptive material is often fascinating, but his scholarly contribution
would be greater if he had made the effort to explicate the causal chains
underlying his expositions and give his readers guideposts to a general
theory of informationalism. While he often claims to be developing
hypotheses about events, at the end of the day one has great difculty
identifying any clearly testable statements in his analysis.
End of Millennium and its companion volumes are decidedly worth a
read, for Castells has an impressive grasp of the contemporary world. As
an original contribution to knowledge or a stimulus to further scholarly
research, however, they are a good deal less impressive than their scope
and ambitiousness. Food for thought, but readers will need to do much
of the thinking.
1844
Book Reviews
Contested Countryside Cultures: Otherness, Marginalisation and Rural-
ity. Edited by Paul Cloke and Jo Little. London: Routledge, 1997.
Pp. viii295. $85.00 (cloth); $25.95 (paper).
Michael Mayerfeld Bell
Iowa State University
The countryside is becoming more interesting. Beset for decades by the
twin modularizing modernisms of industrial agriculture and positivist ru-
ral social research, the landscape of rural life had been determinedly
developing into a monotonous monoculture. Those monocultural tenden-
cies are still with us, particularly with regard to agricultures continued
bigger-is-better beggaring of the rural economy and the rural environ-
ment. But rural society is taking on a more diversied appearanceat
least in terms of its representation by a more diversied rural studies
literature more attuned to the margins and the differences and the othern-
esses contained within the rosy (albeit contradictory) idylls of a mechan-
ized-and-transgenetic countryside or a Babe-and-Farmer-Hogget coun-
tryside. As Contested Countryside Cultures wonderfully shows, rural
social research is becoming less of a monoculture.
This welcome volume by a group of 15 British geographers illustrates
the renewed diversity of rural studies in two broad ways. The rst I have
already alluded to: the elds recognition of the diversity of its topic. Con-
tested Countryside Cultures adds to a growing literature on rural differ-
ence and its representations and misrepresentations, a critical literature
that intervenes in the ow of rural images and inspects the power rela-
tions that shape them. Much that rural researchers had taken for granted
is now coming into the foreground: the cultural construction of nature,
the politics of space, the experience of place, the ideology of rurality. And
as well, the diversity of people who live a life they or others deem rural
is also coming into the foreground, what Paul Cloke and Jo Little in their
introduction to the volume describe as hidden others in what is some-
times perceived as a monolithic stronghold of the white, the nationalist,
the Christian, the homophobic, and the patriarchal.
In other words, there is now postmodern rural research too. This post-
modern turn has also been largely responsible for the second form of di-
versity now emerging in rural studies, a diversity of method. Here again,
Contested Countryside Cultures exemplies the trend. Flipping through
its 295 pages, the reader encounters nary an equation or a graph and
only a few tables. Rather, the contributors to the volume mainly employ
the wide range of ethnographic and textual approaches that postmodern-
ism and cultural studies have ushered back into the social sciences, now
welcome in rural studies too.
The contributors to Contested Countryside Cultures are all at British
institutions, and most of the chapters deal with British case material. A
few chapters also consider the United States, but no other countries re-
ceive sustained attention. Nevertheless, the themes of all the chapters
1845
have much to inform a North American audience. The book begins by
furthering Chris Philos debate with Jonathan Murdoch and Andy Pratt
over what postmodern rural studies should look like, a debate that began
in the early 1990s in a series of articles published in the Journal of Rural
Studies. Philo again advances his view that rural studies needs, without
political premeditation, to open itself truly to the possibility of rural oth-
ers and other rurals, giving here the example of the unusual rural vi-
sion of the Shaker movement in the United States. Murdoch and Pratt
then repeat their caveat that the study of rural others must also consider
how these Others came to be Othered (p. 55)that rural studies
needs to attend to power relations and to the possibility of political en-
gagementand go on to argue that, like power itself, rural identities need
to be understood as uid and provisional not eternal or inevitable.
Subsequent chapters present a series of challenges to a stable view of
rural life, showing both something of the range of hidden rural others
and of the constant contestation of their identities. Annie Hughes and Jo
Little introduce us to the identity struggles of British rural women; Gill
Valentine revisits the lesbian separatist rural communities of the 1970s
and 1980s United States; Julian Agyeman and Rachel Spooner recount
the marginalization of blacks and Asians in the British countryside; Da-
vid Sibley critiques public order legislation that controls the movement
of Gypsies, new age travelers, and hunting protestors; Paul Cloke lets us
hear the voices of the rural poor of Britain and the United States and
discusses their conicting imageries; Sarah Harper and Clare Fischer re-
mind us about the lives of, respectively, rural elderly and rural craft
workers; Owain Jones and David Bell describe the representation of ru-
rality in childrens literature and in the American horror lm; Keith Half-
acree invites us to consider even the counterurbanite commuter as a kind
of other.
The book thus demonstrates much of the promise of postmodern re-
searchand some of the pitfalls. There seems to be a tendency here to
regard nearly everyone as in some way neglected and misunderstood, as a
marginalized othereven counterurbaniteswatering down the power
perspective that underlies postmodern cultural studies. There also seems
to be a potential to not merely give voice to others but to create them
to begin with and to gain academic standing from their exoticness. In
the concluding chapter, Cloke and Little give us a sensitive discussion of
this latter problem, what they term research tourism.
But the promise of restoring to view those commonly overlooked is
nonetheless admirably accomplished in this book. Indeed, rural studies
in its own way has been something of a hidden other within the social
sciences. Like the half of the world that still lives in rural areas, including
a quarter of the population of the rich countries, rural social research
has often been overlooked by an urban-oriented academe. There is some
interesting stuff happening in rural studies these days, though, and this
book is an excellent illustration of that trend.
1846
Book Reviews
Sociology on the Menu: An Invitation to the Study of Food and Society.
By Alan Beardsworth and Teresa Keil. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Pp. x277. $69.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).
Consuming Geographies: We Are Where We Eat. By David Bell and Gill
Valentine. New York: Routledge, 1997. Pp. ix236. $69.95 (cloth); $19.95
(paper).
Rick Fantasia
Smith College
In explaining why, until very recently, food and eating have received less
analytical attention from sociologists than from scholars in neighboring
disciplines, Alan Beardsworth and Teresa Keil suggest that, paradoxi-
cally, one reason may be that the very centrality of eating to human life
has made it relatively invisible to the principal analysts of society.
Whether or not this is so, Sociology on the Menu has been designed to
make visible the complex of activities and relationships surrounding the
human food system, from production to consumption, as well as to high-
light the contributions made by sociologists to our understanding of its
social and cultural dimensions. This is not a modest pair of objectives
but objectives that are mostly attained by a book that manages to sustain
a certain anaytical density while successfully avoiding the arid, encyclo-
pedic quality of most textbook introductions.
Organized into four parts, the book consists of 11 chapters that break
down fairly evenly between those areas that would be obligatory in any
attempt to reasonably cover such a eld (i.e., The Origins of Human
Subsistence, The Making of the Modern Food System, Eating Out,
and Changing Conceptions of Diet and Health) and those areas that
seem to have been animated by the particular intellectual and political
commitments of the authors (a strong emphasis on gender inequality
throughout, and specic chapters on Food Risks, Anxieties and Scares,
Dieting, Fat and Body Image, and The Vegetarian Option). Each
chapter includes some critical recapitulation of the recent sociological re-
search related to the specic topic, and data from the United Kingdom
tends to predominate (while this very well may be the result of more and
better research on the relationship between food and society in the United
Kingdom, it may also have something to do with the nationality and in-
stitutional location of the authors). A chapter devoted to the principal
theoretical perspectives offers a useful review and assessment of the con-
tributions made not only by the most well-known theorists (such as
Levi-Strauss, Mary Douglas, Jack Goody, and Norbert Elias) but also by
those like Stephen Mennell and Claude Fischler, who may be less widely
known outside the eld of food and foodways but whose work has been
very important in helping us to understand it.
Although the authors assert change and ambivalence as the thematic
thread linking all of the chapters, this does not really contribute very
1847
much in analytical terms (after all, what domain of social activity is not
characterized by change and ambivalence?) and mostly seems like an
attempt to override any perceived imbalance resulting from the dual pres-
sure on the authors to both cover a wide area and to pursue their more
focused interests. This is unnecessary, since the very subject matter pro-
vides ample thematic coherence, while the authors display a sufciently
rm grip on the principal theoretical perspectives and empirical studies
on food and society to give the reader condence that if some issues have
been treated more or less exhaustively than others, nothing really crucial
has been left out.
Sociology on the Menu succeeds in its main purpose of introducing the
reader to the primary sociological literature and thinking in this area.
But the authors have a secondary goal, that of advancing the status of
the sociology of food and eating as an important and distinctive project
(p. 257). By demarcating its intellectual boundaries, they seem to be seek-
ing to establish food and eating as a distinctive subeld. But besides add-
ing a degree of needless severity to the work, what they actually have
shown is that many of the key questions tend to be generated by and
within a number of existing subelds of sociology (culture, development,
gender, class, political, and environmental sociology; themselves rather
arbitrary designations). Whether or not their book elevates the status of
food and society, it has identied it as a valuable and important area of
concern for the discipline.
Less encumbered by these sorts of concerns, David Bell and Gill Valen-
tine have written a book that, while covering some of the same ground
as Beardsworth and Keil, shows little respect for either disciplinary
boundaries or academic conventions. Beginning with the glossy image on
the books coverthe distorted head of a fat, loutish-looking man, bliss-
fully licking the whipped cream that is smeared about his mouth and
chinwe know that Consuming Geographies: We Are Where We Eat has
entered us into a world of stylish (some might say, stylized) irreverence.
The playfulness extends to the satiric photographs and advertising im-
ages smattered throughout the text, as well as to the favourite recipes
placed at the beginning of every chapter, each contributed by a member
of a group of the most cited geographers. Despite the appearances, there
is denitely a there there, as the authors (lecturers in the United King-
dom in cultural studies and geography, respectively) have fashioned their
analytical lens from some of the best materials in both elds to examine
eating practices as a way of thinking about consumption, identity, and
place.
The book is structured according to spatial scales: the body, the
home, the community, the city, the region, the nation, and the global.
Various aspects of food consumption are examined at each of the scales,
or levels, as a way of constructing an account of the circuits of culinary
culture as they map across space (p. 12). So, for example, the chapter
on the body examines social and cultural practices related to such issues
as body size, dieting, eating disorders, bodily pollutants, the eroticism of
1848
Book Reviews
food, and the body as cultural capital. The chapter on the city considers
various urban food rituals, including restaurant consumption as enter-
tainment, as performance, the varieties of eating places, fast food and
homogenization, and the culture and system of the contemporary super-
market. While the authors specic analytical points often lean toward
the postmodern, they also frequently summarize systematic research
ndings when it is relevant to their analyses, and so the book provides
one with a reasonably good sense of what sociologists have been learning
with respect to contemporary food consumption.
Throughout, the authors engage in a sort of theoretical bricolage, draw-
ing ideas from the sources that seem relevant at the time (Mary Douglas
or Pierre Bourdieu here, Michel Foucault or Arjun Appadurai there) and
have interspersed, at various points in the text, boxed excerpts, several
paragraphs long, from raw interviews (i.e., Jackie, who is 43 and a
lone parent. She has two adult daughters and an 11-year-old son [p. 33]).
The extended quotations, many of which have a confessional quality, are
implicitly played off against the theoretical analyses offered by the au-
thors and the theorists they are working through. Although one can imag-
ine some readers becoming irritated by the authors meandering style
(they often seem to wind their way in no particular direction) the struc-
ture of the book serves to contain their movement to some degree and
is generally quite effective. Plus, the authors happen to be concerned with
issues that most sociologists will nd interesting and important. Consum-
ing Geographies is provocative, signicant, and enjoyable.
Changing Financial Landscapes in India and Indonesia: Sociological As-
pects of Monetization and Market Integration. By Heiko Schrader. New
York: St. Martins Press, 1998. Pp. 293. $59.95.
Michael McIntyre
DePaul University
In this study, Heiko Schrader attempts to account for the uneven devel-
opment of nancial institutions, formal and informal, in India and Indo-
nesia from the precolonial era to the present. The central thesis is that
a world economy requires a more developed network of nancial institu-
tions near the center than it does closer to the periphery. Hence, for exam-
ple, Mughal India, which was more central to the precolonial Asian world
economy, had a far more developed set of nancial institutions than did
precolonial Indonesia. Similarly, colonial India, as a colony of a core
power of the capitalist world system, continued to develop an intricate
set of nancial institutions, while the Dutch East Indies, attached to a
far lesser power, developed a far more truncated set of institutions.
Clearly, for Schrader, the key theoretical point of reference is Imman-
uel Wallerstein, but the design of this book breaks with the monistic view
of a single world system. This break is methodological rather than theo-
1849
retical, for there is in this book still a sort of functionalist determination
of the last instance: the world system gets the nancial institutions that
it needs, where and when it needs them. But by conceding a relative
autonomy to geographically delimited subsystems, Schrader is able to
proffer a causal rather than a functional account of the emergence of
those institutions. The long synthetic essays on India and Indonesia at
the heart of the book in which those accounts are elaborated are the
books best feature: lucid, economical, focused, and for the most part con-
vincing. Particularly noteworthy in these sections is an extraordinarily
ne-grained appreciation of the interpenetration and meshing of formal
and informal nancial institutions. By skillfully deploying an array of
theoretical categories developed, perhaps at too great length, in the intro-
ductory section of the book, Schrader is able to avoid reifying the notions
of formal and informal sectors without slipping into mere ad hoc descrip-
tion.
At the end of the book, though, the theoretical tension is not entirely
resolved; it is not altogether clear whether Schrader is arguing that India
garnered a denser network of nancial institutions because its place in
the world system required it or whether India garnered a more central
place in the world system because of its denser network of nancial insti-
tutions. Most of the material in the empirical sections of the book points
to the latter interpretation, the material in the concluding theoretical sec-
tion to the former. Nonetheless, despite this unresolved tension, Schrader
is largely successful in his avowed aim of showing how contemporary
nancial landscapes and regional differences result to a high degree from
processes in the past taking place both on the particular national level
as well as on a higher, structural level (pp. 3738).
There is, however, a less explicit agenda in this work about which I
have greater reservations: to demonstrate the centrality of nancial insti-
tutions to capitalist development on a world scale. The tight focus on
relations of exchange in this study often, I fear, slight the importance of
the means and relations of production. One nds this uneven emphasis,
for example, in the very able summary of the Great Firm theory of the
Mughal Empire, the notion that the Empire (and its British successors)
relied on a network of bankers who underwrote its expansion. One nds
no similar discussion of scholars who give primacy to the Mughals vary-
ing success in creating a patrimonial bureaucracy capable of collecting
land revenue. Similarly, great emphasis is placed on the ability of the
Dutch and British East India companies to tap into preexisting networks
of merchant bankers, without considering that in this trade many were
called but few were chosen. From the Portuguese on, the ofcial Euro-
pean trading enterprise regularly found itself stymied by its own agents
who found trading on their own account to be more protable than loy-
ally serving their rms. In the end, what distinguished both the British
and the Dutch was their transformation from trading companies to quasi
states whose revenues were based on agricultural production: land reve-
nue in the British case, plantation agriculture in the Dutch. These colo-
1850
Book Reviews
nial enterprises succeeded because they made their money the old-fash-
ioned waythey beat it out of the peasants.
In sum, then, this study is an interesting and unusual use of compara-
tive analysis in a theoretical framework that heretofore has ill supported
such work. Anyone who needs a convenient summary of the development
of nancial institutions over a very long period of time in either India
or Indonesia will nd this an accessible and for the most part reliable
rst stop. Those sympathetic to the longstanding critique of Wallersteins
neo-Smithian Marxism, however, will nd little in this study to change
their view.
Making Capitalism in China: The Taiwan Connection. By You-tien
Hsing. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Pp. xiv250. $35.00.
