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Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews http://csx.sagepub.com/ Disciplining the Poor: Neoliberal Paternalism and the Persistent Power of Race Sujatha Fernandes Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews 2013 42: 109 DOI: 10.1177/0094306112468721cc The online version of this article can be found at: http://csx.sagepub.com/content/42/1/109 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com On behalf of: American Sociological Association Additional services and information for Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews can be found at: Email Alerts: http://csx.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://csx.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav >> Version of Record - Dec 28, 2012 What is This? Downloaded from csx.sagepub.com at HUNTER COLLEGE LIB on November 6, 2013 Ó American Sociological Association 2013 DOI: 10.1177/0094306112468721 http://cs.sagepub.com REVIEWS service and industrial sectors. The first generation of Filipino immigrants struggled for and soon (in 1906) attained the right, as U.S. nationals, to unlimited entry into the United States. The author skillfully shows how Filipinos were clearly agents, and not merely victims, in this process: they were active in both class struggles, to obtain better wages and conditions, and legal battles, to achieve right of entry into the United States. Even though they gained the right to unrestricted immigration, Filipinos confronted other legal barriers regarding interracial marriage, property rights, and naturalization as U.S. citizens. In addition, local governments also attempted to police the color line by passing laws enforcing social segregation. In general, the legal issues were complicated by two principal factors. First, the laws were not always created with Filipinos in mind and the existing racial categories did not easily apply. Indeed, part of the strategy of Filipinos was to argue that they were outside of the laws that were erected explicitly against Afro-Americans, Mexicans, and ‘‘Asiatics,’’ namely, Chinese and Japanese. Second, the interests of local ‘‘nativists’’ often conflicted with those in agribusiness or the federal government. On the one hand, the nativists sought to preserve white privilege, dominance, and the color line; they opposed Filipino immigration. On the other hand, agricultural enterprises were in favor of Filipino workers, although they also sought ways to divide and conquer them whenever workers organized and pressed for better working conditions. In addition, the federal government was obliged to concede some degree of legal and naturalization rights to Filipinos. In the international sphere, it was not good politics to simply exclude them as ‘‘aliens’’ in U.S. society. Especially interesting is the analysis of the diverse and often contradictory positions of the local nativists in towns, counties, and states, the economic interests of agribusiness in the region, and the laws and policies of the federal government. In addition, the full range of actions and strategies of Filipinos on different fronts is fully explained. The Third Asiatic Invasion: Empire and Migration in Filipino America, 1898–1946, by Rick Baldoz. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2011. 301pp. $25.00 paper. ISBN: 9780814791097. LANNY THOMPSON University of Puerto Rico, Rı́o Piedras [email protected] This book begins with the creation of the colony of the Philippines in 1898 and ends with national independence in 1946. However, the book does not center upon either; instead, it focuses on the economic, political, and legal struggles of Filipino immigrants in the United States. The book is organized chronologically, although there is some overlap of periods across chapters. The first chapter deals with the racial politics of empire and the establishment of the Philippines as a colony of the United States. This lays the groundwork for the analysis of the political economy of Filipino immigration (1900s–1920s) in the second chapter. The next chapter deals more specifically with social and legal barriers that Filipinos confronted during the first three decades of the century. Chapter Four is a study of violence directed against Filipinos in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Finally, last two chapters deal with the political negotiations for independence, the participation of Filipinos in the Second World War, and the consequences for immigrants in the United States. The colonization of the Philippines resulted in the creation of a new legal category: the U.S. national, that is, those persons owing allegiance to the United States because they were at the same time citizens of one of its colonies. However ‘‘nationals’’ were not full-fledged citizens of the United States, and this initially led to considerable confusion about their rights to entry and to work. This ambiguous political status set the stage for the immigration of Filipinos who came to work in agri-business, first in Hawaii and then to the western and southwestern states. Later, Filipinos would also find work in 63 Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 64 Reviews The author includes an excellent discussion of the racial dimensions in the definition of Filipinos as a ‘‘social problem’’ by dominant groups. During the 1920s and 1930s, nativists began to interpret Filipino immigration as a social problem, focusing upon issues of public health, interracial sex, deviant sociality, labor competition, and political radicalism. Local officials and newspapers were active in defining and attempting to segregate immigrants while the local populace often resorted to riots and vigilante violence. Beginning in the late 1920s, violence erupted sporadically all along the west coast up through the early 1930s and this brought many issues to national attention. Nativists considered Filipinos to be ‘‘aliens’’ and tried to exclude them, by any means necessary, from social, political, and economic participation. Filipinos responded in creative ways: labor organizing, legal test cases, alliances, and so on. By the 1930s the movement for independence in the Philippines converged with local and federal interests in controlling immigration. The Tydings-McDuffie Act (1934) established a ten-year probationary period that would culminate in full independence and it also prepared the way for limiting immigration of citizens from what would eventually (1946) become an independent country. However, World War II soon complicated the process. In the United States, Filipino immigrants were recruited to serve in the armed forces and in the Philippines regular and guerrilla units were organized under U.S. command. The author argues that the loyalty shown by Filipinos to the United States’ war effort was the basis of their claims for veterans’ benefits and for the naturalization of veterans as U.S. citizens. Although the book is not systematically comparative, it frequently introduces comparisons with Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, and occasionally Puerto Rican immigrants. This adds considerable depth to the legal discussions. The book is well researched, using a wide range of newspapers, legal cases, Congressional debates, and legislation. Many of the issues raised by the Filipinos were fought out in the courts, but the book always contextualizes these cases and never becomes too legalistic. The author is very conscious of the class and gender aspects of the Filipino Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 experience and in this respect the sociological analysis is superb. This book on the political economy and politics of Filipino immigration to the United States is an excellent study of the paradoxes and contradictions of racialized citizenship. Homeless in Las Vegas: Stories from the Street, by Kurt Borchard. Reno, NV: University of Nevada Press, 2011. 239pp. $24.95 paper. ISBN: 9780874178371. CHAD R. FARRELL University of Alaska Anchorage [email protected] ‘‘They should have a ‘beware of people’ sign when you enter this city’’ (p. 171), exclaims a homeless subject in Kurt Borchard’s ethnography set in Las Vegas. The author conducted in-depth interviews with 48 homeless persons in 2005 and 2006 and one gets a sense that such a sign would do little good warding off newcomers. Las Vegas is a powerful magnet, attracting those who seek riches, excitement, opportunity, and a new start. This is a book about those who get much more (and much less) than they bargained for. At times engrossing and too often exasperating, it provides a flawed yet layered look at homelessness in Sin City. Homeless in Las Vegas is Borchard’s second book about homelessness in Vegas, so he knows the ground well. He takes the reader outside the ‘‘homeless corridor’’ where homeless services are concentrated into niches less visible to tourists and authorities. Unfortunately, the book is sometimes as meandering and disorganized as the lives of its subjects. Too often the author’s substantive discussion of the broader implications of his encounters is characterized by tangential self-revelation, flighty supposition, and jumbled overreach. For example, he introduces Jessi—a disabled Native American female—to illustrate the array of obstacles faced by racial minorities and the need for childhood educational programs. This seems straightforward, yet a few pages prior to this discussion Jessi has confided that she previously attended college, owned a home, and worked as a medical technician. In other words, her Reviews 65 narrative is completely at odds with much of the discussion used to contextualize it. Jessi’s pathway to homelessness appears to stem from the trauma of a car accident resulting in an amputated leg. This would seem an excellent opportunity to discuss the crushing burden of healthcare costs and the special difficulties involved for those who are both homeless and physically disabled. Instead, Borchard shoehorns a puzzling discussion of racial inequality and at-risk youth into his conclusion. Borchard seems as preoccupied with the emotional well-being of his homeless subjects as their material circumstances. Bruce, camping in an open field near a casino, sums up the numbing effects of homelessness: ‘‘The more you are homeless, you feel yourself less’’ (p. 78). This emotional focus is fully in line with the stated aim to document the ‘‘individual lives and voices’’ of homeless people but in places it approaches the absurd. In one harrowing encounter, Kevin, a muscled ex-con, admitted murderer, and avowed member of the Aryan Brotherhood, threatens to lynch the researcher. It is a terrifying moment and Borchard distinguishes himself by diffusing a dangerous situation. However, his subsequent policy prescription—empathy training in prisons—is baffling. In other places, this spotlight on psychological states is more grounded but still has a reductionist tendency. Regarding homeless individuals with severe mental health problems, Borchard posits that community mental health centers should provide ‘‘esteembuilding’’ for homeless schizophrenics and he professes the need for shelters to foster a ‘‘positive self-image.’’ However, brief glimpses inside the shelters suggest that they are barely able to maintain a modicum of hygiene and safety in the face of a surging homeless population. Space and resources would seem to be the major priorities here. As for mental health services, Borchard provides the reader with little information about the actual state of affairs in Las Vegas. Are there any community mental health programs in Las Vegas? Well, they are apparently ‘‘weak or nonexistent’’ but the reader is never told which. Are they underfunded? Maybe, probably. Are there systemic failures that account for so many mentally ill homeless persons apparently falling through the cracks? It is unclear. Perhaps it is a bit unfair to expect such a deep analysis of the local social service infrastructure in an ethnographic study. However, given that one of Borchard’s primary stated goals is to reveal the ‘‘key failure in many bureaucracies designed to help the homeless’’ (p. 3) it is incumbent upon him to flesh out the institutional realities rather than simply presuming them to exist. Borchard is far more effective when depicting the labyrinthine Las Vegas labor market. Nearly all of his homeless subjects mention the struggle to secure proper forms of identification and certification to work in the city. Ricky, who seeks employment in the resort casino industry, circumnavigates the city to obtain a health card, a Sheriff’s card, and an alcohol management card. And, of course, each of these cards requires its own documentation. Kevin takes sporadic cash-only construction jobs as he desperately waits for a social security card and certified birth certificate to be mailed to him. Gary’s gaming card is pulled after nearly two decades of dealing poker and he promptly ends up on the streets. Chuck struggles to get a Nevada state driver’s license for his job. It is little wonder so many of Borchard’s subjects eventually turn to panhandling, petty theft, gambling, and other forms of shadow work to supplement their income. Despite its scattershot approach, one consistent theme emerging throughout the book is the interplay of forces conspiring to make homelessness invisible in a touristbased urban economy. This is rooted in part in local siting decisions that concentrate social service agencies miles away from iconic tourist destinations like the Vegas Strip. There is also the selective enforcement of anti-panhandling and camping ordinances which funnels the ‘‘visible’’ homeless into marginalized areas. Finally, there are the actions of the homeless themselves, who often seek to conceal their status from potential employers, law enforcement, the public, and even their own families. Borchard reveals how many of those who have recently become homeless—not yet broken down and visibly tattered by life on the streets— subsist in plain sight by ‘‘blending in.’’ Casinos and coffee shops become ‘‘public’’ Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 66 Reviews resources where they can pass for tourists and access temporary shelter, free wireless, cheap food and drinks, and a sense of normality. Given the housing collapse that rocked Las Vegas and many other cities in the years since Borchard’s fieldwork, it is reasonable to suspect that these newly invisible homeless have multiplied. Moral Movements and Foreign Policy, by Joshua W. Busby. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 327pp. $31.00 paper. ISBN: 9780521125666. MARCO GIUGNI University of Geneva [email protected] Why do some campaigns by principled advocacy groups succeed in some places and fail in others? The question addressed in this book is simple, but providing an answer to it is a more difficult endeavor. Moral Movements and Foreign Policy does an excellent job in doing so. The book’s main argument is that movement success depends on the combination of three main factors: the material incentives facing states, the cultural resonance of the movements’ messages, and the presence of policy gatekeepers. In brief, it argues that movement success rests on a blend of low costs, high value fit, and supportive policy gatekeepers. Translated into the social movement jargon, this means that social movements may have a chance to influence policy decision-making when the costs are not too high and above all are not perceived as being too high, when movement leaders frame the issue in a way that it fits the country’s dominant values, and when political opportunities are favorable and do not pose too many obstacles at the domestic level. Joshua Busby shows that states sometimes act against their own material self-interest when a given issue is framed in a way that it fits the country’s values and when policy gatekeepers view them as important. He points out the limits of interest-based explanations, yet without rejecting them completely, and suggests that a framing-meets-gatekeepers or framing/gatekeepers approach provides a better explanation of why the Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 demands of advocacy movements succeed or fail. In the process, he stresses more specific aspects that have played a particularly important role in some cases, such as the international reputation and prestige that states want to build or maintain, the role of messengers and the similarity of attributes between them and gatekeepers, the importance of perceived costs, and the impact of shaming efforts. Working with an interesting and helpful typology of situations with regard to the possibility of movement success intersecting costs and values, Busby analyzes four cases of transnational campaigns dealing with different issue areas: international economics and development (debt relief), environment (climate change), public health (HIV/ AIDS), and justice/security (the International Criminal Court). In addition, he looks at these campaigns in comparative perspective across seven democracies: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. This two-fold comparison is conducted systematically across the four case studies, showing how the combination of the three factors mentioned above has led to success or failure of the campaigns. Each of the four case study chapters is organized in a similar fashion, which makes the reading comfortable and the line of argumentation easy to follow. The chapters start with an overview of the campaign at hand, then provide a partial explanation based on material interest and show its limits (whose general contours are also outlined in the theoretical chapter), followed by a more complete explanation stressing the framing/ gatekeepers argument (again, outlined in more general terms in the theoretical chapter), and by a more detailed discussion of some relevant national cases showing how the more specific aspects have played a crucial role in these cases. There is more than one reason to praise this book. Firstly, the book examines the impact of transnational movements and campaigns. This is all the more important as most of the existing studies of the consequences of social movements focus on national-based movements. At the same time, the author shows the importance of local or domestic factors for the success of transnational campaigns. Secondly, the book is firmly comparative, Reviews 67 both across issue areas and across countries. Since comparative analyses, especially on these two levels, are still a rare supply in this field, this is a very welcome addition to this literature. Thirdly and perhaps most importantly, the book goes beyond interestbased and simplistic cost/benefit accounts of social movement outcomes to show the importance of moral motivations and altruistic behavior. Yet, the author avoids throwing the baby out with the bath water and considers explanation based on self-interest as incomplete rather than incorrect. He shows the limits of this kind of explanation, but considers costs and material incentives as part of a broader framework that puts framing and political opportunities at center stage. This book, however, could have been even better, had Busby considered more seriously its potential ‘‘bridging’’ function. Indeed, perhaps the main criticism that one could address to this excellent book is that, while dealing with the outcomes of social movements, it largely – if not entirely – ignores previous work by students of social movements. The latter, for example, is not discussed in Chapter Two, which is where the author lays out his theoretical framework for the analyses to follow in subsequent chapters. Although one is not necessarily expecting the often tiresome ‘‘review of literature’’ section, the book could have improved with explicit references to the social movement literature. To be sure, blaming an author for not having used the concepts and terminology ones wishes to read and is familiar with would be quite an illegitimate criticism if not that doing so would have made the book and analysis even stronger. This lack of reference to prior work on the outcomes of social movements, made mainly by sociologists, but also by political scientists, has two negative consequences in my view. Firstly, some of the interesting arguments put forward in the book have in fact already been made in prior work, and this could have been acknowledged more explicitly. To make the most striking example, one of the main explanatory factors, namely the role of gatekeepers, or veto players, sounds similar to the concept of political opportunity structures, only named differently and less enmeshed with structural concerns in favor of individual institutional actors. Secondly, more references to the social movement literature would have contributed more explicitly to another major strength of this book, namely the fact that it bridges two bodies of work that too often travel on separate tracks. The analyses provided in this book draw heavily on social movement theory—most notably, on the framing and political opportunity approaches—yet without fully acknowledging it. Doing justice to these works and literature would only have made the book stronger. The Inequalities of Love: College-Educated Black Women and the Barriers to Romance and Family, by Averil Y. Clarke. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. 409pp. $26.95 paper. ISBN: 9780822350088. SHIRLEY A. HILL University of Kansas [email protected] In a book the author likens to a ‘‘chick flick,’’ love, marriage, and childbearing take center stage to explain the inequalities that African American women experience. Averil Clarke’s central arguments are that love matters when shaping productive and reproductive relations, that African American women face significant disadvantages in pursuing love and marriage, and that inequality scholars should shift their focus from money to love to better understand class formation and maintenance. The Inequalities of Love is based on 58 in-depth interviews with college-educated black women under the age of 50 and the analysis of national quantitative data, which allows the author to compare college-educated women across racial lines and African American women across social class lines. The quantitative data provides the big picture of trends among women in education, marriage, fertility, abortion, and a host of other interesting factors, but the richness of the interviews pushes us beyond assumptions easily (and often erroneously, Clarke argues) drawn from the quantitative data. Intersectionality theory provides the framework for the book: love inequalities are shaped and maintained within the context of gender, racial, and class Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 68 Reviews inequalities, especially as they unfold in institutional hierarchies. But Clarke draws liberally from a range of social theories— stratification, Bourdieu, Merton, feminist— to craft her argument that love matters and to question conventional theoretical wisdom. The first chapter of the book explores how the interviewees came to pursue a college education. Clarke uses their narratives to construct a typology of motivations, but points out that the women rarely fell into a single category. Some were motivated by a racial logic (e.g., the ‘‘status seekers’’ and ‘‘stigma avoiders’’); they sought a college education to escape persistent negative images of black women that depict them as irresponsible, immoral, hypersexual, and overly fertile. The economy of love in their families also mattered: nurturing families were the source of status attainment for many (‘‘prominent people pleasers’’), but dysfunctional families also fostered the desire for self-sufficiency and independence (‘‘conforming escape artists’’). The decision to pursue college also unfolded within the context of structural factors such as being recruited into college preparatory programs or affirmation action initiatives. The ‘‘money logic’’ inequality scholars use to explain college attainment, Clarke argues, ignores the actual experiences and processes that lead to the creation of class categories, especially how they are informed by factors such as love. In the remaining five chapters Clarke delves more deeply into her argument of love as a salient factor in creating and maintaining inequalities, starting with the deprivation that African American women experience when forming families. Much of the deprivation derives from cultural images and representations of blackness, which construct black women as socially undesirable and form the basis for creating elite feminine identities—identities that are not available to black women. The middle-class African American women in this study struggled to signify by their behaviors that such racial images are inaccurate: they saw non-marital sexuality and childbearing as wrong and stigmatizing and wanted stable, committed, monogamous relationships. But in heterosexual relationships, it is men who decide Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 which women are eligible for such relationships, and black women face the choice of a love/sex drought or engaging in the very behaviors they disapprove of. The conflict between their beliefs and their behaviors resulted in sporadic and ineffective contraceptive use, and resorting to induced abortion as ‘‘back stage work’’ to preserve their class identities. But in the end, their marriage/family/reproductive lives look more like those of low-income black women than their white and Hispanic college-educated counterparts. Racial isolation, gender-based romantic rules, and the pursuit of class credentials to avoid racial stigma all restrict black women’s access to love. Moreover, these experiences unfold within the contexts of other social and institutional hierarchies—families, educational institutions—that also constrain their choices. Clarke argues that the complex inequalities that effect African American women are rarely captured by stratification theorists, as their emphasis on social class, rational choice, and productivity ignores unequal access to love, marriage, and childbearing. Feminist theory also often falls short in its analysis of family, childbearing, and love as burdens that impede educational and economic advancement of women. Such thinking negates women’s desire for families and children; moreover, romantic love and childbearing may actually push women toward greater attainment. Clarke presents a persuasive case for the ways in which love matters in understanding inequality. Class advantage does not always lead to social power, especially for black women who cannot distance themselves from the symbolism associated with black bodies or gender inequities in the pursuit of love. This book complicates the simple ‘‘shortage of marriageable black men’’ theory used to explain the marriage decline among African Americans by providing an integrated look at the romantic goals of women within the context of class, gender, and racial constraints. Class is not achieved solely in the productive arena, but also through love, marriage, and family. The book may be criticized for excluding the love narratives and goals of black men and for being, at times, somewhat redundant. The strengths of the book, however, far outweigh its weaknesses. It is Reviews 69 theoretically rich and compelling. Detailed statistical analyses of national data are combined with fascinating narratives from interviewees in ways that reveal processes that underlie class formation and maintenance. Moreover, the author aims to move inequality scholarship in a new direction—the consideration of inequalities in love and reproduction. The book is an excellent choice for scholars and teachers in the fields of gender, family studies, and social inequality. Confronting Equality: Gender, Knowledge and Global Change, by Raewyn Connell. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2011. 