Doug Guthrie
New York University
In a time when scholarship on China increasingly relies on large-scale
surveys of household income to examine general issues of economic
change, it is refreshing to see a rigorous study that is driven by substan-
tive issues rather than available data. Combining ethnographic research
with in-depth interviews You-tien Hsings study of Taiwanese invest-
ment in southern China is as deep and systematic as it is informative.
The methodological appendix is impressive on its own: for this study,
Hsing conducted 221 in-depth interviews with Chinese ofcials, Taiwan-
ese investors, and Chinese managers and workers; she visited 40 factories
in Southern China; and she worked on the assembly line for extended
periods in two additional factories. The result is a study that extensively
examines an important aspect of economic development in China.
In the opening pages of the book, you get the sense that this is simply
going to be another of the studies that views China as a connections-
over-all-else world and that business and economic development in China
are completely structured around social ties, personal favors, the ex-
change of gifts, and corruption. However, throughout this nuanced and
balanced analysis, Hsing does a wonderful job of weaving a tale of cul-
tural particularism, institutional and historical contingency, and general
social analysis. Hsings central question revolves around how network
practices of Taiwanese investors and local ofcials in Southern China are
shaped by the institutional and historical conditions in which these actors
are embedded. Hsings argument essentially is the following: industry in
Taiwan is heavily organized around industrial and social networks, espe-
cially among medium- and small-scale rms. In the late 1980s, just as
local Chinese authoritiesespecially in southern Chinawere being
given economic autonomy (as well as responsibility for meeting bottom
lines) and just as Western investors were pulling out of China (in response
to the Tiananmen Square incident), Taiwan was loosening restrictions
1851
on its citizens visiting the mainland. With a common language and
knowledge of the nuances of gift exchange in China, medium- and small-
scale Taiwanese manufacturers brought their networking strategies to
Southern China.
Two issues lie at the heart of the argument. First, a decentralized state
that forges national policy at the center but relies on increasingly autono-
mous local administrations to carry out these rules has fundamental im-
plications for investment practices at local levels. Local ofcials, who are
under economic pressure to make ends meet, want to attract foreign in-
vestors to their jurisdictions, and the exible implementation of the laws
and policies that come from Beijing is the central bargaining chip they
have to offer potential investors. The key is that investors and ofcials
must keep these projects local and smalland thereby stay off of
Beijings radar screenso the size of investments is a central part of the
story. Second, though Hsing makes connections (called guanxi in China),
a central part of the story throughout the book, her analysis of the role
of connections in Taiwanese investment never loses sight of the extent
to which the connections are shaped by institutional contexts. Hsing
avoids the trap that many scholars of guanxi fall intothat guanxi is
something particular to Chinese society and that it is rampant throughout
China. Hsing repeatedly reminds readers that gift economies and connec-
tions are present in many societies and to varying degrees throughout
China, and the interesting project for research is to gure out the specic
institutional contexts that allow such practices to ourish. Hsings answer
here is that a history of network-based business practices among invest-
ors, common culture and language, and autonomy and economic pressure
for local ofcials explain the prevalence of network-based investment
practices among medium- and small-scale Taiwanese investors.
The weakness of the study lies in the attention to details: in three of
the chapters, Hsing spends much more time giving us background details
about different aspects of the structure of Taiwans fashion shoe industry
than she does using her own empirical research and data. While some of
the information related in chapters 1, 2, and 5 is necessary, I would have
preferred to have the discussion interspersed with direct information and
insights about how the managers and investors Hsing interviewed view
such issues as industrial networks in Taiwan or local autonomy in China.
An additional weakness is a lack of familiarity with certain relevant liter-
atures. While parts of the analysis draw appropriately on extant theories
(e.g., the work of Mark Grannovetter), Hsing eschews citations to rele-
vant literatures in institutional sociology. For any study so clearly inter-
ested in the ways that institutional contexts effect economic action, this
is an obvious lacuna, but the omission is especially noticeable in her dis-
cussion of creative imitation, which would clearly tie into Paul DiMag-
gio and Walter Powells theory of mimetic isomorphism. This is an unfor-
tunate gap, because Hsings balanced treatment of networks and
institutional effects could actually make signicant contributions in insti-
tutional research. Nevertheless, despite these gaps, this book is an excel-
1852
Book Reviews
lent study of investment in China and of patterns of international devel-
opment more generally.
Portraits of the Japanese Workplace: Labor Movements, Workers, and
Managers. By Kumazawa Makoto. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996.
Pp. xv267.
D. Hugh Whittaker
University of Cambridge
I rst encountered Kumazawa Makoto in an article on labor simplica-
tion, written several years before Bravermans de-skilling treatise and
drawing on empirical and theoretical studies of Japanese workplaces dat-
ing back to the early 1960s (Rodo tanjunka no ronri to genjitsu [The-
ory and Reality of the Simplication of Labor] in Nihon rodo kyokai
zasshi, June 1970). It was an eye opener, both for what it said about the
transformation of Japanese workplaces under rationalization and techno-
logical innovation at the time and for the current of scholarship it repre-
sented, empirically and theoretically rich but virtually unknown outside
Japan. Andrew Gordon may well have had the same experience, and we
must be grateful to him and Mikiso Hane for introducing Kumazawas
work in this book.
As Gordon points out in his introduction, Kumazawas roots are in the
school of scholars who took Western or British industrial relations and
working class solidarity as a model and from that basis criticized Japa-
nese industrial relations, especially the failure of the labor movement to
chart a course toward that model in the postwar period. It is not a sim-
plistic criticism, however, as constant references to light and dark in
this book suggest. Elsewhere, Kumazawa has suggested that Japanese
unions pressed for citizens rights (kokumin no kenri) and in many cases
gained them, but they failed to protect villager autonomy (sonmin no
jichi) or control over the labor process (Shokuta shakai no sengoshi
[Postwar History of the Workplace Community] in Sengo rodo kumiai
undoshi ron [On the History of the Postwar Labor Union Movement],
edited by S. Shimizu [Tokyo: Nihon Hyoronsha, 1982]). The key ques-
tions are whether, in the face of intense employer pressure, they had a
realistic alternative and whether the majority of workers who acquiesced
in the trade-off of autonomy for rights did so willingly and advisedly.
On these questions, the chapter on the transformation of the shop oor
in the steel industry in the late 1950s and 1960s offers important evidence,
because these changes set precedents that spread throughout Japanese
industry. They also laid the groundwork for the subsequent spread of
zero defect and quality control circles, which is discussed in another chap-
ter. Although the questions may not ultimately be resolved, these two
chapters are at the heart of Kumazawas workrightly soand are
highly informative.
1853
For those who have gained citizenship and whose interests do not
stray far from those of their employers, the outcome may well have been
favorable. For those who have not gained citizenship, options can be
limited and unpalatable, as is shown in the penultimate chapter on work-
ing women. For regular workers whose interests diverge from those of
their employer and who are unwilling to toe the line, there can be intense
hardship, as we see in the nal chapter: Twenty Years of a Bank Work-
ers Life. Here a Marxist banker called Kawabe faces various forms of
discrimination for his views and activities and experiences increasing iso-
lation within the bank. But he himself embodies many contradictions,
which is what makes him so real and Kumazawas analysis so interesting.
An enemy of capitalism, he works meticulously in capitalisms citadel
and is a family man to boot.
This book obviously calls into question naively rosy pictures of Japa-
nese industrial relations. However, it is also a critique of opposing pic-
tures painted with broad brush strokes, which dismiss Japanese labor
unions out of hand and assume that a power imbalance gives employ-
ersor bureaucratsa free hand to do what they will. The former does
not recognize the Kawabes of Japan; the latter dismisses the struggles of
the Kawabes (or those who ultimately desert his cause) and sees them
simply as workaholic bank employees. Kumazawa seeks to bring com-
plexity, contradiction, and subjectivity into the picture.
The book is clearly a critique of those who emphasize harmony and
groupism in Japanese culture as well. Indeed, Kumazawa argues that
Japanese workers have been very individualistic and wishes they were
less so. Like his groupism of the British working class, however, his atom-
istic individualism is only partly convincing, not because Japanese work-
ers are all groupist, but because those who have deserted Kawabe work
hard for a variety of reasons, and not simply to run up the promotion
ladder the company has cleverly lowered for them. And there are other
types of individualism in Japan, found for instance among small rm
workers and owners, which unfortunately are not explored in this book.
Such weaknesses acknowledged, this book deserves to be read widely
because it focuses on vital developments in Japans industrial relations
and fearlessly explores the complexities, contradictions, and meanings of
these developments. Atomistic individuals perhaps, the workers in this
book are human beings rather than robots, happy or exploited. For this
reason alone, the book deserves the attention of scholars of Japan. Por-
traits of the Japanese Workplace is highly recommended for all those who
are not satised with stereotypes of Japan and Japanese industrial rela-
tions and employment.
1854
Book Reviews
Work and Pay in the United States and Japan. By Clair Brown, Yoshi-
fumi Nakata, Michael Reich, and Lloyd Ulman. New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1997. Pp. xi234.
Christena Turner
University of California, San Diego
While it is common to observe that compared to American companies,
Japanese companies have more employee training, job security, employee
involvement, and seniority-based pay schemes, explorations of the com-
plex relationships between these practices and the ways in which they
inuence national economic performance are rare. This is the task Clair
Brown, Yoshifumi Nakata, Michael Reich, and Lloyd Ulman set out to
accomplish in Work and Pay in the United States and Japan. Drawing
on data from large American and Japanese companies and on national
economic data, they set company practices in the relevant institutional
contexts and do an ambitious cross-national comparison.
This is an empirically rich demonstration of the synergy between em-
ployment practices, job security, pay structure, and labor-management
relations. The authors dene two contrasting employment systems, SET
(security, employee involvement, and training) and JAM (job classica-
tion, adversarial relations, and minimal training systems). SET systems
are found in large Japanese rms and in U.S. companies that have
learned from the Japanese in recent decades. JAM systems are found
in more traditional U.S. rms, although in the United States professional
and managerial workers may be incorporated into SET human resource
systems even when production workers in the same rm are not. Doing
a nuanced comparison, they ask how elements of these systems work in
various employment environments in each country. Increased seniority
in a SET employment system increases voice in the United States but
not in Japan. The usual American distinctions between production and
managerial/professional workers are not found in Japan, but the SET
systems in Japan affect only the core workers in large rms, somewhere
between 17% and 50% of employed males by their estimates (p. 38).
Security of employment, training programs, and employee participa-
tion are all parts of an integrated human resource system wherein work-
ers are more motivated to take extensive training and managers to offer
it because both are assured of a long-term relationship. This clearly dif-
ferentiates Japanese and American employment practices because of
shorter average tenure in the United States. While these observations are
not new, the authors present extensive empirical detail to ground them
in recent corporate and national practice. They discover, for instance,
that in spite of the more extensive use of training in Japan, the Japanese
spend less on employee training than do U.S. companies (p. 80) and that
demonstrating a willingness to be trained aids Japanese workers in
achieving promotions and wage increases (p. 91).
The books strongest contribution is its sober look at specic aspects
1855
of human resource systems in the United States and Japan over the last
two decades of domestic and international economic challenges. Avoiding
the discourse of collapse and downfall, the authors analyze both efforts
to changemost Japanese companies have been trying to increase merit-
based components of pay since the early eightiesand outcomesvery
few Japanese companies have succeeded in making signicant changes
(p. 105). They point out ways in which U.S. companies have been inu-
enced by Japan but retain, for example, distinctly more exible labor
markets.
The effort to explain why, in spite of recent economic problems, Japa-
nese productivity has continued to grow and unemployment has re-
mained relatively low is an ambitious one, and it is here that the book
falters. Brown et al. conclude that SET systems are partially responsible
for some national comparative advantages and highlight practices like
the use of overtime for core employees as a substitute for new hiring
and just-in-time learning as a way to target on-the-job training for im-
mediate rm needs. They would, however, be on rmer ground if their
arguments incorporated larger institutional and political processes. Their
chapter on Shunto is a case in point. They offer a ne discussion of how
this national wage negotiation institution has been used from the late
1980s to suppress wages rather than equalize and raise them as it had
been doing since the 1950s when it was founded (p. 185), but they omit
the national political process that resulted in the merger of the national
federations Domei and Sohyo into the new federation Rengo in the mid-
1980s. The birth of Rengo was lamented by labor movement activists as
the death of progressive labor politics at the national level. The link be-
tween union-sponsored wage negotiation and national economic trends
is easier to understand when the virtual elimination of the radical Sohyo
federation, which founded and set the agenda for Shunto in the 1950s
and dominated it through the 1960s and 1970s, is linked to the more
recent emergence of conservative and conciliatory union bargaining.
While many of the elements linking rm employment systems and na-
tional economic performance are present in the book, the authors neglect
the political processes that link labor activism, corporate strategies, and
national and international economic policy and are unable to offer a
sharp explanation for national performance. Instead, they conclude that
overall economic performance is not determined by either rm employ-
ment systems or national economic institutions (p. 191) but that there is
an important interaction between these factors, a measured and appro-
priate if somewhat anticlimactic conclusion.
1856
Book Reviews
World of Possibilities: Flexibility and Mass Production in Western In-
dustrialization. By Charles F. Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin. New York:
Cambridge University Press. Pp. x510. $79.95.
Robert Salais
IRESCO
This book brings together a series of historical essays on varied economic
worlds (regions, geographically concentrated industries, and rms). Their
products are diverse, as are the periods under study (long or short, shift-
ing from the 18th century to the present) and the disciplines to which
their authors belong (though economic history and sociology predomi-
nate). We nd, for example, the silk industries of Lyon and London in
the 19th century, the cutlery industry of Solingen, Germany, since the
19th century, the British engineering industry (18401914) or the Italian
metalworking industry (19001920), the plastics industry in Oyonnax,
France, after World War II, and so on. What unites these economic
worlds is the fact that the actors, rms, and institutions tried to respond
to the changing difculties and uncertainties of the market by constantly
renewing and expanding their product lines and introducing new technol-
ogies. These essays are remarkable in themselves for their precision, in-
structiveness, and innovative methods (such as exploring new sources).
According to Charles Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin (who initiated the inter-
national seminar sponsored by the Maison des Sciences de lHomme in
Paris, where this research was elaborated and discussed), each of these
worlds offers a ground for thinking and trying out new ways of doing
economic history. In so doing, they have largely renewed the approach
introduced in their seminal article Historical Alternatives to Mass Pro-
duction. Politics, Markets and Technology in Nineteenth-Century Indus-
trialization, published in Past and Present in 1985:
Economic history has reached a turning point, if it is to continue pro-
viding lessons for contemporary thought. Indeed, todays economies are
marked by three factors: the fragility of institutions compelled to adapt
to ever-changing contexts, the recombinability and interpenetration of a
plurality of organizational forms, and the awareness of the actors role
in decision making, innovating, and creating institutions. The traditional
methodology of economic history is at fault, as it emphasizes the long-
term, historical periodization into major phases of crisis or growth and
a structuralist conception of social dynamics. Sabel and Zeitlin intend to
renew this methodology by insisting on the relationship between rational
economic actors and institutions. Their goal, as I see it, is to place eco-
nomic history within the framework of an institutionalism revisited by
the methodology used in history. In so doing, they have joined, albeit in
an original way, similar efforts underway in Europe, especially in France
(see Salais and Storper, Worlds of Production [Harvard University Press,
1997]), in economic history and sociology. This book is thus a highly im-
1857
portant contribution to the debate on action, coordination, and institu-
tions within social science.
The challengers in this area are, roughly speaking, neo-institutionalism
(Coase, Williamson, and so on) on the one hand and evolutionism (Gould,
and so on) on the other. Sabel and Zeitlin retain the rst groups concep-
tion of the rational actor, but they differentiate themselves by making
him a strategizer rather than a maximizer. The research in the book re-
veals actors as much concerned with determining, in all senses, the con-
text they are in as they are in pursuing what they take to be their advan-
tage within any context (p. 5). Action is embedded in strategies, which
are possible narratives linking the past, present, and future of the action
that are intelligible to the actors and provide a framework for their ac-
tion. The actors acquire an identity that structures them and makes them
aware of their place in a common destiny. Thus, they are capable of de-
signing institutions likely to generate the trust required for collective ac-
tion within uncertainty. The book offers several convincing illustrations:
for example, joint boards of arbitration or conciliation in the case of labor
disputes and systems of collective tutelage to maintain the ow of trade
in the market, despite the impossibility of drawing up complete contracts.
Clearly, we are far from evolutionism. The movement of history is not
a selection of able individuals but an adaptation process in which human
initiative and reection are paramount, involving recombinations, re-
elaborations, and compromises between various forms of organization.
All this sets out a path for fruitful research. The book is a ne way of
opening a discussion within the history of industrialization that will
surely ourish. Joining in at the outset, we might ask whether Sabel and
Zeitlin have not erred on the side of Schumpeterian optimism. Can we
generalize on the basis of the essay results? Should collective failures not
be studied more closely? Is history, and more broadly human life, only
intelligible as narration? Is rational reexive action not forced to compro-
mise with material objects and products and with a temporal trajectory
inscribed in institutions? Should the concept of possibility not be exam-
ined in greater depth, for, while it appears in the title, it remains at the
horizon of the book?
1858
Book Reviews
Between Equalization and Marginalization: Women Working Part-Time
in Europe and the United States of America. Edited by Hans-Peter Bloss-
feld and Catherine Hakim. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Pp. xx333. $85.00.
Gunn Elisabeth Birkelund
Institute for Social Research, Norway
Part-time work is a cross-national trend of growing signicance, yet pat-
terns of part-time work differ across nations and over time. This book,
edited by Hans-Peter Blossfeld (University of Bremen) and Catherine
Hakim (London School of Economics), is an impressive cross-national
study of the long-term development of part-time work in Europe and the
United States. Focusing primarily on womens part-time work, the vari-
ous chapters comprise thorough empirical case studies of country proles
of part-time work conducted by national researchers, using a wide range
of cross-sectional and longitudinal data. The book includes studies of
part-time work in the following countries: Central and Eastern European
countries, written by Sonja Drobnic; Greece by Haris Symeonidou; Italy
by Tindara Addabbo; France by Laurence Coutrot, Ire` ne Fournier, An-
nick Kieffer, and Eva Lelie`vre; West Germany by Hans-Peter Blossfeld
and Go tz Rohwer; the Netherlands by Paul De Graaf and Hedwig Ver-
meulen; Britain by Brendan J. Burchell, Angela Dale, and Heather Joshi;
Denmark by Sren Lenth-Srensen and Go tz Rohwer; Sweden by Mari-
anne Sundstro m; and the United States by Sonja Drobnic and Immo
Wittig.
The country-specic studies document a postwar growth in female la-
bor force participation and the development of full-time and part-time
work. Several authors also include statistics on mens part-time work,
which in many countries is nonnegligible and increasing. The distinction
between part-time work, exible work, and reduced work hours is also
discussed. The impact of education and family-stage for married wom-
ens labor supply is emphasized. Several authors also discuss the impact
of political and institutional frameworks, such as the availability of child
care arrangements and rules of taxation. Since most studies rely on of-
cial statistics and individual-level surveys, such as the Labour Force Sur-
veys, changes in the employers behavior cannot be studied directly. Indi-
rectly, however, some aspects of demand-side mechanisms are addressed,
such as the thesis of the reserve army and various theses pertaining to
the restructuring of the labor market in terms of postindustrial develop-
ment, sexual segregation, and public sector growth.
The research design of the book is a challenging one. The aim is to
investigate the rise in womens part-time employment in modern societies
in a cross-national perspective, combined with an awareness of time-re-
lated variations in industrial structure and economic development. There
is always a danger that a project like this results in a number of very
interesting and well-performed national studies (as this book also does),
1859
without the synthesis of results that a comparative perspective requires.
In the last chapter, however, Blossfeld integrates the common features
as well as differences between the countries studied by returning to the
six clusters of societies (or welfare state regimes) that was advocated
in the rst chapter of the book (this typology is partly following Gsta
Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism [Polity Press,
1990]): The Scandinavian welfare states; the liberal welfare states, such
as Britain and the USA; the conservative welfare states, such as West
Germany and the Netherlands; France (with the most sophisticated pro-
visions of child care within Europe); the South European countries; and
nally the former socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe.
These clusters of countries have different packages of family, employ-
ment and welfare policies (p. 12) that are expected to inuence womens
employment in the postwar period. The results show that the integration
of married women into the labor market has occurred between the mid-
1950s and late-1970s in Northern Europe and the United States. Married
womens part-time work is a typically Northern European phenomenon.
Within the former socialist countries, part-time work hardly existed, and
presently, part-time work is not specically related to women. The coun-
tries in Southern Europe hardly supply part-time jobs, and the editors
argue that this canat least partlybe explained by the later economic
development of these countries.
The title of the book reects two perspectives on womens labor market
participation. These perspectives are briey elaborated by the editors in
the introduction of the book. The rst perspective argues that womens
labor force participation increases their independence and may be a vehi-
cle for greater equality between men and women; whereas, the other per-
spective argue that most womenin particular married womenwork
part-time, and part-time work is secondary or marginalized work. The
editors of this book argue that the rst perspective is too optimistic, since
it overstates the liberating effects of womens employment; whereas the
second is too pessimistic, since it exaggerates the negative aspects of part-
time work. Blossfeld and Hakim, therefore, are in favor of a third per-
spective, which emphasizes that married womens work must be under-
stood within the context of their families and the sexual division of labor
in the family. Part-time workers are usually secondary earners within
their families, thus the high level of job satisfaction that often is docu-
mented among part-time workers may not be a paradox after all: Low-
paid and noncareer jobs can not only be tolerated but even enthusiasti-
cally appreciated by dependent wives and other secondary earners, (pref-
ace) I would want to add that these women would alsogiven the
choicemost certainly prefer part-time work with better terms.
In order to avoid the time bind of present-day societies (see, Arlie R.
Hochschild, Time Bind [Metropolitan Books, 1997]), part-time work may
be seen as an indicator of a new and alternative work orientation, since it
allows women to structure their time schedules differently. Yet the male
1860
Book Reviews
model of full-time continuous employment is not challenged, since part-
time workers are dependent on a main breadwinner.
Despite the national differences in the overall level of womens part-
time work, these ndings also suggest that there are cross-national simi-
larities and continuities over time in the structuring of gender relations;
married women still carry out the major part of child care and domestic
work, yet their labor market proles differ greatly.
A comparative design can illuminate the importance of political and
ideological country-specic contexts, and the longitudinal perspective re-
veals different country-specic trajectories. This book is an important
contribution to our understanding of part-time work and womens em-
ployment across countries and over time. The book contains useful statis-
tics and analyses of part-time work in European countries and the United
States, and I can recommend it to anyone interested in labor markets,
family research, and comparative welfare state research.
Essential Outsiders: Chinese and Jews in the Modern Transformation of
Southeast Asia and Central Europe. Edited by Daniel Chirot and An-
thony Reid. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998. Pp. vii335.
$25.00 (paper).
Walter P. Zenner
University at Albany
The economic success and political vulnerability of the overseas Chinese
have frequently been compared to that of Jews in Europe and elsewhere.
Both groups have been subsumed under rubrics such as middleman mi-
norities or ethnic entrepreneurs. There have been articles that compare
a specic Jewish community in one country (Poland or Romania) with a
Chinese community in another land (the Philippines or Indonesia), as well
as various works that have compared these groups among others. This
is the rst volume specically devoted to a comparison of Chinese in one
region and Jews in another area. The phrase, essential outsiders, speaks
to the central issue of how the Chinese in Southeast Asia and the Jews
in Europe played central roles in the lives of these lands, while remaining
strangers. They were strangers in Georg Simmels sense of being in-
side the society but not of it.
The volume as a whole conveys a particular viewpoint regarding both
groups as well as issues in the sociology of ethnic relations. The two intro-
ductory essays by the editors, Daniel Chirot, a Europeanist, and Anthony
Reid, an Asia specialist, are the only ones that directly compare the two
groups. In parts two and three, there are essays on both Chinese and
Jews, while part four is devoted exclusively to essays on Chinese business
in contemporary Southeast Asia. Although one essay, Victor Karadys
article on Hungarian Jewry, brings the story of one Jewish community
1861
into the 1990s, the other articles on Jews, by Hillel Kieval and Steven
Beller, deal with the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For the editors,
the issues relating to anti-Semitism and European Jewry are passe . The
dilemmas relating to people who are identied as Chinese are very much
part of the present scene in Southeast Asia, having prospered during the
recent boom. The articles by Kasian Tejapira, Gary Hamilton, and Tony
Waters; Linda Y. C. Lim and L. A. Peter Gosling; and Edgar Wickberg
portray communities that have become more, rather than less, assertive
about their Chinese identity, unlike Chinese in the region in the 1960s.
The assertiveness of the Chinese may have some relevance for the United
States, considering the role attributed to Chinese immigrants to the
United States as well as wealthy businessmen of Chinese ancestry, such
as the Riadys in Southeast Asia in the campaign fund-raising scandal
during 1996.
The essays by Chirot and Reid, as well as the other contributors, show
familiarity with what has been called entrepreneurial or middleman
minority theories. Yet the editors, in particular, dismiss these theories.
Reid writes that the nomenclature used by the North American middle-
man minority theorists is too broad, and their lumping together of
status-gap minorities in developing nations with immigrant small busi-
nesses in the United States is not useful (p. 36). Some of the authors do
address these theories head on. Kieval, for instance, uses his essay to re-
fute the economic explanations implicit in most middleman minority the-
ories in accounting for anti-Semitism. His analysis of propaganda used in
19th-century central Europe to support accusations that Jews murdered
Christian children for ritual purposes was not grounded in either an eco-
nomic or a medieval theological discourse but in a modern criminological
language. Takashi Shiraishi also places the rise of anti-Sinicism in Indo-
nesia into a larger context. He shows that the Chinese role in the Indone-
sian colonial economy was not static and that Dutch colonial ofcials, as
well as Indonesian Muslim activists, viewed it differently in various pe-
riods. The stress on historical change is a major theme in this book. These
two articles go along with the editors emphasis on a nationalistic frame-
work that excludes Jews and Chinese from the national community as
an explanation for the status of these groups. They claim that the blood
and civic varieties of nationalism explain the different fates of Jews and
Chinese during various periods and in different countries.
Whether one comes to this subject matter from the eld of middleman
minorities or from comparative nationalism and ethnic relations, the es-
says here do provide one with useful comparisons, contrasts, and general-
izations. For instance, Steven Beller, on the Jews of Vienna, contrasts
anti-Semitic Vienna with other Hapsburg cities and populations, such
as the Germans of Prague and Hungarian Budapest, where non-Jews
were friendlier to Jews than in Vienna. Takashi Shiraishi shows similar
changes over time in relations between Chinese and Muslims in Java.
The present climate in Southeast Asia, in which anti-Jewish sentiment
is promulgated by Muslims makes Chinese in the area loathe to identify
1862
Book Reviews
themselves with Jews, as the editors point out. Yet, not only have the
Chinese been called the Jews of Southeast Asia by outsiders, they have
also at times seen themselves in this way (W.P. Zenner, We are the
Jews of . . .: The Symbolic Encounter of Diaspora Chinese and Jews,
in Points East, vol 8:3:1 pp. 34, 1618).
There are also some roads not taken in this book. The parallels be-
tween the wealthy Chinese in Indonesia and Thailand, who have been
clients of powerful military elites, and the court Jews of 18th-century cen-
tral Europe are close, despite the preindustrial nature of the latter econo-
mies. This would be a fruitful eld for future research; yet there are im-
portant differences. The global economy plays a much more important
role than the emerging world-system of the early modern period. In
addition, the connections between China, Taiwan, Singapore, and the
minority Chinese are many stranded. In fact, the opening of mainland
China to global capitalism has had a major impact on the Chinese in
Southeast Asia. Many of the Chinese in this region have now been able
to demonstrate their roles as brokers between China and their present
homelands, a relationship far different from what it was in the past.
While the authors of the articles in this book write during the boom,
several suggest that in the event of a sharp economic downturn, relations
between the Chinese and their neighbors may turn in a hostile direction.
This has not occurred in Thailand, but Indonesia in early 1998 has seen
a number of anti-Chinese riots. As the title of this volume makes clear,
they remain outsiders. In general, I would recommend this volume
highly to both those interested in Southeast Asia and Europe and those
who wish to learn more about the interaction of economics and nation-
alism.
Opposite Poles: Immigrants and Ethnics in Polish Chicago, 19761990.
By Mary Patrice Erdmans. University Park: Pennsylvania State Univer-
sity Press, 1998. Pp. xi267. $50.00 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).
Mary E. Kelly
Central Missouri State University
Opposite Poles by Mary Erdmans is an engaging account of the struggles
of three distinct groups in Chicagos Polonia to work together to ensure
an independent, democratic Poland. While Erdmans focuses on new im-
migrants (Polish immigrants since the 1960s) and ethnics (descendants of
earlier immigrants), she also analyzes the role of World War II emigre s
who acted as mediators between the two groups. Like the new immi-
grants, the emigre s had been born in Poland, but they had lived in the
United States for decades and thus also shared many characteristics with
ethnics. Although much of the current literature on ethnics and immi-
grant groups assumes uniformity among people of the same nationality,
Erdmans discovers that there are extensive differences among groups. In
1863
short, identity and solidarity are inuenced by borders created by migra-
tional and generational differences. She situates her study in the pivotal
years of 197690 when Poland was making headlines around the world
as Poles tried to free themselves from the grip of Soviet rule. Data was
collected through participant observation, interviews, archival resources,
and surveys.
Erdmans suggests that in some circumstances the various groups were
able to work together toward their common goals. Different resources
gave them something to exchange, while having distinct networks mini-
mized competition. For example, new immigrants had ties to the opposi-
tion in Poland whereas Polish Americans had connections to American
institutions and ofcials. They also supplied legitimacy to each other; Pol-
ish-American organizations gave legitimacy to the newer ones because
of their established history, while political refugees lended legitimacy to
Polonia. New immigrants were able to channel aid to local groups and
individuals in the Polish underground through their contacts, while Pol-
ish Americans were limited to giving assistance to legitimate institutions
in Poland.
The groups experienced conict, however, when their strategies and
goals diverged. Although all the groups traced their ancestry to Poland,
their political strategies and ethnic identities are affected by their political
identitiesPolish or American. For this reason, new immigrants, with
strong ties to Poland, advocated more radical measures for helping soli-
darity activists than did Polish-American ethnics. Frustration also arose
over who the legitimate leaders of Polonia should be. New immigrants
believed that their knowledge about the current situation made them bet-
ter leaders, while the established Polish Americans believed that they
were the superior leaders due to their American connections. The differ-
ences became glaringly apparent during the Polish partially free elections
of 1989. In this instance, national loyalty took precedence over ethnic
identity. It did not matter if one felt culturally attached to Poland, be-
cause it was a political decision whether or not to vote.
One of the most fascinating accounts in her book is the policing of
ethnic boundaries within Polonia. The ethnics and immigrants both be-
lieved that they were the authentic Poles in the United States. The new
immigrants focused their identity around current events while Polish
Americans had a historical orientation. As a result, new immigrants ac-
cused the Polish Americans of being more interested in doing the polka
than in the struggles of the solidarity workers in Poland. Polish Ameri-
cans, however, thought the new immigrants should be concerned also
about U.S. issues, such as defamation and cultural maintenance. They
simply had different understandings of what it was to be Polish and cen-
tered their identities around disparate cultural symbols. The question
raised was, who are the true Poles? Those who had lived under Com-
munist rule and thus were tainted by it or those who had ed Poland
before Soviet occupation?