191pp. $22.95 paper. ISBN: 9780745653518. RHACEL SALAZAR PARREÑAS University of Southern California [email protected] Confronting Equality is Raewyn Connell’s latest contribution to the social sciences. Connell’s field-defining works have broadened our understanding of masculinities, gender as a social construction, and among others the sociology of knowledge. In this book, Connell examines the impacts of and challenges brought by the culture and politics of neoliberal globalization to the achievement of equality. Bringing together previously published journal articles, she uses empirical research as well as intellectual work produced in the global metropole and periphery to analyze the intersections of gender, knowledge production, and globalization in the era of neoliberalism, meaning free enterprise, free competition and self-reliance. Confronting Equality covers a wide spectrum: the question of neoliberalism as a gender-neutral principle, the role of the family in neoliberal regimes, and education or more generally knowledge acquisition in neoliberalism. One can initially struggle to figure out the overall argument of the book and how the chapters link with one another. It is a wide reaching book best described as a social scientific examination of knowledge acquisition in the contexts of economic globalization and political neoliberalism. Its major contribution is its illustration of the inequalities embedded in knowledge acquisition, which Connell sees as exacerbated by the economic principle of neoliberalism. The inequalities of knowledge acquisition are imposed in manifold ways including in the workplace, family, schools, and discipline of sociology. In the first two chapters, Connell calls our attention to how the principle of neoliberalism in global and state governance advances the post-feminist ideology of gender neutrality, which is an ideology that she rightfully links to the celebration of the individual and self-reliance in neoliberalism. In her discussion, she asserts that the advancement of gender equality has been wrongfully pursued under the guise of gender neutrality, leading to positive and negative results but ultimately resulting in the denial of gender differences. Gender neutrality, for instance, can result positively in the destigmatization of stay-at-home fathers but it can negatively result in downplaying the persistence of gender inequalities. It can also absolve the state of needing to ensure gender equality thereby becoming complicit in the maintenance of gender inequalities, including for instance dealing with sexual harassment at schools. In Chapter Three, Connell provides a case study of gender neutrality and an illustration of how the principle of neoliberalism transforms social realities. She looks specifically at the case of parenting and the division of labor in the family. It is in this chapter that Connell finally provides us with a working definition of neoliberalism, which she sees as ‘‘the project of transformation under the sign of the free market that has dominated politics in the last quarter-century’’ (p. 41). Drawing from multiple studies on the family, Connell observes that neoliberalism promotes de-gendering but that this process neither eliminates nor exacerbates gender divisions—instead it configures gender. These configurations lead to new anxieties about masculinity, redefine mothering for both the working and middle class, and involve great tensions. Connell does not offer a conclusion about parenting but steers scholars to reckon with market forces when examining the family today. In the next two chapters, Connell turns to previous studies to examine the politics of neoliberalism in education. The discussion moves away from gender and the analysis of neoliberalism’s advancement of gender Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 70 Reviews neutrality. In these chapters, she instead pays closer attention to class inequities, looking at the schooling of working-class families in New South Wales, Australia and the case of teachers. What we learn from these chapters is the exacerbation of class exclusion in global neoliberalism, the standardization of education and the lesser flexibility given teachers—realities that potentially hurt the learning environment of poorer students. In the latter portion of the book (Chapters Six to Nine), Connell embarks on a discussion of the sociology of knowledge. Chapter Six looks at ‘‘intellectual workers,’’ Chapter Seven at sociology as a discipline, and Chapters Eight and Nine at the knowledge produced by two social theorists Paulin Hountondji (from the global South) and Antonio Negri (from the margins of the global North). These last chapters are best described as an examination of the valuation of knowledge in our global society and provide a critical reading of the constitution of inequality in this valuation. In Chapter Six, Connell explores the character of intellectual work in neoliberalism and the labor process of knowledge production, questioning the notion of a ‘‘free’’ thinker and calling attention to the hierarchies of knowledge sources. In Chapter Seven, she continues to establish the existence of a ‘‘metropolitan hegemony.’’ In the next two chapters, she highlights the works by two marginalized knowledge sources, Hountondji from the global South and Negri from the subjugated class of the global North. She pushes readers to utilize the noncanonical perspectives of these theorists and credits Hountondji for calling to question Eurocentric knowledge production and Negri for his critical reading of world capitalism that comes from his perspective ‘‘below.’’ She then ends with a semiautobiographical chapter in which she reflects on her own social activism, calling for a critical need for publicly-engaged intellectual work in the era of neoliberalism, the need for intellectual work to engage a vast range of inequalities, and the need to blend practicality and utopianism in the construction of knowledge. Confronting Equality is best described as a sociological query into the ethos of neoliberalism and its relevance to our understanding of inequality. There are two significant strands to Connell’s discussion Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 of neoliberalism. In the first part of the book, she explores the heightening of gender neutrality in neoliberalism and in the second part she addresses the inequalities that underpin the sociology of knowledge. This is a thought-provoking book that I recommend, written with political urgency, which advances our core understanding of inequality. Renewal in the French Trade Union Movement: A Grassroots Perspective, by Heather Connolly. New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2010. 248pp. $60.95 paper. ISBN: 9783034301015. KENNETH H. TUCKER, JR. Mount Holyoke College [email protected] It is not news that unions are in trouble throughout the Western world. Buffeted by the onslaught of neo-liberalism and privatization, unions face an uncertain future at best. So what should they do to regain strength in this illiberal era? Heather Connolly explores how militants in one union in France, the railway workers of the Fédération des Syndicats Solidaries, Unitaires et Démocratiques (SUD), have attempted to revitalize worker activism. France has always been an interesting case for the study of union activism, for it has combined radical ideas, from communism to revolutionary syndicalism, with a history of strikes, yet exceedingly low rates of union membership. Current trade union membership is under 10 percent of the workforce, and over half of union members are concentrated in the public sector, in protected nationalized industries like the railway and the post office. Unions have progressively lost members throughout the years. Yet union membership has never been high in France, in part because collective bargaining covers 90 percent of workers, whether they are unionized or not. In this context, unions have historically relied on a core of activists rather than mass membership. Connolly engages in ethnographic research to examine how the SUD-Rail is responding to the enormous challenges that it faces. Her specific focus is on the role of these union activists in constructing and sustaining collective interests and solidarity among workers. She draws Reviews 71 on sociological theories of framing to explore how activists create ways of understanding and interpretation that promote workingclass interests. She finds that union activists are indeed important in framing the interpretation of injustice among workers, encouraging group cohesion and identity, and inciting and legitimizing collective action SUD militants are but the latest group of worker activists upset with the seeming inability of French labor organizations to promote radical social change. The French labor movement has been characterized by rivalry between competing unions for workers throughout much of its history. The SUD emerged in the late 1980s in opposition to what its members considered to be the reformism and bureaucratization of the two major French labor unions, the Confédération generale du travail (CGT) and the Confédération Francaise Démocratique du Travail (CFDT). The SUD grew fairly rapidly after its formation in 1988, wishing to remake the confrontational identity of French unionism. It adopted a federal structure organized on the basis of occupation or company, while emphasizing local union activism, as did the revolutionary syndicalists. The union criticized the privatization craze as a movement away from a public sector ethic focused on what is best for society towards a consumerist approach concentrating solely on profits. The SUD has also attempted to forge links with other social movements, such as the social justice movement, to integrate the demands of labor into a broader context. Connolly focuses specifically on the activities of militants in the SUD-Rail union. Railway workers have traditionally been among the most highly unionized sectors of the French labor force, and among the most militant. SUD-Rail activists have tried to revive the spirit of early twentieth century French revolutionary syndicalism, by emphasizing direct action, a strong working-class identity, a suspicion of political parties, and participatory democracy and agency at the local level. While the movement has been partially successful in resurrecting languages of class struggle and direct action, and organized some previously unorganized workers, on the whole the SUD-Rail is struggling with membership crises, as are the other French labor organizations. These militants attempted to implement direct action at the local level, but confronted a number of problems familiar to anyone who studies union activism. They faced tensions between worker participation and maintaining organizational efficiency and a clear decision-making process. There were also tensions between attempts to represent the particular interests of workers and wider working-class claims for social change. The most interesting part of the book, and the most distressing, is Connolly’s study of the discourse and actions of working-class militants. SUD-Rail activists were very aware of the problem of bureaucracy, and often discussed ways that they could avoid becoming bureaucrats. They often discussed how to promote strikes and worker demonstrations, while also looking for new activists who could bring in novel ideas for the union. They truly believed in the power of grassroots unionism and participatory democracy, self-consciously constructing their identities as union activists in opposition to the reformism of the CGT. Yet they ultimately failed to attract a mass membership. Tensions between old and new generations of activists, and between those committed to local action and those militants more responsive to national trends, contributed to this problem. Pressures on the union to negotiate with the state, and the seemingly inevitable process of the professionalization of the union leadership, were also factors. But ultimately, Connolly writes, workers were just not interested in joining the union. She cites the famous free rider problem as a major reason for the lack of participation, for workers benefited from the actions of the unions, whether they were members or not. It is hard to say if Connolly contributes much to our knowledge of trade unions, beyond some ethnographic data on the beliefs of activists. She recognizes that a study of workers who are not leaders, and how they approach union activism, could contribute much to our understanding of the fate of workers in France. Finally, the book reads much like a dissertation, and could have benefited from a rewrite and attention to editing. Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 72 Reviews The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy As If the Future Matters, by Diane Coyle. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. 346pp. $24.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780691145181. ANDERS HAYDEN Dalhousie University [email protected] A series of crises now confronts many contemporary societies: climate change and ecological unsustainability, growing public debt in the wake of the financial crisis and bank bailouts, socially corrosive inequalities, and the depletion of trust and social capital. Diane Coyle sees a common theme tying together these challenges: the need to ensure that our actions today do not come at the expense of the future. Coyle, a Harvard-trained economic consultant, proclaims that, ‘‘We’ve reached the point of Enough.’’ She highlights the way in which the United Kingdom, United States, and other nations are living beyond their means environmentally and financially, leaving the bill for today’s consumption to those who follow. Solutions, she argues, require new social norms and institutions that embody a longer-term view. They also require reforms to increasingly dysfunctional political systems that seem incapable of solving any of the core problems or of engaging citizens in informed debate about the difficult decisions ahead. Despite the book’s title, Coyle does not actually believe that we can ever have enough in one important sense—that is, with regard to economic output. She rejects the new ‘‘conventional wisdom’’ that GDP growth and happiness are unrelated in already-affluent societies. Coyle draws, for example, on recent studies concluding that a link is still evident between happiness and GDP (in logarithmic form) in most countries—although not in the United States, where increasing inequality has excluded so many people from the benefits of growth. Coyle concludes decisively that growth and happiness are linked, but this is unlikely to be the last word on that debate. There remains considerable evidence that income has diminishing marginal utility in Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 improving well-being, while many other factors have more powerful impacts than income on happiness. (See, for example, the 2012 World Happiness Report, edited by John Helliwell, Richard Layard, and Jeffrey Sachs). Coyle likewise attacks the increasinglyprominent argument that environmental challenges can be addressed by turning away from economic growth without reducing well-being. Instead, she asserts that the growth we need, which until now has been unsustainable, will have to be sustainable in the future, through measures such as green taxes that incorporate environmental externalities into prices and better statistical measures that capture the depletion of ‘‘natural capital.’’ This has been the mainstream view since the 1987 Brundtland Report on sustainable development; however, Coyle does not engage with the data, produced by environmental sociologists and others, showing the inadequacy to date of this project of decoupling growth from environmental impacts. In light of such evidence, it seems unwise to dismiss, as Coyle does, the idea that a turn away from prioritizing growth might be needed. The idea of ‘‘Enough’’ notwithstanding, there are few limits to the range of issues that Coyle addresses. For example, a chapter on ‘‘Trust’’ manages, within a few pages, to touch on the flawed institutions of global economic governance, the importance of face-toface contact in cities, racial diversity and affirmative action, and whether governments should collect taxes via payroll deduction. Some readers might find this breadth impressive; others will find themselves wishing the author had shown greater restraint and focus. Prospective readers should also be aware that the book does not provide original scholarship, but rather reviews the available literature—at times quite thoroughly— in building her argument. The book is at its strongest—or at least most in line with this reviewer’s ideological predilections—in its denunciation of growing inequality, the ‘‘social contagion’’ of excess incomes in the economy’s upper reaches, and the ‘‘sham’’ of bonuses with no identifiable link to individual performance. Coyle identifies two main, standard explanations for rising inequality: globalization and Reviews 73 technological change. She adds that we do have a choice in how to respond to these forces—some countries, including Germany, France, and Denmark, have seen reductions in inequality since 1990. However, a tension exists between her suggestions to limit these inequalities by reining in excess at the top and her call to scale back social entitlements, such as public pensions, to strengthen governments’ long-term budgetary pictures. Indeed, she seems to buy into some of the more alarmist claims about the sustainability of public finances, quoting a bond trader on the growing reluctance in the markets to purchase U.K. and U.S. debt, and implying that these two countries face fates similar to Greece, Spain, and Portugal. In fact, markets continue to snap up British and American bonds at low short- and long-term interest rates. The book concludes with a 30-page ‘‘manifesto,’’ which is unlikely to inspire the masses to take to the streets. Its mildly reformist proposals not only aim to give greater weight to the future, but also to ‘‘strengthen the moral dimension of capitalism.’’ Perhaps most significant, although not original, is the call to supplement GDP with new statistical indicators that measure wealth more comprehensively. Another proposal with the potential to shift political debate and priorities—by providing a counterweight to short-term political pressures— is the creation of institutions with a duty to give voice to the interests of future generations. Coyle also emphasizes the need to encourage savings over current consumption—especially high-carbon consumption. While some of her proposals are sensible, others are bound to cause some head-scratching, such as: ‘‘Make the old-fashioned virtue of public service a priority in implementing the inevitable cuts in public expenditure and reforming the provision of services’’ (p. 295). Coyle believes the pendulum has swung too far in a market fundamentalist direction, but she is quick to warn against a return to the statism of 1970s Britain, and ultimately does not stray far from economic orthodoxy. Indeed, there could be greater acknowledgement of the role that mainstream economics has played in the various crises she highlights. The Economics of Enough is an ambitious, thought-provoking, but uneven book. Sociologists may find it to be a useful overview of recent economic thought on a wide range of issues, even if it does not provide fully satisfying answers to the question, outlined in the sub-title, of ‘‘How to Run the Economy As If the Future Matters.’’ Transatlantic Conversations: Feminism as Travelling Theory, edited by Kathy Davis and Mary Evans. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. 237pp. $99.95 cloth. ISBN: 97807546 78359. ANAHÍ VILADRICH Graduate Center, CUNY [email protected] Kathy Davis and Mary Evans conceived this collection of essays as a natural outcome from their role as editors of the European Journal of Women’s Studies—which was born as an attempt to counter-act the overspread dominance of U.S. feminist theory amid the field of women studies. From the very introduction, the editors acknowledge that the book’s underlying framework is (and despite their best intentions) Eurocentric and Anglo-centric, as it mostly resulted from conversations held between the United States and the United Kingdom. Central to their main approach lies the issue of translation: the fact that the official language in the ‘‘global North’’ is English makes even more evident the uni-directionality that privileges Anglo-spoken countries, with the United States in the lead, as the mainstream intellectual force. Halfway between a self-reflexive analysis and a conceptual undertaking, the writers in this volume map out their evolving feminist voices through multi-theoretical and empirical layers of meaning across the Atlantic. And the strength of this book precisely rests on its authors’ attempts for translation toward building accountable scaffolds to make sense of their personal and geographical realities. By no means this volume aims at universalizing its scope; on the contrary, Davis and Evans invite us to ask: what is unique to European feminism(s) and, at the same time, shared with women academics in the United States? Is there anything distinctive in European feminist scholarship? How to bring the commonalities among Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 74 Reviews women’s different voices in the United States and Europe? Sixteen succinct and powerful essays by writers from different disciplines, generations, and locations joined the editors in devising a challenging, and accomplished, book project. Although not all chapters are as successful in providing powerful takehome messages, the collection overall succeeds in offering a multi-vocal feminist quilt for the expression of women’s academic and political voices across the Atlantic. The writers in this volume build upon their intellectual and professional trajectories that place themselves somehow between the center and the periphery of feminist scholarship. In doing so, this collection concocts a pristine kaleidoscope that reveals the enduring differences within and across nation states. Situated in different geographical sites (from Western to Eastern Europe) the authors’ narratives show dissimilar, albeit complementary, standpoints that make this volume unique. Divided into three inter-connected themes, the book’s first part follows the biographical trajectories that led the contributors to define, and become, feminist scholars in complex ways. While the editors, and many of the authors, acknowledge that the core of mainstream feminist paradigms have mostly traveled from the United States to Europe (with little circulation of European ideas back to the United States), this does not mean that those on the European side have had their voices subsumed to American scholarship. Under the spells of European thinkers from Julia Kristeva to Simone de Beauvoir, to critical theorists including Althusser, Gramsci, and Poulantzas, the chapters’ eclectic agendas are not absent of critiques of the West. Therefore, it is not surprising to learn how little is known in the United States about the contributions of women from the other sides of the world on gender theory, third-world feminist contributions, and political practice. Grounded counter-narratives to the ‘‘global womanhood’’ mantra in this book are uttered by those at the European borders, as in Andrea Petö’s essay that retraces her intellectual path, initially as an historian, while growing up in the 1960s in communist Hungary, and later becoming a feminist scholar in Germany. The essays’ common tropes of Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 contextualizing (namely translating to American scholars) what is specific about their ‘‘exotic’’ areas of the world include critiques on the U.S. lack of analysis of the global struggles for reproductive freedom and social justice movements outside its frontiers. The chapters also reflect upon the contributions to social theory on both sides of the Atlantic, including the pluses and minuses of each region regarding the advancement of specific political and intellectual agendas—from queer studies to gender equality and racial justice. For example, renée hoogland’s essay conspicuously observes that while the field of racial and ethnic studies is more accepted as a prism for the examination of gender inequalities in the United States than in Europe, European scholars are more eager to embrace broader advocacy agendas in support of queer studies and gay civil rights. The authors’ political engagement towards pursuing a feminist standpoint, both within and outside the academy, is the main topic of the second part of the book in which critical theory is framed by empirically-grounded research and political platforms in support of gender equality and social justice. For instance, Ann Phoenix’s striking essay revisits her own contradictory path towards becoming a black British feminist. The broader East-West racial conversations are germane to her political involvement with both U.S. black feminist writings and ‘‘third world’’ discussions on social and racial (in) justice in the United States. Throughout the book, a few of the chapters revisit the uneven ways through which their authors’ feminist trajectories actually suffered from the contradictory processes, and ongoing struggles, involving the fights for gender equality in their countries of birth. For instance, the striking essay by Maria Garcı́a de León reveals, in first person, the dramatic sociopolitical transition that took place in Spain (beginning in the mid-1970s) between the conservative Franco’s government and the subsequent progressive Spanish era that welcomed principles of gender equality amid women’s rising professional careers. In this vein, Gul Ozyegin retraces her family history in Turkey, where she grew up under the spells of Western modernization and ideals of gender equity in the Reviews 75 labor force, amid a patriarchal upbringing in which women were supposed to be domestically caste and submissive. Veronica Pravadelli, who was born to a traditional Italian family, portrays a similar trend by revealing the tensions of coming of age in a country where gender clashes are the norm, with women becoming pioneering subjects in the public world albeit remaining as subsumed (and sexualized) objects in the social imaginary, including the national media. The challenges exemplified by these authors also speak to existing gendered tensions between the domestic and public spheres both in Europe and in the United States. For instance, Kelly Coate’s essay challenges the dual meaning of ‘‘writing in the dark’’ both as a metaphor of working on marginalized (feminist) topics in American academia, and as a claim for finding one’s own time to write. The third and final part of book explores the transformations of theoretical concepts across the Atlantic, including the conundrums involving the ‘‘big three’’ (i.e., gender, race, and class) in different locations. In a way, terms that were initially framed in the United States have achieved both global and localized meanings that differ from the ones with which they were originally crafted. In the end, this book offers women’s real stories eager to enchant the reader with their personal telling of their coming-of-age as professional women, feminist scholars, and advocates. Far from providing a ‘‘one-sizefits-all’’ recipe, the book offers a provocative lens with which to explore the authors’ multi-locality while reflecting on their own struggles toward finding their unique (and shared) conceptual voices. Tacit Subjects: Belonging and Same-Sex Desire among Dominican Immigrant Men, by Carlos Ulises Decena. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. 