It would be interesting to see similar studies done on Polish-American
1864
Book Reviews
communities outside of the Chicago area. This study is unique in that
there is such a large concentration of members from all three groups in
Chicago. Did the same identity and national issues come about in smaller
communities? It is likely that in areas where people of Polish ancestry
(whether born in the United States or Poland) are small in number and
dispersed in the suburbs that there would be a stronger inclination to
embrace the new immigrants, despite the differences. In fact, in commu-
nities without a signicant e migre population, new immigrants might be
considered the real ethnics, not those who had been in the United States
for several generations.
This book should be of great interest to American ethnic and Polish
historians as well as to scholars of immigration, ethnicity, and social
movements. Erdmans clearly summarizes the historical circumstances in
both Poland and the United States, which lead to the cooperation and
conict between the ethnics, e migres, and immigrants in Polonia. In addi-
tion, she situates her discussion in the literature on ethnic identity, assimi-
lation, and pluralism. Finally, she synthesizes the relevant literature on
social movements to help explain the different resources and strategies
available to the Polonia organizations to mobilize for a democratic Po-
land.
Competing Visions of Islam in the United States: A Study of Los Angeles.
By Kambiz GhaneaBassiri. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997.
Pp. xiv202. $59.95.
Aminah Beverly McCloud
DePaul University
The study of Islam in the United States is an increasingly viable eld of
inquiry open to investigation by scholars in every discipline in both the
social sciences and the humanities. While this text has critical deciencies
as an in-depth sociological analysis, it is of denite value for the au-
thors discussion of important, hidden issues in Muslim communities. It
is the analysis of these issuessuch as gender, ethnocentricity, new inter-
pretations of scripturethat make this text important. The central argu-
ment of this text is that in the absence of a central Islamic authority (i.e.,
no government or religious oversight) in the United States Muslims have
become ethnic enclaves with freely competing interpretations of Islam
and its practice.
GhaneaBassiri, an American Muslim of Iranian descent, situates his
study as a survey from a 13-page questionnaire given to a variety of Mus-
lims living in Los Angeles and its suburbs. Unfortunately, the survey in-
strument is far too ambitious for the population, is not reproduced in the
text, and was not analyzed. He uses 83 multiple choice and 14 short an-
swer questions for a respondent population that is signicantly under 18
years old (36%). Because of the preponderant age of the respondents one
1865
questions the relevancy of the questions to them as well as their ability
to answer them. Even though some of the questions are used (approxi-
mately 45) throughout the text to enhance discussion, we are unable to
surmise who answered the questions or what values have been assigned
to the responses used. I surmise that what we actually can benet from
are GhaneaBassiris discussion, based upon his extensive experiences of
the issues, concerns, and problems in a diverse Muslim community.
There are several, at least seven, studies of Muslims living in Los
Angeles that attempt to describe the population. This text does not add
to that general information but does for example, take readers inside
some Iranian organizational meetings. From this we are able to take a
rare look at Shiis operating in social groupings rather than individually
as is typically the case in most studies. Here a good discussion of Shiism
would have been helpful in giving readers background for understanding
issues around the Iranian Revolution, an event that is the major dividing
line in the community.
What emerges as signicant for research on Islam in America is how
Muslims understand Islam in the United States (p. 11). Here Ghanea-
Bassiri explains the dimensions of Muslim outreach to each other and to
non-Muslims (dawah) insightfully. He explores in some detail the
changes in Islamic understandings that are occurring in the United
States, such as changes in the role of the imam and the diversity of
thought in the absence of authority. Examination of gender issues leads
to discussions of women leading prayers in the mosque and divergence
of concerns about womens dress, dating, and even diet.
GhaneaBassiri asserts that in the United States Islamic laws have been
deemphasized as American Muslims are quite pleased with the absence
of authority that dictates everything in the Muslim world. He found that
Muslims have the same problems as the majority society when it comes
to raising children. The various freedoms in this society and the violence
cause problems across the board. It is these freedoms, however, that per-
mit women to assume more meaningful roles Islamically, such as their
attendance and participation in mosque activities. This does not mean
that the longstanding Muslim assertion of equality between men and
women is being actualized. Even in America women almost never share
in the ofcial leadership of mosques. The American Muslim community
like its world counterpart has not provided an atmosphere where there
is an equality of responsibility. Immigrant women, though they have the
freedom to go, still do not attend the mosque. Women who do go nd
the separation or rather the type of separation between men and women
for the congregational prayer, negative or isolating.
Even though Muslims of differing ethnicities and ideologies interact
more in the United States than anywhere else, there is only tolerance, not
cooperation, not a real brotherhood. No leader has emerged to lead the
whole community. GhaneaBassiri expresses the sentiments of many Mus-
lims when he points to Muslim leaders who do not actually have follow-
ers. He asserts that it is the lack of leadership that prevents Muslims
1866
Book Reviews
from exerting any political or measurable social inuence. Almost every
aspect of living Islam has undergone some change. Mosques are built and
maintained by individuals in the United States rather than the govern-
ment as in the Muslim world. While this can be good it denitely changes
the understanding of place of prostration, since individual owners can
then decide who can or who cannot come in.
This text could have given more information on the interactions of
Muslims in the general Los Angeles community but, as previously stated,
nds its forte in discussions of concerns and issues. GhaneaBassiri does a
good job of integrating other research on issues into his narrative thereby
adding to its credibility. This is a welcome addition to texts on Islam in
America.
From Black to Biracial: Transforming Racial Identity among Americans.
By Kathleen Odell Korgen. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1998. Pp. ix143.
$55.00.
Michelle D. Byng
Temple University
In From Black to Biracial, Kathleen Odell Korgen proposes that there
has been a transformation in the racial order of the United States. She
argues that the civil rights era changed societal recognition of and indi-
vidual identication among those persons who have an African-American
and a white parent. Although historically the one-drop rule assigned
all persons with known African heritage to black racial identity, it is no
longer strictly applied. Today these individuals can identify and are so-
cially recognized as biracial.
Korgens analysis is based on 64 interviews with persons who have a
black and a white parent: eight primary interviews and 22 secondary
interviews (from Lise Funderburgs Black, White, Other [William Mor-
row, 1994]) with persons who were born before 1965 and 32 primary
interviews with Boston area college students who were born after 1965.
(The methodology is outlined in an appendix.) The rst chapter gives a
well-written and informative history of miscegenation and black/white
racial identity in the United States from 1619 to the present. The next
chapter uses three case studies of biracial adults, born before, during, and
after the civil rights movement, to examine how social context inuences
racial self-identication. Here Korgen establishes the foundation for her
proposition that those born before the civil rights movement adhere to
the one-drop rule and identify racially as black, while those born during
and after the movement acknowledge or adopt biracial identity. Chapter
3 looks at the inuence of appearance, the civil rights era, culture, and
neighborhood and family on black versus biracial self-identication. The
evidence here points to the importance of social class and neighborhood
composition for racial self-identication. Korgen argues that racial identi-
1867
cation is problematic for those who have a mixed racial heritage. How-
ever, the concept of race is shifting, although the boundary between black
and white still exists (p. 55). Even though the younger cohort identies
as biracial, none of the respondents identify as white. In chapter 4, Kor-
gen argues that in college the younger group of biracial Americans face
a tremendous amount of social pressure, from both blacks and whites,
to racially identify as black. Dating provides the litmus test for which
racial group a biracial student has chosen. Failing the racial litmus test
can have serious consequences: Some are literally driven from the com-
munities in which they nd themselves tested (p. 66). In the following
chapter, Korgen applies the concept of marginality to the experiences of
her respondents. Even though the younger cohort is willing to label them-
selves biracial, they, like their older counterparts, express some difculty
around being able to t in. On the other hand, many of the respondents
perceive themselves as having a more objective view of race than those
who are not biracial. Chapter 6 examines symbolic interactionist and
postmodernist theories of identity formation. Korgen argues that these
theories provide useful insights into racial identity transformation, how-
ever, they should be expanded to include chosen identities (p. 95). She
says globalization and economic shifts require that people have more uid
identities. As identities shift, so do persons demands on society. This
in turn prompts a further alteration in social structure (p. 95). In the
nal chapter, Korgen addresses the policy implications of her ndings.
She notes that biracial people face the same discrimination and racially
based injustices that African Americans face. Additionally, like other
Americans, her respondents have varying opinions about afrmative ac-
tion, but they are overwhelmingly supportive of biracial Americans bene-
ting from it. Also, this chapter examines adding a multiracial category
to the United States census in 2000. Here the concerns are with whether
biracial/multiracial people will succeed in having their interest in this
recognized and what form the question would take (i.e., allowing people
to check as many boxes as apply or a single box labeled multiracial).
According to Korgen, the multiracial future of the United States is at
hand (p. 118).
For those who are interested in the racial categories that will appear
on the census in 2000, Korgens research is very useful. She clearly dem-
onstrates that her younger respondents see themselves as having more
than one racial identity, even though they are very aware that American
society continues to apply the one-drop rule in identifying them racially
(see, e.g., chap. 4 and p. 114). Thus, Korgens analysis is not fully convinc-
ing in terms of her argument that the racial identity of biracial Americans
is no longer socially constructed as black. She never provides an analysis
of a transformation in the racial structure of American society to support
her proposition about societal change. The only applicable data she pre-
sents are from a survey of 204 New England area college students, where
74% of them agreed that people with an African-American and a white
parent should be able to identify as biracial (p. 42).
1868
Book Reviews
Furthermore, Korgens analysis is weakened by her focus on identity
theories without incorporating race and ethnicity theories. While it is rea-
sonable to propose that people, to some degree, can choose their identities;
within the subeld of race and ethnic relations, one factor that distin-
guishes race from ethnicity in the United States is the optional (or choice)
character of ethnicity and the identiability that is associated with racial
labeling. Additionally, it is the ability to identify those who are black or
nonwhite that makes them easy targets for discrimination. Although Kor-
gen nally acknowledges that biracial persons, and, what is more impor-
tant, her respondents experience the same discrimination as African
Americans, she never analyzes if these experiences inuence whether her
respondents identify as black or biracial.
While I agree with Korgen that today there is more willingness to ac-
knowledge the conicts around black/white racial identity, biracialism
does not resolve the racial dilemmas in American society. If as Korgen
suggests, Our multiracial future is at hand (p. 118), maybe it should
begin by acknowledging the multiracial identity of African Americans
that she outlines in her rst chapter. Wider awareness of this history may
have the potential to close the racial divide and transform the racial struc-
ture of the United States.
After Pomp and Circumstance: High School Reunion as an Autobiograph-
ical Occasion. By Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi. Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1998. Pp. x203. $39.00 (cloth); $14.00 (paper).
Shaunna L. Scott
University of Kentucky
Perhaps it was fortuitous for Vinitzky-Seroussi that her analysis of high
school reunions arrived in my mailbox near the 20th anniversary of my
own high school commencement. My general enthusiasm for this topic
and my favorable assessment of the authors description and analysis
may result from my reunion state of mind. The time has come for me
to reminisce and account for myself, after all. So, what could be more
enjoyable and enlightening than reading about others in a similar situa-
tion? However, the fact that this book offers an accessible and competent
analysis of an underresearched social phenomena should make it appeal-
ing to most sociological reading audiences, regardless of when they gradu-
ated high school or what their experiences of high school and high school
reunions may have been.
Vinitzky-Seroussi examines high school reunions as autobiographical
occasions (p. 3), a term coined by Robert Zussman (Contemporary Soci-
ology [1996] 25:143) to refer to social settings in which actors share their
life stories. This author takes seriously Zussmans complaint that auto-
biographical scholarship concentrates too much on the narrative while
paying scant attention to the social context in which the narrative un-
1869
folds. She sets about the task of providing an explicitly sociological ac-
count of identity construction and life story narration that occurs at high
school reunions. For the most part, the book succeeds in this task quite
well. In fact, the primary strength and appeal of the book is its absolute
insistence upon the social nature and embeddness of human beings, even
in their most personal and individual endeavors of self-scrutiny, re-
ection, reminiscence, and interaction at the microlevel.
This analysis is based upon participant observation at ve class re-
unions held at three suburban East Coast high schools (one from a mid-
dle-class neighborhood and two from lower-middle-class areas) as well as
interviews with 94 reunion participants, 200 questionnaires from reunion
attendees who were not interviewed, and questionnaires from 115 indi-
viduals who declined to attend their high school reunions. It covers such
topics as the construction of personal and situated identities, the creation
of communities and collectives, how pasts and presents can be connected
and evaluated, and how collective and personal memories are forged. The
author takes a symbolic interactionist approach to these subjects, with
particular reliance on Erving Goffmans dramaturgical metaphor and
Charles Cooleys concept of the looking glass self. In general, the book
is well researched; it makes a clear argument and employs appropriate
methodological tools and theoretical perspectives in accomplishing its in-
tellectual goals. Readers on such general sociological topics as collective
memory, community, social control, identity, autobiographical occasions,
and the study of life story and narrative should nd this book worthy of
their attention.
This work is also a prime candidate for use in undergraduate courses
where it is important to offer a good read on a sexy topic that is,
above all, clearly focused upon the social dimension of human life and
thought. Readers of AJS who are considering this as an undergraduate
text should be forewarned, however, that the author occasionally employs
concepts without adequately dening themalienation, for example
(p. 34). Similarly, in a discussion of spouses reunion experiences, she
writes, spouses bracket the event (p. 64). Without adequate explication,
undergraduates could be left confused by this statement. In the same
vein, the author cites Howard Chudacoff (How Old Are You? [Princeton
University Press, 1989]) in order to make the claim that age-based refer-
ence groups have assumed great importance in contemporary American
society. Yet, she never adequately describes the empirical basis upon
which she and Chudacoff have based this conclusion. Finally, chapter 3,
which makes an excellent argument concerning the subtle processes of
social control operating in even the most benign and voluntary social
settings, could use some editing with attention to organizational concerns.
More troubling, however, is the appearance that the author may be
overgeneralizing from this study of (predominantely) white, East Coast
adults to American culture, more generally. In an attempt to counter
exaggerated claims concerning the death of the subject, on one hand, as
1870
Book Reviews
well as criticisms of American culture as individualist, shallow and overly
concerned with appearances, on the other, Vinitzky-Seroussi occasionally
oversteps the empirical limits of her study. Statements, such as Ameri-
cans are loath to confront tension between outer appearance and inner
beliefs (p. 15) and contemporary Americans nd it difcult to com-
pletely separate them [situated and personal identity] and have trouble
living with the tension between what is publicly held and what is inter-
nally felt (p. 162), push the boundaries of what can be reasonably con-
cluded on the basis of this data. Though more limited in scope than its
author sometimes admits, this book is nevertheless interesting and sig-
nicant.
Procreative Man. By William Marsiglio. New York: New York Univer-
sity Press, 1998. Pp. xi276. $55.00 (cloth); $18.95 (paper).
Barbara Katz Rothman
City University of New York
Just think how far we have come: Someone can write a book called Pro-
creative Man, and that is exactly what it is aboutmen, fellas, guys, not
women. Just think how far we have to go: Someone can write a book
called Procreative Man, and the text runs to less than 200 pagesthere
are only 30 pages of references, not all of which are even about men.
I am grateful to William Marsiglio for having done this book: it is a
very useful piece of work. The bibliography alone, wonderfully interdisci-
plinary, including some classics but brought right up to date, makes the
book indispensible. Want to know what is known about men and birth
control, men and childbirth, men and abortion? This is the place to begin
ones research.
The problem is that we are indeed only at a beginning. Look up cesar-
ean section in the index, as I did, to see what is known about mens
experiences with this surgical procedure that accounts for close to one-
fourth of the births in the United States, and you nd it mentioned once.
Look up lactation, breastfeeding, nursingnot listed. Am I focusing too
much on men as other here? So look up impotence: two references, both
in passing.
When it comes to reporting the data, the book isnecessarilylled
with phrases like while no reliable data exists and perhaps, maybe,
and one study suggests. This is not Marsiglios problem; this is his con-
tribution. He highlights for us that we have not really bothered to ask
these questions. We do not know a lot about how fathers whose children
are born by cesarean section experience that event, how it does or does
not affect their relations with their partners or the children themselves.
We do not know much about how men experience living with what the
breastfeeding literature likes to call the nursing couple. And until Via-
1871
gra burst on the scene, we did not even know how many men are troubled
by their (relative) impotence, and we still do not know what if anything
that has to do with their experience of themselves as fathers.
So while I would like to see a 500-page, densely packed encyclopedia
of procreative man, I am grateful for what I have in this book. The best
statement of what this book is about, its accomplishments and limita-
tions, is offered by the author in the preface. He assures us that while
the title is simple, he does not mean to imply or portray a singular gure,
a universal procreative man. He remains sensitive to the varieties of
experience men have. Obviously, procreation means different things to
men older and younger, married, single and gay, fathers of newborns,
grandfathers, nonfathers, and to men of different cultural backgrounds.
But where is the data supposed to come from for Marsiglio to draw this
out for us? The paucity of data on some of the topics I cover limits my
ability to explore the procreative experiences for different categories of
men, many of whom are affected by different types of masculinities. My
principle contribution, then, is to develop new ways of thinking about
mens diverse procreative experiences and to generate future research av-
enues (p. x).
I think he is much better at the latter than the former. I saw dozens
of different dissertations rise up before my eyes as I read this book. I did
not, however, feel I had come to some new way of thinking or under-
standing mens diverse procreative experiences.
The rst chapter does lay out a theoretical scheme, guided, Marsiglio
informs us, by symbolic interactionism, the scripting perspective, and
identity theory, each briey explained. His conceptual model is organized
around two loosely dened social pscyhological concepts or themes,
which he calls procreative consciousness and procreative responsibil-
ity (p. 5). The next chapter provides a brief history from the discovery
of biological paternity through the HIV epidemic, all in under 20 pages.
The third chapter, Gender, Sex and Reproduction, I found most pro-
ductive of theoretical thought: the answers may not be available, but the
questions are very rich indeed. Chapters 4 and 5, on birth control and
on abortion, are the most solidly data based. Chapter 6 on Pathways to
Paternity and Social Fatherhood talks about pregnancy, new reproduc-
tive technologies, adoption, and stepfatherhood. I want to know more
about how men feel about nurturance, about their relationships with chil-
dren, and how that does or does not relate to ideas about paternity in
the bio-legal denitions. Here is where gender politics between the author
and this reviewer come to the fore. As an adoptive mother and as a sociol-
ogist who focuses on the signicance of human relationships, I felt dis-
tressed by the conclusions of the section on adoption and stepfathers:
While anecdotal evidence reveals that children are sometimes quite close
with adoptive fathers and stepfathers, this does not negate the possibility
that children may at times emphasize the presence or absence of a biologi-
cal connection. Indeed, some adopted children devote a considerable
amount of time and energy to locating their birth parents (p. 143). We
1872
Book Reviews
do not need to relegate the signicance of family ties in adoption and
stepparenting to anecdotal evidence. We have better than that. And
when we do look at the adoption search literature, what is immediately
apparent is that the search has been overwhelmingly for birth mothers
and relatively rarely for genetic fathers. And what does any of that tell
us about procreative man?
By the last chapter, Marsiglio and I had parted company. The future
of Procreative Man includes a call for a Pregnancy Resolution/Child
Support (PRCS) contract (p. 76), ideally signed prior to partners having
sex (p. 175), which would delineate the negotiated rights and responsi-
bilities of the parties involved (p. 75). As a man who began this book
discussing his own entry into fatherhood with an unplanned pregnancy
when he was 18, Marsiglio seems to have wandered rather far from the
real world.
In spite of my concerns, I return to where I started: This book is a
good indication of how far we have come and how far we have to go in
understanding procreative man.
Post-Soviet Women: From the Baltic to Central Asia. Edited by Mary
Buckley. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. xvii316.
$59.95 (cloth); $22.95 (paper).
Bolshevik Women. By Barbara Evans Clements. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1997. Pp. xiv338. $64.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).
Rochelle Ruthchild
Norwich University
The plight of the majority of the population in the former Soviet Union
has received little attention. Women, the focus of so much Soviet propa-
ganda, live mostly on the margins of the new society rising from the
ashes of the Soviet Union. Mary Buckley is prominent among a group
of British scholars who have consistently produced signicant studies of
Soviet and post-Soviet women. The collection of essays in Post-Soviet
Women is Buckleys latest contribution.
The author provides a useful introduction, framing the discussion in
terms of continuity and change, diversity and distance from current west-
ern feminist debates. Her book is divided into two parts: part 1 focuses
on Russia, its economy, society, and polity; part 2 discusses women in
the newly independent states formed from the former Soviet republics.
A number of the essays challenge common assumptions; others reinforce
them, but the overall tone is gloomy. Sarah Ashwin and Elaine Bowers
argue that womens unemployment has been overstated, that women re-
main the backbone of many industries, and are more reluctant than men
to leave their traditional work for the private sector. In contrast to west-
ern press accounts, for most Russian women, the allure of housewifery
1873
is not appealing; they praise the work collective and prefer to stay in the
paid labor force. But in so doing, they face increasing discrimination and
shifting stereotypes, all aimed at keeping women at the bottom of the
heap.
Women in the countryside fare no better. They remain a critical part
of the rural workforce, especially now that more men are moving into
the private sector. As Sue Bridger shows, increased alcohol abuse and
malingering by their men make the women even more reliant on subsis-
tence farming and barter to get by.
Rebecca Kay discusses images of the ideal Russian woman, showing
the ways in which young women have absorbed western images of femi-
ninity. Lynne Attwood addresses the issue of violence against women
and the ways in which women are blamed for this increasing phenome-
non. While post-Soviet changes have allowed more open discussion of
this issue and have allowed the establishment of womens crisis centers
and shelters, the problem persists, and societal attitudes are getting
worse. Hilary Pilkington makes visible the plight of Russian women and
children forced by rising nationalism to migrate from the newly indepen-
dent states.
The situation of women in the other areas of the former Soviet Union
is the subject of essays that take up about one-third of the book. Nijole
White is comparatively positive about the prospects of women in Latvia
and Lithuania, citing the greater support for womens organizations and
the openness to western models of feminism. Solomea Pavlychko is pessi-
mistic, outlining the problems in Ukraine of blending nationalism and
feminism, and citing the strengthening of discrimination and womens
conservatism. Nora Dudwick is similarly pessimistic about the situation
of women in Armenia, and Shirin Akiner outlines the problems of central
Asian Women, the surrogate proletariat emancipated by the Soviets
and now caught in the midst of resurgent Islam and economic uncer-
tainty.
So what is a woman to do? Even when women do attempt political
activism, the results are mixed at best. The blending of womens activ-
ism, nationalism, and pacism is described in Tamara Dragadzes ac-
count of the Georgian womens peace train seeking and failing to stop
the conict between Georgians and Abkhazians in Abkhazia. Kathryn
Pinnick explores the history of the Committee of Soldiers Mothers,
founded in 1989 by mothers who had lost their sons in the Afghan war.
Mary Buckley traces the checkered history of the Women of Russia party,
the old Soviet Womens Committee transformed into the rst all-female
group in the Russian parliament, or indeed in any parliament, from its
high point in the 1993 elections to its subsequent slide. Only Olga Lipov-
skaia is positive, recounting the growth in womens activism despite the
hostile political and popular climate.
Russias future may be less in politics than in prot making. Here
again, women are marginalized, mostly at the bottom, but adapting to
changing conditions. They are invisible in accounts of the new entrepre-
1874
Book Reviews
neurs but quite visible as street vendors, selling goods to survive. Despite
lack of access to capital, some women have even created successful, gen-
erally small-scale, businesses. In a more hopeful vein, Marta Bruno shows
how women, outside the sphere of big money, have created a countercul-
ture of entrepreneurship based on networking and mutual support and
thus are adapting to the vicissitudes of the market economy in their own
way.
How is it possible that a post-Soviet patriarchal renascence is taking
place in a country that considered itself the cradle of womens emancipa-
tion? Barbara Clements analyzes the antecedents of early gender debates
and their results in Bolshevik Women, her study of the Bolshevichki, the
women who joined the Bolshevik party before 1921, and shows how the
changes in their careers and lives mirrored the resurgence of patriarchal
attitudes and values from the earliest days of the socialist state.
Most studies of women in the Soviet period have connected the reasser-
tion of more traditional values with Stalins rule. For Clements, the
change occurred as early as 1917, when the Bolsheviks seized power. She
argues that the Bolshevik Revolution, despite its sweeping enactment of
laws liberating women, actually marked revolutionary womens nadir of
power, that women rose highest in the Bolshevik organization when it
was at its most egalitarian, that is, before and during 1917 (p. 12).
After the revolution, in Clementss view, the Bolsheviks reverted to
tyrannical political habits deeply embedded in Russian culture and to
the kind of gender discrimination that marked all European political par-
ties. Her argument runs counter to the prevailing scholarship, which links
Bolshevik authoritarianism directly to Lenins philosophy and personal-
ity and any pre-Revolutionary egalitarianism to Lenins inability to
control the party from afar.
Clements based her study on a database with records of 545 Bolshev-
ichki, 318 pre-1917 members (about 13% of approximately 2,500), and
227 of those who joined during the civil war years (about 7.5% of the
total of about 30,000), which she then compared to a database of male
Bolsheviks, culled from the massive 28,000 entry Soviet Data Bank. She
then added information from the biographies of seven leading Bolshevik
women, including Inessa Armand and Elena Stasova, both of upper-class
origins, and Alexandra Artiukhina and Klavdiia Nikolaeva from the
working class. She bolstered her work with 41 tables, six graphs, and 31
illustrations, adding a further dimension to her portraits of the Bolshev-
ichki.
Clements applies current social movement theory to her study, espe-
cially stressing notions of collective identity in shaping the views and
actions of these women. She makes much of the concept of tverdost, or
hardness, as an important part of the collective identity of the Bolshev-
ichki. The term has layers of gendered meaning, but for the revolutionar-
ies, it meant someone who was coldly rational and unsentimental, some-
one with a tight control on their emotions, in other words, a woman who
had mastered the ideal qualities of a man.
1875
The author provides a useful perspective on the comparative progress
of female and male Bolsheviks both before and after the Revolution. It
should come as no surprise that female Bolsheviks fared less well than
their male counterparts, were passed over for prominent positions (Ar-
mand), or unceremoniously ousted when they did get them (Stasova).
Nevertheless, Clements provides signicant details to esh out the story
of Bolshevik sexism. The Bolshevichki were subject to sexual innuendo
in the erce intraparty power struggles before and after the Revolution,
and responded by withdrawal, self-exile, or in at least one case, commit-
ting suicide. In the early years, troublesome female activists were gener-
ally demoted or exiled. Losers in most power struggles, the female activ-
ists gender sometimes aided them in avoiding the worst of the purges.
Reversing the traditional patriarchal notion that marriage protected a
woman, single women such as Stasova, nicknamed Comrade Absolute
and Kollontai, were considered least dangerous and generally spared.
Younger activists, without the baggage of life in the underground,
found opportunity in a system whose propaganda promoted equality; no-
where else in the world were there so many female professionals, artists,
scientists, judges, as in the USSR by 1930. As Stalin gained power, many
of the Bolshevichki showed themselves lacking in the requisite amoral
toughness, but some survived, and one, Rosaliia Zemliachka, was re-
warded for her enthusiastic participation in the purges with appointment
to the Council of Peoples Commissars, becoming the sole woman to
break through this Stalinist glass ceiling.
Clements is particularly good when she eshes out her portraits, in
good feminist fashion integrating information about the personal and po-
litical lives of her subjects. There is more about the better known Bol-
shevichki, such as Inessa Armand, Alexandra Kollontai, and Elena Sta-
sova, but there is also information and reinterpretation of the importance
of less well-known women, such as Alexandra Artiukhina, a worker and
the last head of Zhenotdel, usually portrayed as a party hack.
This is the rst time that so much information has been gathered in
one place about both prominent and rank and le Bolshevik women.
Clements is to be commended for her diligent detective work and dedica-
tion to her task. In showing how the Bolsheviks co-opted the ideology
of womens emancipation for their own ends while preserving basic as-
pects of patriarchal power, she helps explain the conditions that have led
to the dramatic loss of opportunity and economic independence analyzed
so vividly in Mary Buckleys collection.
1876
Book Reviews
Reconstructing a Womens Prison: The Holloway Redevelopment Project
196888. By Paul Rock. Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1996. Pp. xii360. $69.95.
Andreas Glaeser
University of Chicago
Narrating the history of the reconstruction of Holloway, Englands most
notorious womens prison, Paul Rock lays bare the ironies of policy, plan-
ning, goodwill, and anxiety in a sophisticated, multilayered analysis of
the vicissitudes of an attempted prison reform. Rock begins his fascinat-
ing tale in the mid-1960s when Holloway, an imposing Victorian struc-
ture built to intimidate, discipline, and guard its inmates, started to be
perceived as inhumane because it seemed to constitute an environment
hostile to the therapeutic treatment of its inmates. Thus, the replacement
of the old structure with a pathbreaking modern design was conceived,
literally inverting the old panopticon by substituting a park as meeting
ground for the central inspection bridge. Intertwined with the reconstruc-
tion was a plan for reform. The centrality of security was supposed to
be replaced by an emphasis on treatment by building the new Holloway
on the model of a hospital and thus changing the fundamental character
of the relationship between personnel and inmates from surveillance to
treatment. However, soon after its initiation, the reconstruction project
ran into difculties when unforeseen environmental changes began to
challenge some of the basic assumptions underpinning the reconstruction
project. With the advent of prominent women terrorists and with the
overall number of female prisoners steeply on the rise, the proposition
that women were not really criminal in the same way as men had to be
reconsidered. Moreover, the rst oil-price crisis triggered comprehensive
cost-cutting measures putting a denite end to liberal public spending.
Both of these changes in the external environment led to signicant alter-
ations in the plans for the new building, in stafng levels, and in per-
ceived staff responsibilities. By the mid-1970s, contrary to the reformers
original intentions, security measures were moving to the foreground
again.
The result of the thwarted reform was, according to Rock, a vicious
cycle of violence between wardens and inmates. Anxieties about an un-
controllable situation provoked prison personnel to insist on locking pris-
oners up into their cells for longer periods of time. Inmates, in turn, re-
acted to these restrictions by increasingly violent, seemingly crazy
behavior, giving wardens yet more cause to keep them in their cells.
Rocks tale culminates in the analysis of a strike staged by the wardens
union in 1988 to enforce even tighter security measures in an already
very strictly controlled environment. Instead of caving in to the demands
of the union, Holloways governor chose to ght for more liberal prison
regime. Locking out the striking security ofcers, the governor decided
to run Holloway with a minimum of staff, relying on the maximum coop-
eration of the inmates. Allowed to take greater responsibility for their
1877
own lives, the inmates in fact did cooperate, leading to what Rock de-
scribes in vivid colors as the most humane episode in Holloways pained
history. The governor succeeded in the end, but his success came at a
price. Alarmed by the anger the strike had caused in the wardens union,
the home ofce relieved the governor of his duties, thus rendering the
nal success of a more lenient, more humane penal regime at Holloway
uncertain. What remains according to Rock is the hope that the strike
was a rite of passage permanently transforming the consciousness of all
involved.
Rocks well-written book thematizes human agency from two different,
equally fascinating angles. First, he explores the structural and cultural
conditions under which bureaucrats enjoy the freedom to enact their own
agenda. Narrating his story from the point of view of Holloways gover-
nors, while considering a truly impressive variety of inuencing factors
(ranging from the impact of spatial environments and the rhythm of ca-
reer trajectories, over personal biographies and networks, to group con-
ict, local politics, changes in public ideology, and international affairs),
Rock is able to draw an admirably nuanced picture of the decision mak-
ing of the reform project in progress. He also strikes a convincing balance
between the agency of individual and institutional actors on the one hand
and structural changes on the other by integrating systemic changes both
as political constraints and as cultural representations into the life worlds
of creative actors. In this sense, Rocks book provides an excellent quasi-
ethnographic perspective to the literature on bureaucratic decision mak-
ing and the state.