309pp. $23.95 paper. ISBN: 9780822349457. KATIE L. ACOSTA Tulane University [email protected] Scholars interested in intersections of race, class, sexualities, and migration will be rightfully engaged by Carlos Decena’s Tacit Subjects, a much awaited and formidable addition to this nascent field of research. Decena’s book is divided into three main sections, the first focusing on the participants’ moves to New York City and their ongoing connections to the island. In the second section, Decena focuses on the importance of the body as a tool used for communication, legitimacy, and boundary work, while the final section focuses on sexual practices and contested relationships within the activo/pasivo paradigm (Almaguer 1993) and, more generally, within an ideology of machismo. Each section begins with a short auto-ethnographic vignette in which Decena shares with the reader pieces of his own life as a Dominican gay immigrant man and, thus, connects his experiences with those who participated in his study. In so doing, Decena provides a rare and deeply personal account of the ways in which he, as researcher and participant, interprets the related findings. Decena begins by revisiting the concept of a sujeto tacito or a tacit subject, that which remains unspoken albeit understood, which he previously outlined in an earlier article (Decena 2008). In this book, Decena expands upon this concept, noting that tacit subjects helped these men maintain connections with their families through a mutual understanding that sexual matters were private and not to be discussed in a familial setting. Decena cautions that tacit subjects are not equated to or read as an individual’s sexual repression, but rather should be seen as taking ownership of one’s own sexuality and determining the means by which sexuality is discussed within the family. By establishing the aforementioned differentiation, this Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 76 Reviews pivotal chapter becomes the point of departure for the remainder of the study. Decena pays an extraordinary amount of attention to language in his book, making it initially clear that language is never transparent, neither his nor that of his participants. The author demonstrates an astute ability to unpack language, both in English and in Spanish, paying meticulous attention to the multiple and myriad meanings behind his respondents’ words and the ways in which the limitations of language can, at times, truncate understanding. Decena fluctuates frequently between the two Spanish-language forms of the verb ‘‘to be’’ (ser and estar). The verb ser translates more literally into an English version that implies a stable, unchanging, and invariable constant. Estar, however, is not as easily or directly translated into English. While also meaning ‘‘to be,’’ estar subtly implies a way of being that is not permanent or static. Decena uses estar often in the work to evoke the essential idea of identities in transit. The distinction between these verbs, although often difficult to establish in English-language translations, is both vital and rich in meaning. It reminds the reader of movement as a recurring theme in the book, particularly reminiscent of the participants’ moves, before and after migration, in and out of Dominican worlds, heterosexual worlds, gay and bisexual worlds, and worlds of family. Decena himself moves fluidly back and forth between English and Spanish. While he consistently provides translations, it is unfortunately likely that much of the richness with which he manipulates language will be lost for the monolingual reader. Another important theme explored in Decena’s work is ‘‘the straightjacket of masculinity.’’ The author recounts the constraints felt by those he interviewed to perform masculinity as a means for financial survival. Decena notes how the straightjacket of masculinity also shaped the sexual exchanges and intimate friendships among his study participants. He contrasts what he refers to as the serious, masculine image these men give off in public spaces with an image of effeminacy which they sometimes evoke with one another as a way of creating intimacy and proximity. At this point, Decena provides an analysis of the nuances of code Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 switching, a way for participants to communicate as they move throughout the different worlds they straddle. Sexual practices became one of the places in which Decena notes that the participants challenged masculinity. He relays their distancing from Dominicanidad and the machismo attached to it by establishing a precedent for sexual reciprocity and equality in bed. He also points to the racist stereotypes met by most men in the United States which scripted them as the Dominican macho and, regardless of desire, shaped their sexual negotiations. Decena’s work is a provocative scholastic piece which pushes the boundaries of academia to include more ‘‘tacit subjects’’—both ideological and human. Decena is bold, in that he does not apologize for the frank image his participants depict of their fellow Dominicans or the hierarchies they create to distance themselves from others whom they perceive to be undesirable. Rather, Decena unpacks the meanings behind the boundaries and links created by those in his study, focusing on their perceptions of other Dominicans in relation to their own positions as marginal, working-class, immigrant people attempting to advance based on a social status hierarchy in a host country. Tacit Subjects is clearly a must read for any scholar interested in race, class, sexualities and migration. References Almaguer, Tomas. 1993. ‘‘Chicano Men: A Cartography of Homosexual Identity and Behavior’’ Pp. 255–73 in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, edited by Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, and David Halperin. New York, NY: Routledge. Decena, Carlos U. 2008. ‘‘Tacit Subjects.’’ GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 14: 339–59. Reviews 77 Divided by Borders: Mexican Migrants and Their Children, by Joanna Dreby. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010. 311 pp. $24.95 paper. ISBN: 9780520260900. R.S. OROPESA Pennsylvania State University [email protected] Migration from Mexico is a perpetually salient public issue on both sides of the border. The Mexico-born population in the United States is 11–12 million persons, including 5–6 million undocumented migrants who send billions of dollars ‘‘home.’’ However, the story of this migration must go beyond counts of the individuals per se to the families in which they are socially embedded. The prevailing social science narrative starts with a description of migration as a strategic decision that reflects the interests of families in spreading economic risks by sending members abroad. Families are also vital for marshaling resources that surmount barriers to both leaving home and maintaining transnational relationships that can pave the way for those who might follow in the footsteps of pioneer migrants. This narrative misses the human drama in families that is created by tensions between aspirations, emotion-laden bonds, and expectations about fulfilling responsibilities to others from afar. Joanna Dreby’s Divided by Borders: Mexican Migrants and Their Children is a compelling ethnographic investigation that re-focuses attention on this drama, especially on parent-child relationships. Based primarily on fieldwork conducted with undocumented Mexican adults in New Jersey and the children of migrants and their grandparent caregivers in Mexico, this study provides an intimate portrait of how the costs of living apart unfold over time. This is the story of what happens when married and single parents migrate, and when children are asked to join them. The book is structured around chapters that offer case studies and chapters that pursue analytic themes. For example, the initial case study suggests that lengthy separations create mismatches between how mothers and their children remember one another. Poignantly conveyed by the reproduction of a family portrait taken in New Jersey with an out-of-date picture of a Mexico-resident child ‘‘pasted in,’’ migrant mothers remember their children as they were and miss seeing them change in real time. Because routine phone calls home are poor substitutes for continuous contact, some children may create emotional distance from absent mothers who yearn for closeness. Of course, such experiences are not limited to mothers. Corroborating video evidence of this account of the malaise accompanying out-of-synch lives can be found in an interview of a migrant father in the documentary Farmingville. He describes himself with sadness as a ‘‘blind man’’ because of his inability to visualize a growing son in Mexico from his voice on the phone. The passage of time at different speeds for those who lead different lives in different places is not emotionally neutral. This description alludes to the primary objective of elucidating how various inequalities affect family relationships. Specifically, expectations about parents’ responsibilities to children are structured around gender. Migrant fathers must provide financially and those who are either unable or unwilling to send money home may withdraw from their children’s lives. As the socio-emotional anchors of families, mothers carry a heavier ‘‘moral burden’’ to be with their children. Migrant mothers must manage guilt about leaving children who may resent them for doing so and inflict emotional pain by calling their grandmother caregivers ‘‘mama.’’ Those who separate from their husbands or who start new families abroad are in an even more difficult position when dealing with children who may fear the loss of emotional commitment from competing loyalties. When separation occurs, some fathers may take advantage of the opportunity to fill the resulting vacuum (at least until forming a union with another woman who can pick up the slack). Although even familiar descriptions of gendered parenting dilemmas will resonate with many readers, Dreby’s attention to children’s perspectives is particularly fresh. Children’s views are structured less around gender than age. Children apparently shift from an attitude of indifference to an attitude of resentment toward migrant parents as they get older. Because this adds to the Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 78 Reviews emotional baggage migrant parents must carry, children have some leverage in dealing with them. Older children also have greater freedom under the supervision of grandmother caregivers who typically are careful not to undermine the child’s parents and are often lax in monitoring. This lack of mooring increases the chance that children will become ‘‘troubled youth’’ who perform poorly in school. Still, perspectives mature during the transition to young adulthood as children accumulate experiences in their own romantic relationships and come to understand their responsibilities as men and women. Young men who are less successful in school realize that migration is a route to employment. Young women increasingly realize that it is a viable option in the context of marriage. Thus, the migration cycle begins anew. Divided by Borders offers important insights into the ongoing costs of migration for fathers, mothers, and children. The implication that the costs for parents evolve over time, partly in response to the stance of children, exposes models of the migration process which assume that different family members have the same interests, the same costs, or that costs are static. In this vein, it is hard to walk away from this work without realizing how sterile commonlyused analytic terms like ‘‘costs’’ are when a richer language exists for capturing the psychological downside of migration. This study is also praiseworthy for evidentiary reasons. Less ambitious undertakings might have focused solely on parents in New Jersey, but the adoption of an origindestination research design that includes children in Mexico provides a necessary vantage point for developing an understanding of how lives are affected by geographic separation. Moreover, some ethnographies that are primarily narratives in the investigator’s own words require considerable trust on the part of the reader. This is not an issue here. Dreby is able to maintain the reader’s trust by liberally showcasing her subjects’ voices as evidence, despite the obvious challenges of doing so when respondents refuse to be recorded. Several limitations that reveal avenues for future research should be mentioned. Although insights are generated from Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 a multi-faceted data collection strategy involving in-depth interviews, in-school surveys, and interviews with school personnel, this effort better illuminates the possible channels through which some problems may emerge than their prevalence because of the research design (e.g., only 12 families were followed over time). Moreover, an original research design that excludes nonmigrants cannot show that children’s problems there are due to migration. Collectively, these issues make it difficult to evaluate claims about the inadequacies of perspectives which draw attention to processes associated with cultures of migration and familism. Lastly, a secondary goal was to reveal the human impact of immigration policies. It is hard to separate the effects of immigration from the effects of immigration policies described as ‘‘exacting an unbearable toll on families.’’ Nevertheless, such characterizations will resonate with the already converted—those who favor a more humane approach to immigration policy. They will fail to move those who focus selectively on evidence of the resiliency of families, or who feel that angst among the undocumented population is in the national interest if it increases the likelihood of eventual family reunification in Mexico. In closing, this exceptional study reveals the complexities of undocumented migrants as humans who are more than ‘‘arms’’ for digging ditches and carrying someone else’s kids. Divided by Borders will likely serve as a touchstone for future research on families with children who are both here and there. Corporate Wrongdoing and the Art of the Accusation, by Robert R. Faulkner. New York, NY: Anthem Press, 2011. 192pp. $32.95 paper. ISBN: 9780857287946. ARI ADUT University of Texas, Austin [email protected] This book is a very original study of public accusation. By using sundry media sources, LexisNexis, and Dow Jones interactive corporate archives, Robert R. Faulkner generates and analyzes an impressive data set consisting of over a thousand public accusations Reviews 79 of corporate malfeasance made over two decades. These charges are about the business transactions of more than 400 high-capitalization companies in the United States. Faulkner usefully differentiates among four types of announcements of wrongdoing: innuendo, admonition, accusation, and indictment. Despite their different logics, these types are often interconnected by distinct social processes. Accusation is defined as a ‘‘publicly expressed and perspicuous statement of alleged wrongdoing that affixes blame on the supposed offender’’ (p.7). According to Faulkner, accusations play an essential function in economic markets insofar as they constitute initial public warning signals about transgressive business conduct. The author convincingly argues that accusation is a social form with an autonomous logic. It is not simply a response to a transgression. This is why Faulkner stresses the symbolic work underlying the production of an accusation—hence the title of the book. According to him, the art of producing a public allegation entails: ‘‘(1) focusing on an explicit market-based tie, (2) stripping away connotations that are favorable and nuanced, (3) abbreviating or leveling the public denunciation into concise message, and (4) attributing or casting explicit blame’’ (p. 9). Faulkner then embarks on a quantitative study of the different market-ties that corporate accusations involve. He differentiates among the following types of accusations: (1) accusations of wrongdoing in and around the corporation; (2) accusations involving rivals, industry peers, and competitors; (3) accusations involving suppliers of resources, goods, services, and commercial banks; (4) accusations involving buyer of products, customer of resources, clients of services, and investors in securities and pension funds; (5) accusations involving investment banks, analysts, advisers, rating agencies, and the Registered Investment Community; and (6) accusations involving government officials and federal, state, and local regulators. Corporate Wrongdoing and the Art of the Accusation says very important things about the multiple meaning and uses of accusations in different contexts and their frequency. Here are some of the interesting findings. Despite the high-level publicity that the fifth and sixth types of accusations usually obtain, they are statistically, relatively speaking, not very frequent. In Faulkner’s data set, 45 percent of the accusations implicated only one-fifth of the companies. Despite the high number of accusations collected by the author and their seeming heterogeneity, closer analysis reveals that they involve only three principal themes: misrepresentation, misdirection, misuse, or circumvention of government processes and procedures. Public charges of corporate wrongdoing often cause more moral outrage than convictions. Faulkner argues that ‘‘in white-collar and corporate crime, by the time the sentencing arrives, the aura of gravitas and moral seriousness is exhausted’’ (p.10). Finally, this book makes a signal contribution to the study of opportunism insofar as it emphasizes the supply-side of ‘‘interestseeking with guile,’’ while most social scientists and commentators tend to make demand-side arguments on this topic. As Faulkner compellingly argues, corporate accusations have their own logic and sociological patterns. But his book does an equally good job of analyzing how the denunciatory disclosure of corporate wrongdoing also reveals quite a bit about the culture and moral order of capitalism. The transgressions of market rules throw into full relief the implicit, taken-for-granted presuppositions of action in the economic world. Furthermore, Faulkner successfully shows that corporate scandals are often not only about straightforward illegal acts but also about broken promises and other violations of social expectations. This book should be of great value to economic sociologists, criminologists, and sociologists of culture. Anyone interested in conflict or the seamy side of American capitalism would also learn much from it. Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 80 Reviews Are Muslims Distinctive?: A Look at the Evidence, by M. Steven Fish. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011. 385pp. $27.95 paper. ISBN: 9780199769216. ZIAD MUNSON Lehigh University [email protected] Are Muslims Distinctive? addresses the deceptively simple question of how Islam affects individuals and societies. Are Muslims more personally pious than others? Are they more tolerant of crime or corruption? Do Muslim societies treat women less equally? Are they less democratic? The premise of M. Steven Fish’s book is that most work focused on such questions brings more heat than light to these issues, selectively culling data that fits preconceived notions of Islam rather than a dispassionate and comprehensive survey of the available information. This book is an attempt to provide such a survey, through attitudinal data coupled with a wide variety of country-level data drawn from many sources. Six substantive chapters focus on a particular area in which there exists significant public discussion of how Muslims might be distinctive: personal religiosity and views toward religion in politics, social capital and tolerance, corruption and crime, large-scale political violence and terrorism, social inequality, and democracy. Some of these questions are explored at the level of individual attitudes. Contrary to stubborn stereotypes, Fish finds little evidence that Muslims differ much in their attitudes toward the separation of religion and politics. He also finds that they are no more religiously devout than members of other faiths, and they are just as likely to be members of voluntary associations as anyone else. They are less tolerant of atheism than non-Muslims, but also less tolerant of political corruption. Consistent with other stubborn stereotypes, Muslims do exhibit more sexist views toward women. Other questions are explored at the societal level, comparing predominantly Muslim and non-Muslim countries. Muslim countries, he finds, enjoy about the same overall level of social capital as the rest of the world, and suffer from about the same amount of Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 corruption and large-scale political violence. Both economic inequality and violent crime are less prevalent in Muslim countries than they are elsewhere. On the other hand, the social conditions for women are poorer in Muslim countries than in non-Muslim countries. Muslim countries are also more likely to be home to authoritarian political regimes. And the majority of most deadly terrorist attacks are committed by Islamists (and most of those who die in such attacks are Muslims in predominantly Muslim countries). The general analytic strategy of each chapter follows the classic pattern of most quantitative journal articles: present the data, show bivariate relationships, explain multivariate statistical models, and provide a short discussion of the results. Fish is a careful methodologist who clearly explains the measures he uses at the beginning of each chapter, including both their strengths and weaknesses. A key strength of the book is his multivariate approach, including regular use of multi-level modeling. For each topic, he takes into account a wide array of potentially confounding independent variables. So for example, he begins Chapter Two by documenting that far more Muslims consider themselves a ‘‘religious person’’ than do non-Muslims, but that this difference largely disappears once age, gender, education level, and the overall proportion of religious people in the society are accounted for. Muslim countries may appear to have more corruption than non-Muslim countries in bivariate measures, but this pattern is entirely explained by their lower overall levels of economic development in the multivariate model. Fish tests the robustness of his findings with alternate measures and data sources in many places throughout the book. Overall he devotes far more space to issues of data availability, data quality, the range of available measures, and model specification issues than do most monographs. Fish also displays a magisterial command of the literature on his topic. Each of the chapters contains extensive citations to work in that area, and he carefully parses it all to identify the key debates and potential hypotheses about the role of Islam. As the author acknowledges several times, the book is almost entirely descriptive. The goal is to identify patterns using robust Reviews 81 statistical analysis, rather than explain the causes of those patterns. Fish shares some of his explanatory hunches in each chapter, but does not explore them in any systematic way. In several places he looks for differences between the Bible and Quran that might explain the divergence between Christians and Muslims on topics such as personal religiosity and gender equality (he finds none). The discussion of his finding that predominantly Muslim countries have significantly less open political systems is perhaps the most interesting of the book, as he explores many possible reasons for the pattern and ultimately finds no evidence for any of them. It is a refreshingly honest analysis— both devastating to many extant explanations for authoritarian Muslim states yet open about the lack of any plausible alternative explanation. It is a bit disappointing that Fish relies exclusively on quantitative data. The patterns he identifies might be fleshed out more with the inclusion of some other data sources, including the numerous ethnographies and interview-based studies that exist on the different topics he covers. Inclusion of such data would not only enrich the findings, it would allow him to overcome some of the limitations in the measures he uses in the quantitative models. The intended audience for the book is also not completely clear. The book argues convincingly that more basic quantitative descriptive data on the role of Islam in the world is needed. For social scientists, though, the descriptions of the data and methods will seem too basic. For interested readers outside of the academy, on the other hand, the careful attention to data measures and statistical models will seem tedious. But both of these points are minor quibbles. Overall the book is packed with carefully developed and described empirical results that will serve as important baseline reference material for a wide variety of scholars. It is a valuable set of analyses for those working on issues of religion and Islam as well as the broader issues of inequality, social capital, democracy, and violence. Race and Justice: Wrongful Convictions of African American Men, by Marvin D. Free, Jr., and Mitch Ruesink. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2012. 333pp. $68.00 cloth. ISBN: 9781588268105. JOE FEAGIN Texas A&M University [email protected] In this original and interesting book, Marvin Free and Mitch Ruesink provide an important compendium of 343 known wrongful conviction cases involving African American men over recent decades. While a few other recent books (Alexander 2010) have examined the extensive racialization of the U.S. criminal justice system and its intentional focus on black men, no book yet has focused so centrally on the wrongful convictions of black men. The authors here use a narrative method to examine in some detail many actual cases of wrongful convictions (with an appendix listing all cases), thereby providing very useful accounts not only for those teaching about the treatment of African Americans in the criminal justice system but also for future researchers seeking important data to develop a broader conceptualization of these cases than the authors provide here. Drawing on multiple databases—such as those connected with various innocence and justice legal projects—they examine known wrongful convictions overturned by new evidence or DNA testing, not by legal technicalities. For each case analyzed in some detail, they examine what factors were important in generating the wrongful conviction, with a recognition of the likelihood of multidimensionality. They accent the factors of witness error, police and prosecutorial misconduct, informants with an incentive to lie, forensic errors, insufficient evidence, and perjury by criminal justice officials. In their interesting descriptive data tables, the states with the most known wrongful convictions are the large population states of Texas, Illinois, Ohio, Florida, New York, and California, although as the authors point out these are also states that have generally gotten more attention from the media and organized groups working on wrongful Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 82 Reviews convictions. The most common offenses alleged in these wrongful conviction cases are actual/attempted murder and actual/ attempted sexual assault (including rape). They provide substantial chapters with numerous narrated examples of these two main types of cases, as well as additional chapters on cases involving wrongful convictions in regard to drug offenses, robbery, and other offenses. Their descriptive breakdowns of the dimensions of these wrongful conviction cases should be of interest to many social scientists and policymakers. One interesting finding in their review of cases of those wrongly convicted for actual and attempted murder is that the most common problem is witness error. They also