Second, Rock looks at the consequences of structural constraints and
cultural presuppositions of the prison personnel on the types of action
taken by Holloways inmates. Rock reads the increasing rates of seem-
ingly crazy, violent, and self-destructive behavior of inmates as a direct
consequence of curtailing their freedom. As a ipside to this view, he
interprets the cooperation of the prison inmates during the strike of 1988
as the humanizing effect of trust and respect granted to them by the emer-
gency staff keeping Holloway operational during the strike. Given the
importance of this interpretation for Rocks rhetoric of reform, it is very
unfortunate, however, that Rock has very little interview material with
inmates to substantiate this part of his analysis. Thus, it remains quite
unclear, for example, how inmates interpreted their own actions before,
during, and after the strike.
Given the two very different angles on agency developed by Rock, it
would have been helpful if he had moved beyond a juxtaposition of his
material on inmates and ofcials to systematic comparison and theoreti-
cal reection. Without theoretical reection, the tenor of Rocks work
remains paradoxical, for he suggests more autonomy for the inmates as
effective means of prison reform. A rigorous theoretical exploration of
this paradox might have also enabled him to respond more effectively to
Foucaults biting observation that the very idea of reform has always
been a functional part of the prison system without ever yielding the pro-
1878
Book Reviews
claimed result of improving the reintegration of exprisoners into main-
stream society.
Being There: Culture and Formation in Two Theological Schools. By
Jackson W. Carroll, Barbara G. Wheeler, Daniel O. Aleshire, and Penny
Long Marler. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. xi299.
$35.00.
Mary Blair-Loy
Washington State University
This book is an ethnographic study of two postbaccalaureate institutions
that prepare students for various types of ministry in protestant churches
and organizations. Mainline Seminary is the pseudonym for a seminary
afliated with a liberal protestant denomination. Evangelical Seminary
denotes a multidenominational seminary loosely aligned with conserva-
tive, evangelical churches and organizations. The authors goals are to
map the culture of each seminary and to show how this culture affects
the formation of students character, vocation, and resources for answer-
ing their call to ministry.
The authors nd that each school has a distinct, core normative mes-
sage that functions as the pivot of the institutions culture, anchoring
the culture and orienting the educational agenda (p. 205). Evangelical
Seminarys cultural anchor is that the world needs to embrace a sober,
religious discipline that allows people to follow Gods orderly plan for
human redemption that is inerrantly inscribed in the Bible. Mainline
Seminarys central message is that the world needs to be cleansed of all
prejudice and oppression to help usher in Gods reign of justice.
Despite the substantive difference in these cultural messages, the au-
thors identify striking formal similarities in how the school cultures are
organized and how they shape and are shaped by students. Each culture
provides a tool kit of strategies for ministry in uncertain times (Ann
Swidler, Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies [American Sociolog-
ical Review 51 (1986): 27386]). Each culture has a normative core and
permissible variations that include purer, more radical and watered-
down versions of the core message. Both seminaries allow students lee-
way in contesting the core cultural message and in ultimately negotiating
a qualied acceptance of some version of that message. The processes of
critique, negotiation, and altered reproduction occur in small student
groups and in the classroom. The cultures of both seminaries are thus
constructed and changed over time by the interaction of students, faculty,
and staff. Each school culture is also affected by the seminarys selective
adaptation to and isomorphism with broader organizational elds from
which it derives resources and legitimacy. And in contrast to other schol-
ars accounts of culture wars, these authors nd that each school empha-
sizes the reform of the religious institutions with which they are closely
1879
afliated rather than castigates those at the opposite end of the ideological
spectrum.
By the end of the book, the authors convincingly make the theoretical
argument I have just summarized. However, readers may nd the road
to this argument long and frustrating. Although the authors say they fol-
lowed Barney Glaser and Anselm Strausss grounded theory method (The
Discovery of Grounded Theory [Aldine Publishing, 1967]), the books or-
ganization does not mirror a grounded theory approach of reciprocal at-
tention to data, literature, theory formation, back to data, and so on.
Rather, the book rst presents nine chapters of pure description before
offering any explicit theorizing. The reader must absorb a dizzying array
of detail about the two schools and meet a huge cast of characters before
any framework is given for the datas relevance or interpretation.
Without context or framework, some of these data are bafing. While
my education at a liberal divinity school helped me follow the description
of Mainline Seminary, I lacked the cultural capital to understand much
of life at Evangelical Seminary. For example, I could only very super-
cially follow what is presented as a signicant argument between students
and faculty over process theology (pp. 6468), and I remain bewildered
by the debate between dispensationalism and the mainstream Evangeli-
cal Seminary position. The descriptive chapters lack an authorial voice
to guide readers through the maze of characters, ideas, and debates. Yet
perseverance in reading the rst nine chapters is rewarded by the clear,
thoughtful interpretation in chapters 1013. The book ultimately presents
a compelling analysis of each schools culture and its relationship to stu-
dent formation.
This book will interest sociologists of culture, religion, organizations,
and education. Several ndings are relevant to higher education in gen-
eral. Most students in both schools are profoundly effected by their inter-
action with faculty and with other students. But students who do not
spend substantial amounts of time at the seminary miss out on this pro-
cess of vocational formation and seminary culture reproduction and
change. One must be there temporally and geographically to shape and
be shaped by the school culture. The authors caution that many trends
in higher education, from part-time and commuter students to video- and
internet-based distance learning, will undermine the process of personal
and institutional formation and reformation.
1880
Book Reviews
Is Science Multicultural? Postcolonialisms, Feminisms, and Epistemolo-
gies. By Sandra Harding. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.
Pp. xi242. $35.00 (cloth); $14.95 (paper).
Bart Simon
Queens University
Sandra Harding is no stranger to challenging the boundaries of the phi-
losophy and social studies of science and knowledge. As a feminist philos-
opher of science, Harding has made issues of diversity and difference a
central aspect of her program of strong objectivity. This program has
always had two basic components. The rst is an analysis of modern
science as historically gendered and raced in ways that privilege a pre-
dominantly white, patriarchal, and eurocentric standpoint. The second
is the development of an epistemological framework that allows for the
recognition of other nonwhite, nonpatriarchal, and non-Western stand-
points without retreating from a conception of objectivity or falling prey
to a form of naive pluralism or relativism.
In effect, Hardings latest book, Is Science Multicultural? is a logical
extension of her previous work in feminist epistemology with a few re-
nements. Hardings previous work might be understood as an attempt
to mediate between the concerns of constructivist sociology and history
of science on the one hand and more politicized feminist science studies
on the other. This new book adds a third voice: that of postcolonial sci-
ence and technology studies. The mere attempt to bring together these
three often disparate trajectories of research on science marks this book
as both unique and important to the development of a broader under-
standing of knowledge-making and science. Is Science Multicultural? ini-
tiates a conversation that should have taken place 10 years ago amongst
science studies scholars; if there is a major drawback, it is that the con-
versation barely gets started before the book is over.
Hardings project is perhaps too grand to suit most social scientists,
but her intention is to lay out the possibilities for a multicultural episte-
mology that might transform scientic practice, international science pol-
icies, and their effects. Modern science, for Harding, is not culturally tran-
scendent but is bound to specic cultural histories and their relations.
Hardings targets, therefore, are the dominant eurocentric and androcen-
tric science and technology policies that are in part legitimated by a posi-
tivist and internalist epistemology, which has its origins in the develop-
ment and expansion of European patriarchal culture. To counter these
conceptions of science, Harding advocates adopting a postcolonial stand-
point and looking at Western science from the outside. As most readers
will be unfamiliar with the genre of postcolonial science studies, Har-
dings advocacy is valuable for this reason alone.
The rst half of the book considers three kinds of postcolonial perspec-
tives: studies of the relationship between European colonial expansion
1881
and the emergence of modern science, studies of contemporary non-Euro-
pean (and American) cultures scientic practices, and development stud-
ies that question the universal applicability of Western paradigms of sci-
entic progress. Harding provides brief accounts of a range of historical
and ethnographic studies written from a postcolonial perspective, which
demonstrate the cross-cultural contingency of both early-modern and
modern scientic practices. While the main issues are clearly laid out,
Hardings discussions of these texts are all too brief and are seldom crit-
ical.
In the second half of the book, Harding proceeds to articulate the con-
sequences of adding postcolonial voices to the development of feminist
standpoint theory and her brand of strong objectivity. Particularly useful
here is Hardings discussion of the possibilities for antiessentialist and
nonrelativist borderlands epistemologies. Although important in their
own right, Hardings overt epistemological concerns cut short the conver-
sation on the implications of postcolonial perspectives for science studies
and vice versa. A more interesting and important task, perhaps, is articu-
lating the ways that knowledge is made and deployed across cultural con-
texts. Postcolonial studies are important for understanding the relation-
ship between non-Western epistemic practice and the globally dominant
ways of knowledge-making we call science. While Harding takes an im-
portant epistemological and political stand in referring to all systematic
attempts to produce knowledge about the world as sciences, this does
little to help us understand how actors must regularly negotiate the
boundaries of what counts as legitimate knowledge within and across
cultures.
A nal disappointment is that, despite Hardings advocacy of postcolo-
nial scholarship and its epistemological implications, her text contains
almost no discussion of extant work in postcolonial critical theory. Har-
dings arguments would benet from the reection on the problematic
meanings of postcoloniality, the process of decolonialization, and neocolo-
nialism by authors such as Franz Fanon, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak,
and members of the Subaltern Studies Group. To a certain degree, the
same criticism applies to Hardings use of the term science. It is often
unclear when Harding wants to refer to science as a Western cultural
institution, a set of local practices, a collection of beliefs about the world,
or a particular epistemological framework that grounds those beliefs. All
of these meanings are ne, but the lack of specicity in her discussion
makes nding the points of convergence and divergence between postco-
lonial, feminist, and constructivist science studies a more difcult task
than it needs to be.
1882
Book Reviews
The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography. By Martin W.
Lewis and Karen E. Wigen. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Cal-
ifornia Press, 1997. Pp. xv344. $55.00 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).
Jeffrey C. Bridger
University of Kentucky
Metageography, the set of spatial structures we use to organize and com-
prehend the world, would seem to be a topic of immense interest at this
juncture in history. It is surprising, though, that systematic inquiry has
not kept pace with developments that threaten to demolish longstanding
understandings of global geography. Martin Lewis and Karen Wigen see
this oversight as one of the most serious aws in contemporary geography
and attempt to rectify it by identifying the dominant metageographical
frameworks currently in use, the spatial distortions to which these give
rise, and the ideological and political consequences that ow from reli-
ance on an overly simplistic metageography. Their critique provides the
basis for the building blocks needed to construct a more sophisticated
global geography.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, our view of a world composed
of relatively stable units has been revealed for the ction that it is. Bound-
aries that once seemed natural and immutable are now contested and
ephemeral. Deeply rooted ethnic and religious conicts have erupted in
regions that were once largely ignored or treated as if they formed homo-
genous cultural units. Despite these and other changes, we continue to
describe the world with such static metageographic categories as conti-
nents, East/West, First/Second/Third World, and Europe/Asia.
According to Lewis and Wigen, the bulk of our misunderstanding can
be traced to an uncritical acceptance of a series of convenient but stulti-
fying geographical myths, based on unwarranted simplications of global
spatial patterns (p. xiii). These include the myth of continents, the myth
of East and West, the myth of the nation state, and the myth of geo-
graphic concordance. The myth of continents and the myth of East and
West are singled out for detailed treatment, while the myth of the nation
state and the myth of geographical concordance occupy supporting roles,
reinforcing the prejudices and stereotypes that grow from the central
myths.
The myth of continents is by far the most basic and damaging metageo-
graphic category. Continents, as generally understood, are large, continu-
ous expanses of land separated by bodies of water. The most obvious
problem with this scheme is that the required size and degree of physical
separation have never been dened. Over time, different criteria have
been used to draw continental lines in different places, depending on the
interests of who was doing the drawing. Thus, Europe, which is most
accurately viewed as part of single continent that includes Asia, is never-
theless elevated to continental status. In doing so, it assumes a level of
cultural and political importance that is not warranted by size alone. This
1883
is not simply a matter of convenience or the result of a simple oversight.
Instead, it has been a key element in the effort to establish and maintain
a cultural dichotomy between Europe and Asia, a dichotomy that was
essential to modern Europes identity as a civilization (p. 36).
Like the continental scheme we have inherited, the spatial division be-
tween East and West is largely arbitrary. And it too has been subject to
shifts over time. During World War II, for instance, some historians clas-
sied Germany as an eastern country in order to distance Nazism from
true European civilization. With the onset of the cold war, the bound-
aries shifted again; West Germany became part of the West, while every-
thing behind the iron curtain was East. In this incarnation, the West was
synonymous with capitalist democracy and the East with communism.
Today, the West has come to mean the developed world, without refer-
ence to the actual location of particular countries. With this redenition,
Japan becomes a western nation while the countries of Latin America
simply become part of the Third World.
The spurious geographical division between East and West is com-
pounded by unexamined assumptions about the cultural differences be-
tween these regions. While Lewis and Wigen catalog a host of attributes
that supposedly distinguish Western and Eastern Culture, they argue that
rationality has long been the most important. In this view, Western prog-
ress was made possible by a commitment to a peculiarly Greek spirit of
rationality (p. 83). The implication here is that this force was missing
in the East. However, if one denes rationality in broad terms, the West
can hardly be said to have a lock on reason. At times, in fact, China and
parts of the Islamic world have in many ways been more committed to
rational inquiry than Europe.
The misunderstandings that grow out of the myth of continents and
the East-West myth are exacerbated by a persistent environmental deter-
minism that continues to assert a causal relationship between the physical
environment and cultural and social traits. This is seen most clearly in
the notion that Europes developmental trajectory was largely dependent
on a temperate climate: Europes physiographic and climatic diversity
are now sometimes viewed merely as having prevented the consolidation
of large empires and allowed scope for the development of a market-
driven economy (p. 44).
While it is obvious that our uncritical use of metageographic categories
serves to highlight the achievements of European civilization, it also has
a more pernicious consequence. As Lewis and Wigen put it, Our awed
metageography has become a vehicle for displacing the sins of Western
Civilization onto an intrusive non-European Other in our midst (p. 68).
By redrawing the physical and cultural lines between East and West
when the need arises, the blame for all manner of atrocities can be shifted
and historical responsibility denied.
This last charge is open to serious debate. For while some scholars may
indeed have used stereotypes of the East to shift blame for Western sins,
Lewis and Wigen ignore the work of Horkheimer, Adorno, and other
1884
Book Reviews
members of the Frankfurt School who trace some of the most despicable
acts of the 20th century to contradictions embedded within the Enlighten-
ment. Despite this omission, Lewis and Wigens broader argument is a
sound one. Overly simplistic metageographic categories are a barrier to
understanding an increasingly complex world, and our reliance on them
does lead to generalizations with often damaging political consequences.
Replacing the existing framework, however, creates new problems. For
all the deciencies inherent in the systems currently in use, they do pro-
vide a shared language for talking about the world. The move to an
open-ended melange of overlapping and incommensurable distributional
patterns (p. 13) will upset common understandings and threaten our
ability to communicate effectively. Hence, some form of taxonomy is es-
sential. The world region framework is the scheme that comes closest to
meeting these criteria. Lewis and Wigen propose that we take this as a
starting point for developing a more subtle map of the world. In addition
to the 10 regions that are typically delineated, they suggest that we add
three new ones: African-America, Melanesia, and Central Asia. Their
world map is also explicitly rooted in historical processes, ignores political
and ecological boundaries in favor of meaningful cultural areas, and con-
ceptualizes regions both in terms of internal characteristics and their rela-
tions with one another. This rendition provides a more nuanced view of
sociospatial relations, and while useful to scholars and policymakers, it
does little to correct popular stereotypes and prejudices that are insepara-
ble from the myths of metageography. Dislodging these will take more
than a new set of lines on the map.
The Struggle over the Soul of Economics: Institutionalist and Neoclassi-
cal Economists in America between the Wars. By Yuval P. Yonay.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998. Pp. xiii290.
Mark Blaug
University of Exeter
This luridly titled book is a ne example of the sociology of science ap-
plied to the history of economics, in particular, the interwar period in
American economics that consisted in large part of a struggle for hegem-
ony between institutionalists of the Veblen-Commons-Mitchell variety
and orthodox neoclassical economists. It utilizes the actor-network ap-
proach (ANA) associated with the Paris School of Bruno Latour and Mi-
chel Callon that views science as a social network of individual scientists
who negotiate with one another in an endless struggle for intellectual
dominance, the outcome of which is never decisively inuenced by either
internal or external forces but rather by an unpredictable combination
of both cognitive and sociological elements. The appeal to the names of
Latour and Callon, not to mention Barry Barnes, Harry Collins, Karin
Knorr-Cetina, and Trevor Pinch, suggests that we are going to be shown
1885
how economists in such interwar economic laboratories as the National
Bureau of Economic Research and the University of Wisconsin Depart-
ment of Economics actually conducted their research. But this is not Pro-
fessor Yonays tack: instead, he connes himself to the written word, a
limitation that he frankly acknowledges. Nevertheless, the thesis that he
establishes by an examination of the primary literature is that institu-
tional economics was in ascendancy throughout the 1920s and main-
tained its grip on the economics profession even in the 1930s and 1940s,
only to be vanquished by neoclassical economics in the late 1940s. More-
over, this brand of neoclassical economics (a label that was itself in-
vented by Veblen as early as 1903) was nothing like what we now call
neoclassical economics. Somewhere around 1950, economics went
through a veritable revolution of mathematization, with names like
John Hicks, Paul Samuelson, Kenneth Arrow, and Gerard Debreu be-
coming the idols of a new generation of postwar economists. From that
moment on, in the customary manner in which history is always being
rewritten by the winners, the story of interwar American economics was
reinterpreted as one of an inevitable victory of orthodox neoclassical eco-
nomics and the equally inevitable demise of institutionalism. In conse-
quence, it is now difcult to recognize the writings of some of the leading
mainstream interwar economists such as Frank Knight and Jacob Viner
as orthodox at all: they seem at times to be highly critical of assumptions
regarded nowadays as absolutely sacrosanct.
This may not be as novel an interpretation as the author claims (e.g.,
see my own Disturbing Currents in Modern Economics, Challenge
[MayJune 1998]) but nevertheless this is the rst detailed demonstration
of the argument and hence may convince even the most skeptical of text-
book writers in the history of economics. As a bonus, we are given an
attractive account of the new school of ANA as a species of the genus
of constructivism in the philosophy of science, of which other closely
related examples are the Bloor-Barnes strong program in the sociology
of science and the McCloskey-Klamer program in the rhetoric of eco-
nomics (chaps. 1, 10). Until the very last pages of the book, ANA is sold
to the reader as the only successful explanation of the evolution of in-
terwar American economics, superseding Thomas Kuhns appeals to par-
adigms or Imre Lakatoss notion of scientic research programs. But in
the nal pages (pp. 21822), it is suddenly conceded that the methodology
of any social science such as economics also has a normative objective,
namely, to appraise developments in the subject with a view to improv-
ing the quality of practice and even to criticize the drift of current devel-
opments. Professor Yonay argues that construction is not indifferent to
normative issues and does not necessarily condone whatever is standard
fare in an area of scientic inquiry. I was not entirely persuaded by this
all too brief defense. It does seem to me that ANA, like all varieties of
constructivism, is bound to conclude, not only that anything goes but that
everything goes. As for causally explaining the past, ANA likewise suffers
from excessive generality. What could possibly contradict an ANA expla-
1886
Book Reviews
nation of a historical episode when in fact every conceivable element in
scientic disputes is recognized and is indeed recognized as having equal
value? An ANA explanation of a past event strikes me as very much like
playing tennis with the net down.
Nevertheless, I can think of no historian of economics who would not
learn a great deal from this book; needless to say, it is vain to imagine
any workaday economist reading this book since they (a) never read
books, and (b) never read books on intellectual history. Is this an ANA
argument?
La decouverte du social: Naissance de la sociologie en France (1870
1914). By Laurent Mucchielli. Paris: Editions la Decouverte, 1998.
Pp. 572.
Robert Leroux
Universite de Montreal
Reference books usually have the limited yet practical function of provid-
ing information on a particular topic. Laurent Mucchiellis work is more
than a simple reference book; it deserves to be read in its entirety. De-
fending an interesting and important general perspective, Mucchielli pro-
poses to situate the institutional genesis of French sociology in its social,
cultural, intellectual, and political context. Using a sociology of knowl-
edge approach to identify the multitude of inuences at the origin of the
main French sociological theories that emerged between 1870 and 1914,
Mucchielli shows that the discovery of the social was the result of a
major collective effort.
In the rst part of the book, Mucchielli argues that at the end of the
19th century the previously dominant biological and racial models were
replaced with an understanding of sociology as an objective science. He
analyzes in minute detail the works of sociologists of that period, their
intellectual networks, and their main theoretical concepts. Mucchielli
goes on to demonstrate how E
mile Durkheim and his collaborators repre-

sent a new sociological paradigm, in the Kuhnian sense of the term.
The theoretical projects of Durkheims key opponents are examined, in-
cluding Gabriel Tardes theory of imitation and Rene Wormss organi-
cism. The strength of Mucchiellis work lies in the second part. He shows
how the Durkheimian school, which gravitated around the journal
LAnnee Sociologique, tried to impose its project on the other social and
human sciences of that period (i.e., criminology, psychology, biology, ge-
ography, history, linguistics, ethnology, political economy), while at the
same time being largely inspired by them. The contribution of Dur-
kheims major collaborators (Bougle , Halbwachs, Hubert, Mauss, Meil-
let, Richard, and Simiand) in the inauguration of a fertile dialogue with
these competing sciences is brilliantly analyzed.
This book is a very valuable work for many reasons. First, the subject
1887
itself is highly original from the perspective of the history of ideas: Muc-
chielli focuses on the birth of French sociological thought in this decisive
period of its history when the fundamental questions, which are still with
us, were rst addressed (i.e., the links between theory and empirical re-
search). Some authors analyzed by Mucchielli, against whom the Dur-
kheimian paradigm raised its voice, had never previously been seriously
taken into account, despite the fact that they played an important role
in the emergence of sociology in France. Second, the interest of the inter-
pretative framework of the book must be underlined. This framework,
which rests on an impressive erudition, is conceived in such a way that
the main thread of Mucchiellis argument is never broken between the
general project and the particular constructions, that is, between the anal-
ysis of central theoretical concepts and the effort to reconstruct an intel-
lectual horizon on the one hand and a series of portraits of authors on
the other. Beyond individual sociological contributions, it is the ideas
themselves, their confrontation with each other, and their broader intel-
lectual signicance that are at the center of Mucchiellis investigation.
Third, while Durkheims work has been abundantly discussed, the con-
tributions of his disciples have been less well studied, with the exception
of his nephew Marcel Mauss, who has been the object of a few scholarly
books in recent years (Marcel Fournier, Marcel Mauss [Fayard, 1994];
Marcel Mauss, ecrits politiques [Fayard, 1997]). Mucchiellis most re-
markable contribution is his presentation of a generous sample of works
from main contributors to LAnnee Sociologique. Some of the Durkheimi-
ans, Ce lestin Bougle and Franc ois Simiand in particular, have played a
central role in the elaboration and diffusion of the Durkheimian para-
digm, but their names often remain unknown outside French borders.
Mucchielli reminds us what Philippe Besnards works have already
shown (La formation de lequipe de LAnnee sociologique, Revue fran-
caise de sociologie [1979] 20:731; The Sociological Domain [Cambridge
University Press, 1983]): the emergence of the Durkheimian paradigm is
the result of a fruitful teamwork of young scholars from different disci-
plines. Finally, Mucchiellis bibliography is impressive, containing an im-
portant compilation of both primary and secondary sources.
There is no doubt that this well-written reference book will be of inter-
est not only to both undergraduate and graduate students but also to
professional sociologists and other social scientists who want to learn
more about the birth of French sociology. Its merit resides in the fact
that it accurately presents an intellectual landscape about which very
little is known in North America and, to some extent, even in France.
In sum, Laurent Mucchielli succeeds in meeting the challenge he had set
for himself: his book will be useful to many, and one can already predict
that it will become an authoritative source of knowledge on a crucial
period in the history of sociology.
1888
Book Reviews
Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. By David Swartz.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Pp. viii333. $57.00 (cloth);
$15.95 (paper).
David Gartman
University of South Alabama
Of all contemporary European sociological theorists, only Pierre Bour-
dieu has yet to nd his denitive American interpreter. Partly because
of the fragmented nature of our disciplinary eld, Bourdieus complex
corpus has been appropriated largely in bits by specialists who are un-
aware of or unconcerned about the integral whole. So in a manner remi-
niscent of the Indian folk tale of the blind men and the elephant, there
are many American Bourdieus: an anthropologist of Algeria, a sociologist
of education, an analyst of art and culture, a researcher of stratication.
Bourdieu has contributed to this fragmentary appropriation by ada-
mantly refusing to theorize, that is, present his general concepts and
ideas in a form abstracted from his empirical research.
This faulty American reception of Bourdieus sociology will hopefully
change with the publication of David Swartzs new book, which is the
rst successful and accessible overview of Bourdieus entire corpus. Cul-
ture and Power puts all the parts of the elephant back together, revealing
not merely the power and breadth of the animal but the warts and wrin-
kles as well. Swartz is in the right position to accomplish this sympathetic
but probing treatment. As a student at the Sorbonne in the 1970s, he
attended Bourdieus seminars but did not become a disciple. Familiar
with the Parisian intellectual eld, yet viewing it from the remove of the
American university, Swartz achieves a felicitous balance between insider
and outsider. The result is a book unsurpassed in the breadth and depth
of its comprehension of this major sociological theorist. But readers look-
ing for a mere introduction to Bourdieus work had best look elsewhere,
for this is a highly sophisticated work that presents a wealth of details,
complexities, and nuances.
Before diving into his exposition of Bourdieus basic concepts, Swartz
gives us an enlightening chapter on his career and position in Frances
intellectual eld. Bourdieus relentless criticism of the role of culture in
general and education in particular in reproducing social inequalities is
explained by his own origins as a petit-bourgeois outsider who, despite
his remarkable upward mobility, has always felt marginalized by the up-
per-class culture of Frances grandes ecoles. Bourdieus concepts and re-
search are insightfully interpreted as strategic moves against competitors
in this complex and contentious Parisian intellectual eld.
Swartz then moves on to explicate the general concepts that inform all
of Bourdieus research. His utmost objective is to extend the notion of
self-interested action usually associated with economics to cultural prac-
tice. For Bourdieu, all social action is motivated by the pursuit of prots
1889
and power, but the seeming disinterestedness of cultural pursuits allows
them to launder and legitimate the structured inequalities of other ar-
eas. He argues that in modern societies cultural practices have become
the most important method of reproducing inequalities, as the upper
classes invest money and time in education and art, which become the
basis for social selection. Bourdieus theory departs, however, from ratio-
nal choice and conict models of action in holding that the pursuit of gain
is not conscious but is governed by a set of preconscious dispositionsa
habitusinculcated by early socialization in the class structure. The
effects of habitus on action are, however, always mediated by the particu-
lar eld of struggle, one of Bourdieus more recent and less understood
concepts, which Swartz does a good job of clarifying.
Swartz then devotes several chapters to detailing how Bourdieu mobi-
lizes these concepts in empirical studies of social class, education and art,
and intellectuals. Researchers in these elds will nd a wealth of intri-
guing material here, for the author is in thorough command of the French
literature by and on Bourdieu. Unfortunately, however, he only rarely
engages the American literature in these areas, which often reveals the
limited generalizability of Bourdieus French ndings.
The last several chapters explore Bourdieus conceptions of science and
reexive sociology. His insight that science too is a self-interested practice
in a eld of competition leaves Bourdieu struggling to maintain faith in
the objectivity and emancipatory potential of science. But ever the de-
fender of an autonomous and scientic sociology, he argues that sociolo-
gists can partially transcend the limits of their own interests by reexively
analyzing their own scientic eld. As Swartz insightfully notes, however,
Bourdieus professional optimism about the objectivity and progressive
political potential of sociology contradicts his pessimistic theory that all
culture, however autonomous, is inevitably interested and reproduces in-
equalities.
Swartzs book is a welcome and indispensable contribution to under-
standing Bourdieus sociology, but it is not without aws. In his attempt
to be comprehensive, the authors expositions often end up exhaustive
and repetitive. There are also too many footnotes, some of which are
interesting textual supplements, while more are merely annoying inter-
ruptions. Finally, I was surprised to nd in a book published by the ven-
erable University of Chicago Press a generous sprinkling of typographical
errors in the text and numerous errors and omissions in the references.
Readers deserve better.
1890
Book Reviews
Simmel et la modernite. By Lilyane Deroche-Gurcel. Paris: Presses Uni-
versitires de France, 1997. Pp. x336.
Suzanne Vromen
Bard College
This signicant addition to our knowledge of Simmel is remarkable by
the breadth of its scholarship and the depth of its interpretations. In trac-
ing the many ways in which Simmel is an exponent of modernity, the
author argues for the overall coherence of Simmels thought and shows
the close relationship between his sociological, philosophical, and aes-
thetic writings both in concepts and essential reasoning. Simmels
aesthetic contributions have received relatively little attention. Simmel et
la modernite remedies this situation.
As sociologys search for global and denitive explanations has waned
and holistic systems have been replaced by critiques, the author argues,
Simmels popularity has grown. By founding social life on interaction,
by stressing process and the ux of becoming (in contrast to being), and
by overcoming the limits of disciplinary boundaries, Simmel shapes a
unitary and modern vision of culture and society.
The author contends that Simmel is not a positivist, because he rejects
the belief in an immanent, unique truth dened by its contents, nor is he
a postmodern relativist, because he refuses to assume that truth is an
illusion and that all opinions are equally valid. His theory of knowledge
is founded on a nonskeptical relativism. In this epistemological rupture,
truth is not content but a relation, a reciprocity of action. Relativity is
the essence of truth, thus an isolated or absolute truth does not exist, only
a relational one. For example, a line considered in isolation is neither
short nor long. Truth and reality have to be separated. It is precisely on
this point that Simmel criticizes naturalism, synonymous for him with
realism. Art and the social sciences have the ability to create a world
instead of merely copying one. Just as truth is not the duplication of real-
ity, the art work does not copy the real.
Reciprocal action explains the dynamics of social life, but it is also
central to the critique of modernity embedded in his sociology of art.
Simmel criticizes two unsatisfactory artistic conceptions of modernity.
The rst pursues only purely formal intentions; form clearly predomi-
nates over content. The other, expressionism for example, gives priority
to the effusive subjectivity of the artist and claims authenticity by sacri-
cing form. For Simmel, both conceptions lead into an impasse, for both
miss the expression of totality. The real modern artist seeks the totality
of life in which both beauty and ugliness, perfection and imperfection
are included. Pure technical virtuosity cannot achieve excellence. On the
contrary, Simmel praises art for life, thus afrming the interdependence
of form and content.
In the works of Rodin and Rembrandt, Simmel nds the most accom-
plished expressions of modernity, for, different as they are, they both rep-
1891
resent the unity of soul and body, the totality imperative for Simmel. In
Rodins sculpture, constant movement yields a new way in which sur-
faces meet and confront each other. Rembrandt is modern in expressing
the immediate individuality of his subjects through form and color with-
out concern for classical beauty. Opposition and contradiction together
with individuality and particularity characterize modern art, and Rem-
brandt is for Simmel the rst painter to have realized this. Academic
painting only establishes types. But Rembrandt frees himself from the
general semiotic code that imprisons the academic painter and expresses
individuality as a pictorial problem, not as a psychological or metaphysi-
cal or anecdotal one. A quote from Simmels book on Rembrandt cited
by the author sums it up well: this knowledge of life that speaks through
creations and not concepts (p. 84; my translation).