found that the murder victims in these wrongful conviction cases were much more likely to be white than for all murder cases involving black men. The authors provide a short and somewhat disappointing final chapter that assesses too briefly the sociological and policy implications of their findings. With an eye to the issue of reducing wrongful convictions, they offer a savvy but terse summary of the absence of black prosecutors and other prosecutors of color, as well as of lawyers of color, in the criminal justice system. And they note how the use of peremptory strikes and other means of exclusion intentionally keep many blacks from serving on juries. They briefly revisit other inadequate or discriminatory policing and court practices—including poor witness identification procedures, the use of ‘‘snitches’’ inclined to lie, and problematical defense counsels. A few important policy and research recommendations are made: more centralized data collection sources, preserving data on wrongful convictions, looking at wrongful convictions for less serious violations, and a study of convictions of black women. In their opening chapter, Free and Ruesink discuss the limitations of their data and explicitly say they will not examine the ‘‘larger issues of institutionalized racism’’ because that would require an historical and sociological overview of racial relations and criminal statutes in the United States. Still, a few more pages in their concluding chapter on the subject of systemic discrimination and malpractice in the criminal justice system, with Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 some modest links to the relevant social science literatures, would have strengthened the book and its conclusions. In my view that addition would also have made it more useful for criminology and racial relations courses. Thus, in this last chapter they revisit the ‘‘war on drugs’’ that emerged in the Reagan era, yet offer little sociological assessment of the relationship of the extensive and intentional racialization of that so-called war— and the consequent expansion and reworking of the U.S. criminal justice system—to the pattern of many wrongful convictions of black men. They provide a brief discussion of racial profiling in connection with wrongful conviction cases, but again do little linking of that racial profiling to the larger context of systemic racism. One does not need to do a large-scale theoretical analysis to make these important interpretative links, especially given the substantial extant social science literatures on systemic racism they could have used in setting their important data in that larger context. For example, their data show how often a white racial framing of black men is central to the discrimination against them in the criminal justice system. This racial framing is periodically demonstrated in their data for white witnesses and jurors, and even more importantly for the key white actors and agents in the criminal justice system. Since there are few blacks among the prosecutors, other key attorneys, senior police officers, and other important criminal justice decisionmakers, the dominance of the old white racial framing of black men as likely criminals, inferior, undeserving of legal protections, or in need of social control is not surprising. The role of these important white actors and agents in the creation and perpetuation of a systemically racist criminal justice system is made clear in their data. In my view these white actors and agents need to be named as such and intensely analyzed for their actual and possible racial framing and discrimination. As the authors periodically suggest, the issues their wrongful conviction narratives raise are much larger than the troubling particular cases, and now it is well past time for social scientists and other researchers to take the analytical step of assessing in empirical and theoretical Reviews 83 detail why and how the construction and operation of the criminal justice system itself is centrally white-crafted and fundamentally white-controlled. Reference Alexander, Michelle. 2010. The New Jim Crow. New York, NY: New Press. Inside Muslim Minds, by Riaz Hassan. Carlton, AU: Melbourne University Press, 2008. 380pp. $45.00 paper. ISBN: 97805228 54817. MAHMOUD DHAOUADI University of Tunis [email protected] The review of Inside Muslim Minds is timely after the 2011 Arab Spring and September 11, 2001. Riaz Hassan presents a cultural and social psychological profile of Muslim minds and behaviors in seven Muslim countries: Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Pakistan, and Turkey. He deals with several major themes in the book’s ten chapters: Islamic consciousness, patterns of religious commitments, jihad and conflict resolution in Muslim societies, political order and religious institutions, expressions of religiosity and blasphemy, veiling, patriarchy and honor killing, globalization and Islamic Ummah (worldwide Muslim community), philanthropy and social justice, Islam and civil society and mutual suspicions. Three streams of Islamic consciousness are identified: the Apologetics who resist the destructive effects of modernity and Western knowledge monopoly, Wahabism which is a religious movement of the eighteenth century desirous to rid Islam of all corruptions and aberrations, and Salafism which has been often used interchangeably with Wahabism. Salafism calls upon Muslims to return to the original textual sources of the Qur’an. Hassan has surveyed 6,300 respondents from the seven countries. This is probably the first attempt to map quantitatively the different aspects of Muslim religiosity. This constitutes the main contribution of his book. Methodologically, he relies on the analysis of the Berkeley Research Program in Religion. The principal thesis of this work stresses that a religious renaissance is taking place or has already done so in these Muslim societies. The author points out that Muslim piety is socially constructed which explains well why it differs in these societies. For instance, Muslim piety in Kazakhstan is very different from the rest of the other countries (p. 96). Hassan explores the relation between Islam and politics. He found a range of political systems: military dictatorship, communism, monarchy, theocracy, national secularism, and democracy. In contrast to the common view in the West, the author presents an argument in favor of democracy in Islam. Democracy is an appropriate system for Islam because humans enjoy the status of God’s vicegerency and at the same time Islam deprives the state of any divinity. Thus, Islam locates ultimate authority in the hands of people (p. 130). The massive popular political upheavals of the 2011–2012 Arab Spring called for democracy as a priority. So the Islamist parties who won elections in the Arab countries would not have the peoples’ support if they marginalized democracy. After the political mind, the author turns to the Muslim mind and institutions: ‘‘I was particularly interested in exploring differences in attitudes towards key Islamic institutions and the sociological factors producing these differences’’ (p. 131). He discovered the armed forces to be the most trusted in the public mind in Malaysia, Pakistan, and Egypt (p. 136). As to trust in religious institutions, he makes two major conclusions: trust increase in religious institutions is often associated with increased trust in institutions of the state in all seven countries, and the integration of religion and the state might not always be in the best interests of Islamic institutions and the religious elite. Consequently, trust in religious institutions might also be eroded (p. 149). This remark appears to contradict the famous orthodox contention of Islam: ‘‘Islam is deen wa dunia = Islam is a religion and a way of life.’’ Veiling, patriarchy, and honor killing are underlined. Hassan stresses what he calls misogynist attitudes in Muslim culture (p. 175). He makes a historical social analysis of Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 84 Reviews conditions leading to these phenomena. He concludes that these conditions have affected the Muslim consciousness about the status, the role, and position of Muslim women. In the first two centuries of Islam, the Qur’anic injunctions did not prevent women from praying with men. They were expected to dress modestly, yet they were not asked to wear veils. However, by the end of the second century of the Muslim calendar, women were forbidden to pray in public assemblies and over time mosque attendance became male dominated (p. 182). The author explains the strict cultural values and rules towards women because they are perceived as the embodiment of sexuality itself. In his view, veiling, honor killing, and patriarchy could be interpreted as the outcome of mismanagement of sexuality in Muslim societies (p. 215). Personally, I was a witness of strange behavior implicitly related to the mismanagement of human sexuality in rural Tunisian communities: daughters and sons were not supposed to hold their babies/children or talk to them in the presence of their fathers in particular (patriarchy). However, change is taking place in rural Tunisia in favor of more relaxed attitudes towards sexuality. The prevailing attitudes of the surveyed Muslim countries are not identical toward veiling, patriarchy, and honor killing. The latter is more widespread in the Middle East than in North Africa and it is practiced also among Arab Christians in Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinian Territories. Thus, honor killing is rather a cultural value. The author believes that the general trend of change in the Muslim world will have its impact on veiling, the seclusion of women, and patriarchy (p. 216). Yet, Islamic revivalism with the Arab Spring is likely to slow this change. The concept of ummah in the globalization age is expected to lead to the strength of Islamic ummah in the future, not as a unified and unitary community, but as a differentiated one consisting of separate ummahs that represent different Islamic regions. Five centers are identified: Arabic Middle Eastern Islam, African Islam, Central Asian Islam, South-East Asian Islam, and the Islam of the Muslim minorities in the West. This development might give legitimacy to the emergence of regional ummah poles which Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 will chart their own patterns on distinctive religious, political, economic, social, and cultural orientations appropriate to the history and temperament of their people (p. 230). Distributive justice in Islam is raised in the book as both an economic and spiritual act. Some see zakat as a conservative measure of the redistribution of wealth, while others interpret it as a symbol for the creation of ideal ummah: a fellowship of shared faith and the belief that doing good things does matter (p. 247). As to the idea of civil society, the author concludes that movements toward a civil society are gaining momentum in the Muslim world (p. 263). The Arab Spring impact is likely to encourage the processes of civil society in societies calling for more democracy. The book ends its study by indicating the presence of equal mutual suspicions between the Muslim world and the Christian West. Yet, he fails to show that Muslims are more prone to dailogue than Western Christians, because Muslims know Western languages and believe in Christianity more than Westerners know the native Muslim languages and believe in Islam. The partial and the full sharing of these two cultural symbols between peoples are seen as green visas for societies and civilizations’ dialogues.* * Dhaouadi, M. 2010. ‘‘The Arab-Muslim World Set to Dialogue and to Clash with the West: A Cultural Perspective,’’ Dirasat: Human and Social Sciences, 37(2): 523–29. Reviews 85 Over There: Living with the U.S. Military Empire from World War Two to the Present, edited by Maria Höhn and Seungsook Moon. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. 