The author contends that Simmel refutes the pessimism that modernity
inspires in his contemporaries. It is ambivalence that marks modernity,
therefore, a possible disenchantment is never fatal. If the blase displays
melancholy, this attitude reveals itself paradoxically to be a technique of
adaptation.
To highlight Simmels modernity, the author contrasts him with Dur-
kheim. Durkheim is roughly characterized as an interventionist sociolo-
gist, deterministic, with a voluntaristic reformative thrust, a moralizer
emphasizing permanence and regulation. In contrast, Simmel stresses
agency and the creative power of the individual, with the blase attitude
an effective adaptive behavior and aiming at lucid understanding but no
societal prescription.
A short review cannot do justice to all the facets of this work nor to
the incisive connections that the author makes with major literary gures
and art critics. Various secondary sources are used, yet two prominent
Simmel scholars, namely Donald Levine and Birgitta Nedelmann, are
overlooked. The author also neglects to discuss Simmels thoughts on the
place of women in the modern world, a subject embedded in his theoreti-
cal scheme and one that he treats seriously in contrast to his contempo-
rary peers. Further, is it really necessary to juxtapose Durkheim and Sim-
mel, or to put it differently, does praising Simmel demand damning
Durkheim? Finally, I would have liked to learn more about the reception
of Simmels aesthetic works in his time.
The book is unfortunately written in a turgid and redundant style. It
will, however, be cherished by Simmel scholars for its insights and broad
range, and it deserves to be rapidly and coherently translated. Simmel
should be satised; justice has been done to his thought.
1892
Book Reviews
Re-forming the Body: Religion, Community, and Modernity. By Philip
A. Mellor and Chris Shilling. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1997. Pp. 234.
$75.00 (cloth); $26.95 (paper).
Ann W. Ramsey
University of Texas, Austin
Mellor and Schilling contribute to a growing sociological literature on
embodiment as the matrix for both collective experience and the sense
of self. Their nonteleological model uses ideal-types (the medieval body,
the Protestant modern body, and the baroque modern body) to exam-
ine the persistence of the sacred in Western development.
The argument proceeds on three fronts. First, the authors aim to
broaden historical perspective in current debates about the postmodern
condition by showing how the senses and the human body have been
constantly restructured over time. They focus on the character of these
changes rather than the complexities of dening the agents of these
changes. Second, they argue that debate over the future of Western civili-
zation must consider the resilience of the human body and its resistance
to cognitive control. They warn that this resistance may be liberating
or dark and violent. Third, by dening their work as an expansion upon
Emile Durkheims interest in the relationships between forms of embodi-
ment, forms of sociality, and forms of knowing, the authors join the ongo-
ing debate about the legacy of Durkheim himself.
They draw inspiration from the analysis of the sacred res of effer-
vescent sociality, in Durkheims Elementary Forms of Religious Life.
Lloyd E. Sandelands work on embodiment (The Body Social, in The
Mark of the Social, edited by John D. Greenwood [Rowman & Littleeld,
1997]) critiques the primacy of cognition in Durkheims approach to so-
cial life. Mellor and Schilling, however, pursue a different project of cul-
tural criticism and historical analysis emphasizing Durkheims commit-
ments to homo duplex. The authors stress the enduring signicance of
sacred forms of sociality (p. 201). Their critique of the human costs of
the rationalist Enlightenment project (p. 22) nally depicts mind/body
dualism as an inadequate ontology of the human body.
The argument begins in afnity with Max Weber and presents the dis-
ciplined and cognitively controlled early modern Protestant body as the
touchstone of Western modernity. The authors have clearly, however,
been paying attention to dramatic shifts in historians understanding of
the Reformation era and the religious culture of medieval Catholicism.
The present generation of cultural and religious historians have shifted
their attention from doctrinal analysis in order to explore peoples experi-
ence of the sacred and the changing attitudes toward the human body
that shaped religious values, authority relations, the sense of the self, and
the fundamental ways in which one knows the world.
The authors are right to warn the reader not to look here for empiricist
history (p. 32). As a historian, I missed the lack of direct analysis of the
1893
historical material of the past. All their historical material on the Middle
Ages and Reformation era is drawn from monographic and even textbook
interpretations (for the latter chiey Euan Cameron, The European Refor-
mation [Oxford University Press, 1991]). But, the authors have chosen
well: Peter Brown, Caroline Walker Bynum, John Bossy, and Robert
Scribner, among others, have led a veritable revolution in historians un-
derstanding of the place of the body in the changing religious culture of
Christianity.
One may criticize Mellor and Schillingss generalizations about the su-
perstitious character of premodern religious belief or their lack of social
differentiation in treating medieval epistemologies of the sacred. More
important, however, this book enriches the conceptual arsenal for inter-
disciplinary analysis of political, social, and cultural change. Their work
particularly stimulates more nuanced thinking about the cultural and po-
litical legacy of the Reformation era. By drawing attention to fundamen-
tal differences in the way Catholic and Protestant reform movements of
the 16th and 17th centuries reshaped the senses and bodily experience,
the authors in effect emphasize an often overlooked diversity in the West-
ern cultural inheritance. This forces rethinking of oversimplied schemas
of historical development that tended to focus on Protestant paths to
modernity. Their methodology of ideal types, if read as incitement to fur-
ther research, manages both to clarify tensions surrounding cultural and
social integration in the late 20th century while underscoring the real
historical complexity of modern bodies.
This is most evident in their treatment of the importance of the Catho-
lic Reformation and its culmination in the culture of the baroque, which
opposed the asceticism of Calvinism with complex strands of sensuality
and a more physically grounded asceticism. The interpretation of the ba-
roque modern body continues this theme. In tracing connections be-
tween baroque sensuality and contemporary pursuits of the hard ath-
letic body, the authors draw upon an important, relatively new
historiography on late-medieval and early modern Catholic religious ex-
perience and its connections to the postmodern temperament. Here one
misses acknowledgment of the work of Michel de Certeau (The Mystic
Fable [University of Chicago Press, 1992]) or Edith Wyschogrods Saints
and Postmodernism (University of Chicago Press, 1990). But, there is
much more to be grateful for than can be mentioned here, especially in
the political vein in critique of the contractarian mentality and in the
conceptual distinctions stressed in the notes. The book and its bibliogra-
phy will be a welcome overview in courses on the body and the sensoria.
Readers in all disciplines who are interested in pursuing the important
insight that the construction of reality is an embodied process will nd
this provocative reading.
1894
Book Reviews
Social Mechanisms: An Analytical Approach to Social Theory. Edited by
Peter Hedstro m and Richard Swedberg. New York: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1998. Pp. x340. $59.95 (cloth); $22.95 (paper).
James Johnson
University of Rochester
The contributors to this volume are dissatised with the current state of
social and political research. They claim that much of what now passes
for empirical social science and much of what now passes for social theory
is decient because those who engage in either enterpriseone symptom
of deciency is that hardly anyone engages in bothneglect the task of
identifying the causal mechanisms that explain phenomena in the social
world. Many practicing social scientists and social theorists will be
tempted to dismiss such criticism as a distraction from their ongoing re-
search. They should resist the temptation. They should resist, most obvi-
ously, because the contributors to the volume form a distinguished group
of sociologists, economists, and political scientists. I am not invoking au-
thority in a supercial way here. Instead, I simply suggest that we ought
to listen to colleagues whose own researchsome quite recently, others
over the course of several decadessets standards that are very difcult
to match. In the end, this initial presumption is born out. The message
that the contributors convey is, taken as a whole, very persuasive.
Although they sometimes are repetitive and do not always agree on all
details, the contributors to this volume would agree that social mecha-
nisms enable social scientists to identify causal agency. In this sense, a
mechanism m is a component of some more encompassing theory T,
where m typically operates at a level below T and makes T more credible
in the sense that m renders the explanations that T generates more ne-
grained. So, for example, when we elaborate a theory to account for some
social practice or change, we may invoke a mechanism (such as risk aver-
sion, dissonance reduction, or utility maximization) that, while it operates
at the individual level, can, once we properly specify the relevant aggre-
gation processes, help us explain the particular features of that practice
or change. The contributors all elaborate on this general idea.
The largest set of papers develops, in a more or less abstract manner,
conceptions of social mechanism and explores what such conceptions en-
tail. This group includes, besides an insightful introduction by the editors,
essays by Raymond Boudon, Tyler Cowen, Jon Elster, Diego Gambetta,
Gudmund Hernes, and Thomas Schelling. These papers explore a variety
of theoretical issues. They explain why the search for mechanisms does
not presuppose that we can identify general laws and why, consequently,
while they are crucial to explanation, most mechanisms afford unreliable
bases for prediction. They impress upon us the difculties that the search
for mechanisms involves because, for instance, mechanisms typically are
not directly observable and because they often interact in complex, dy-
1895
namic ways. They also stress that the search for mechanisms pushes so-
cial research toward a sort of modest abstraction that relies on the formu-
lation of models to represent crucial features of the social or political
phenomena we wish to explain. And they stress that the search for mech-
anisms directs theoretical attention to the forms of interdependent human
agency that sustains most aggregate social practices and institutions. As
this too schematic account suggests, the argument of the book is in certain
respects old-fashioned. The authors generally hope to resuscitate a mode
of social research exemplied by a lineage whose most exemplary gures
are Alexis de Tocqueville, Max Weber, Robert Merton, and James
Coleman.
The importance of this enterprise becomes clear when we turn to a
second set, or rather, pair of papers. These papers canvass existing work
in sociology and persuasively detail the baleful consequences that emerge
when we fail to identify the mechanisms that animate our inquiries. Aage
Srensen chastises empirical social scientists for mistaking statistical for
theoretical signicance. He argues that social research often is naively
and unduly preoccupied with statistical methods that, he rightly points
out, have no social theory whatsoever. As a result, social research fo-
cuses almost entirely on describing effects (accounting for the variation
of some factor or other) and so neglects to specify in a theoretically credi-
ble way the causal processes that generate and so explain those effects.
Axel van den Berg, by contrast, works from the opposite direction. He
probes the sort of grand theory to which most contemporary social theo-
rists aspire. He focuses on the writings Ju rgen Habermas, Pierre Bour-
dieu, Jeffrey Alexander, and Anthony Giddens, searching, largely in vain,
for any explicit, systematic discussion of mechanisms that might allow
social theorists to account for observed features of the social or political
world. In combination, then, these two papers make clear how inatten-
tion to mechanisms has not only impoverished both empirical social re-
search and social theory but made efforts to reduce the distance between
the two enterprises especially difcult.
A nal group of papers illustrates the power and generality of specic
mechanisms. This group includes papers by Peter Hedstro m on rational
imitation, by Timur Kuran on varieties of dissonance reduction, and by
Arthur Stinchcombe on monopolistic competition. Each author induces
us to see how particular causal mechanisms operate in distinctive, if
somewhat different, ways across a range of empirical settings. These
more constructive analyses nicely complement the theoretical and critical
offerings described above. Taken together, the contributors advance a
sophisticated and penetrating agenda for social research. Readers surely
will disagree with various parts of the argument that this volume ad-
vances. I am condent, however, that research in social science and social
theory can only be improved by confronting the challenge that the con-
tributors lay down.
1896
Book Reviews
Rational Choice Theory and Large Scale Data Analysis. Edited by Hans-
Peter Blossfeld and Gerald Prein. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1998.
Pp. xiv322. $60.00.
Peter Abell
London School of Economics
Why are sociologists moved to contribute to a book linking rational
choice theory (RCT) and large-scale data analysis? Economists, for in-
stance, would not do so; they would take the connection for granted and
view much of the content of the book under review as self-evident. It is
for them standard practice to test theoretical models, derived from ratio-
nal choice precepts, against large data sets. Things are different in sociol-
ogy; rst, RCT has only a tenuous hold on theory, and, second, most
research that draws on large data sets is notable for an absence of system-
atic theory (chap. 2). Why is this so? Take the second difference rst. As
a number of the contributing authors note, social theory is a failed intel-
lectual tradition and has neither had a signicant impact upon empirical
research nor achieved any depth of its own. Thus, the barely concealed
agenda behind the present volume is not merely one of locating a symbio-
sis between RCT and large-scale statistical analysis but of promoting
RCT as the theoretical framework where others have failed. The canvas
is correspondingly large.
While these objectives are, in my view, perfectly laudable, I am afraid
some of the essays are not always quite up to the mark. Many show signs
of having been hastily written, and the English language editing of others
is sometimes far from perfect. Uninitiated and skeptical readers will often
nd it difcult to follow the argument and even, in places, to understand
what is going on. This is a shame because, with a little more care, the
book, I believe, could have proven a landmark. As it is, it will necessarily
have to ght an uphill battle.
Based upon chapterssome by well-established rational choice theo-
rists and some by statistical modelersand linked commentaries, the
contributions are varied, running from the slightly technical (Stanley
Lieberson) to the more philosophical (Hartmut Esser and Undo Kelle and
Christian Lu dermann). There are also a number of chapters based upon
empirical research. The editors provide a most lucid introduction, and
Michael Hechter concludes with observations that future research in soci-
ology is likely to be a team effort. Furthermore, since rational choice is
the best general theory we have, until something better turns up, we best
stick with it.
Despite the books title, one of the most arresting sections is given to a
skirmish between Stanley Lieberson, promoting a well-argued skepticism
about small-N studies and advocacy of probabilistic causality, and
Charles Ragin, advancing his own version of the Boolean analysis of
small-N case study research. Although one can nd no intellectual closure
1897
here, Liebersons insistence that we should draw a sharp distinction be-
tween the causal factors that shape a distribution and those that allocate
individuals within the selfsame distribution is surely central to the RCT
treatment of large data sets. Nonetheless, the distinction is rarely made
by empirical researchers. Rational choice theorists, however, usually
work with the grain of this distinction in requiring (at least as an opening
gambit) that preferences and opportunities are independently determined.
What I found missing here though, and throughout the essays, was any
treatment of the strategic interaction of individuals in determining oppor-
tunities. Clearly, if individuals are strategically linked, then the standard
assumption underlying most large-scale data set research, whereby the
units of analysis (individuals) are drawn independently, must be called
into question. Surely, both endogenous and exogenous autocorrelation
must in practice be rife. I nd little recognition of this in the research
literature or in the essays in this volume.
Part two of the book covers the central issue, linking RCT and quanti-
tative sociology. Predictably enjoyable essays by John Goldthorpe and
Siegwert Lindenberg both nd a compelling complementary between the
two traditions, though in different ways. Goldthorpe, as one might expect,
implores us to start with well-established empirical generalizations and
then to search for RCT explanations for them. (Peter Hedstro m and Rich-
ard Swedberg agreecalling the explanations mechanisms.) Lindenberg,
however, nds the connection less seamless; he wants to protect us from
simple economic imperialism, feeling that the unadulterated combina-
tion of statistical analysis and RCT will not work without a richer model
of the individual (and her constraints) than RCT usually provides. He
is not, however, happy with the standard procedure of multiplying the
arguments in any postulated utility functions. If we are to do this, then
feeder theories are required telling us how, why, and when. These will
inevitably transcend the connes of any straight-laced RCT. Lindenberg,
thus, raises an issue taken up in different ways by many of the authors
(notably Hans-Peter Blosseld and Harmut Esser), namely as to the role
of both generalization and historical specics in sociological explanation.
Blosseld and Prein, in separate essays, begin to formulate the problems
of using longitudinal models in this respect, both of which begin to push
empirical models toward a more adequate approach to causality than we
usually nd in cross-sectional studies.
A number of chapters deal with bridge assumptions, that is, with the
links between macro and micro (both ways), and there are three chapters
devoted to empirical research: Anthony Heath on voting, Wout Ultee on
the cohesion of Dutch society, and Karl Dieter-Opp on political mobiliza-
tion. I would recommend that the skeptical reader start with these, then
move on to Goldthorpes and Lindenbergs essays before embarking on
the rest.
1898

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