453pp. $29.95 paper. ISBN: 9780822348276. GREGORY HOOKS Washington State University [email protected] Maria Höhn and Seungsook Moon have created a unique and splendid volume. They advance a provocative claim: the United States has created and continues to maintain a global empire. Through a network of military bases, the United States has unmatched global reach. For host (occupied) nations, the impacts of bases are pervasive, extending to the most intimate social relations. This claim is provocative because it flies in the face of U.S. self-perception as being a singularly benign world power. This claim is also provocative for sociology. If Höhn and Moon are correct, sociology (and related disciplines) have been remiss. Instead of examining this global empire to understand impacts on U.S. society and on host (occupied) nations, sociologists have treated these bases as local anomalies (or have ignored them altogether). Höhn, Moon, and contributors provide compelling evidence to support their claims. Edited volumes typically exhibit unevenness in focus and quality. Over There is the exception. In addition to their co-authored introduction and conclusion, Moon and Höhn authored six chapters. Moon’s essays examine: (1) the regulation of sexuality (U.S. military and Korean sex workers) from 1945–70, (2) the contradictions and tensions between U.S. and Korean soldiers as reflected in the discourse of Korean soldiers, and (3) contemporary abuse and violence against transnational camptown women (perpetrated by U.S. soldiers and by Korean business owners). With a focus on Germany, Höhn examines: (1) sexuality, soldiers, and policies in postwar Germany, (2) changes in German perceptions of U.S. soldiers over time, and (3) the manner in which U.S. racial politics and racism of the 1970s played out in the sexuality and politics of troops stationed in Germany. Höhn and Moon thereby provide a context that integrates the remaining essays which cover a range of locales, issues and historical periods. Michiko Takeuchi examines postwar Japan (1945–1952), focusing on the intersection of the sexual aggression of occupying military forces and racial, class, and above all, gendered inequalities in Japan. To avoid a harsh occupation and to protect ‘‘good’’ Japanese women (i.e., women from elite families) from the sexual advances of GIs, the leaders of postwar Japan ‘‘gave’’ the American occupiers thousands of comfort women (i.e., women from disprivileged classes and strata). Takeuchi provides a nuanced account that documents the agency of sex workers, the contradiction of U.S. policy regulating the sexuality of GIs, and comparisons with the colonial sex policies of occupying forces in Europe and Asia before and after World War II. Donna Alvah focuses on U.S. military families. At the end of the Cold War, military planners displayed greater acceptance of families on military bases. These shifts have had contradictory results. Some military planners believe that having families with troops boosts morale. Moreover, it reduces the need for the U.S. military to participate in procuring sex workers to satisfy the sexual appetites of hyper-masculinized soldiers. Other military planners express concern that family-centered overseas military bases have resulted in less effective and less aggressive military forces; they advocate a remasculinization of the military. Robin Riley discusses the ‘‘hidden soldiers’’ of the 1990s and 2000s—women employed to manufacture weapons in the U.S. defense industry. These war-workers disassociated the products they manufactured from the grisly carnage these weapons produced (stressing instead their contributions to ‘‘national defense’’). They also emphasized that paid employment allowed them to care for their children and other dependents. Thus, their identities centered on caretaking, not warmaking. Two chapters draw on ethnographic fieldwork. Christopher Nelson focuses on Okinawa, specifically on the artistic and cultural representations of and resistance to U.S. occupation. Chris Ames explores the dreams Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 86 Reviews and struggles of Okinawan women involved with GIs. Throughout decades of occupation, these relationships have been discouraged, at times formally and, at all times, informally. Many Okinawans assume that these women are on a continuum with sex workers; the U.S. military places institutional barriers to such relationships. Ames examines strategies that Okinawan women have used to navigate marginality in their own culture and in the military organization. Jeff Bennett examines the abuse and torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib (Iraq)—abuses based on a highly gendered and sexualized degradation. By situating these abuses in the context of aggressive sexuality, masculinity, and conquest that permeate U.S. occupying forces, Bennett links these contemporary tragedies to the experiences of nations that the United States has occupied since World War II. This is an outstanding collection, it can enrich a wide range of graduate and upper division courses. It would be a lost opportunity were this book pigeonholed and restricted to research and pedagogy focused on the military and peace studies. This book makes a novel and compelling claim that the dynamics at overseas military bases reflect the contours of U.S. politics and culture—if in a distorted fashion. The United States fought wars in the name of democracy; its overseas empire was also justified in these terms. But U.S. foreign policy condoned authoritarianism at the national level. In the vicinity of its bases, the U.S. military assisted and supervised the recruitment, commodification, and regulation of sex workers. These policies reflected patriarchal, homophobic and racist fault-lines in U.S. society. Over There does not treat these issues in a one-sided manner, with the United States imposing its will on complacent and passive victims. Rather, these essays provide a textured examination of the interplay and negotiations between an occupying army and an occupied land and people. In an era of globalization, sociology has moved beyond assuming static and freestanding nation-states. Now, increased emphasis is being placed on the permeability of borders and flows of people and goods. To fully understand the global order and global processes, it is also necessary to come to Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 terms with the empire that the United States built and continues to maintain. Where Are All the Good Jobs Going?: What National and Local Job Quality and Dynamics Mean for U.S. Workers, by Harry J. Holzer, Julia I. Lane, David B. Rosenblum, and Fredrik Andersson. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 2011. 212pp. $24.95 paper. ISBN: 9780871544582. ARNE L. KALLEBERG University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill [email protected] Unemployment and the lack of jobs have dominated policy debates in recent years in the United States. Nevertheless, concerns about the quality of work remain a source of distress for millions of people, especially those who are trapped in low-wage jobs. There has been no shortage of speculation about what is happening to job quality, ranging from those who maintain that good jobs are disappearing, to scholars who argue that the United States does not have enough good workers to compete in the global economy and to create broadly shared prosperity. In Where Are All the Good Jobs Going?, four economists provide empirical evidence that sheds light on many aspects of the debate about job quality in the United States. They address critical questions such as: what are the trends in the availability of good jobs? Which workers are more likely to get—and lose—good jobs? And, how do trends in job quality differ by time period and local labor markets? Their answers to these questions are based on a unique and massive data set on firms and individuals, the Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamics (LEHD) data compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau. Their analysis covers individual workers and their employers in a variety of industries in twelve states over a period of twelve years (1992–2003). The authors’ analyses of the correlates and trends in job quality rely heavily on the estimation of ‘‘fixed effects’’ for every firm and every worker. Their measures of job quality are estimates of the wages that a firm pays the average worker (controlling for workers’ individual skills and characteristics), while Reviews 87 indicators of worker quality are the market value of the skills and other attributes that workers can take with them as they move from one firm to another. The authors divide these estimated firm- and person-fixed effects into quintiles: firms in the top quintile have good jobs and those in the bottom quintile have bad jobs; while workers in the top and bottom quintiles of person effects are the most and least skilled, respectively. Estimating these fixed effects enables the authors to assess changes in job quality from the points of view of both employers and individual workers. Analyses based on these estimates of firm and individual worker fixed effects yield a number of important results. The authors find that good jobs did not disappear between 1992 and 2003, though their character and location have changed: there are now fewer good jobs in manufacturing and more in professional services and finance. There has also been a growing polarization between good and bad jobs, with jobs in the middle growing more slowly than those at the extremes. Polarization in job quality was greatest in metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) with one million or more residents, which is likely due to the expansion of both high-quality professional and low-paying service jobs (which are often filled by lowskilled immigrants), in larger MSAs. Moreeducated workers are better able to obtain well-paid jobs, supporting the view that having good skills is increasingly necessary in order to obtain good jobs. When less-educated workers lose good jobs involuntarily, they are now less able than in the past to obtain jobs of comparable quality. The authors’ empirical findings underscore the necessity for policy interventions to focus on both the demand and supply sides of the labor market. Addressing problems of low-wage employment requires economic and labor market policies that create good jobs directly through the use of various ‘‘carrots’’ (e.g., subsidies to firms that provide more training or upward promotion paths) and ‘‘sticks’’ (e.g., raising minimum wages and/or benefits); as well as the implementation of more active labor market policies that enhance the education and skills of workers so that they are able to fill the good jobs that become available. The authors’ empirical results rely on various assumptions regarding the estimation of fixed effects. Many of these are technical points but some have important substantive implications. In particular, as the authors point out, estimating fixed effects from panel data depends mainly on individuals who change firms, a difficulty that is exacerbated by the relatively short time periods analyzed. Moreover, fixed-effects estimates would not explain why a worker’s wages would change other than attributing it to their changing firms. To illustrate, consider a situation where firm A promotes skill acquisition among its workers, perhaps through an extensive training program in which workers participate as they progress upwards on job ladders within the firm. This increase in skills is not recorded as skill acquisition, however, unless the worker moves to firm B and takes with them the skills acquired in firm A. Furthermore, any increase in this worker’s skills is assumed to result from the actions of firm B, not A, since firm B is paying the worker the higher wages. Hence, firm B may be more likely to be regarded as a ‘‘higher job quality’’ employer than A, despite the fact that A boosted the worker’s skills. Similarly, it is challenging to disentangle factors that might enhance a person’s skills while working for a particular employer (such as continuing education or better developed network contacts) from practices that the firm itself may use to develop a worker’s skills. In addition, these heavily data-driven analyses do not specify in much detail the social and economic forces that generate the changes in job quality that the authors observe. Their fixed-effects estimates are ‘‘black boxes’’ that need to be unpacked in order to understand more precisely the mechanisms that underlie the dynamics of employment and labor markets. This represents a pressing challenge as well as great opportunity for sociologists to contribute to the debate over job quality by identifying the institutional and organizational factors that may account for firm effects, and the social forces that contribute to workers’ acquisition of human and social capital. Sociologists’ (and economists’) efforts to address a variety of timely and urgent issues related to organizational inequality and labor markets will find much to learn from this book’s Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 88 Reviews valuable empirical intervention into the topic of job quality and the gold mine of data represented by the LEHD. Disability and the Internet: Confronting a Digital Divide, by Paul T. Jaeger. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2012. 225 pp. $55.00 cloth. ISBN: 9781588268280. ASHLEIGH THOMPSON City University of New York [email protected] In this very well-researched book, Paul T. Jaeger argues that access to the Internet is no less than a human and civil rights issue. While the Internet and its related technologies hold the potential to be tremendous tools of inclusion, Jaeger cites that people with disabilities access and use the Internet at rates that are half of the general population. His reasoning, perspectives, and examples prove thorough and compelling. While highlighting different facets of the digital divide, each chapter adds to Jaeger’s case detailing the systematic societal exclusion of people with disabilities. On one hand some of these trends stem intuitively from the data: Internet access is largely tied to socioeconomics, and people with disabilities statistically have higher levels of unemployment and lower levels of education than the general population. But people with disabilities prove dissimilar from other Internetdisadvantaged demographics. For people in rural areas, for example, special programs may be enough to bridge the gap. For people with disabilities, barriers of cost and access are magnified by technological barriers built into the Internet and its related systems. Jaeger explains the aspects of exclusion and segregation that result: without the Internet people with disabilities are limited in terms of interactions related to their personal and social lives, commerce, communications, government, employment, and education. Through this lens, Internet access for people with disabilities is tightly connected to social justice concerns about their participation in broader society. Jaeger’s authorial voice, impassioned and political, gives these rolling claims an edginess and punch. Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 Written for a largely academic audience who may be already familiar with using web-based interfaces, Disability and the Internet readers will surely discover new information thanks to Jaeger’s detailed description of the many issues. One interesting section on e-government (Chapter Three) describes the impact of the U.S. federal government as the largest producer of online content in the United States. Yet most of the federal websites violate accessibility guidelines. The digital divide becomes a democratic divide when people with disabilities are cut off from civic participation, social services, and information needed for daily living. Other discussions of interest include relevant laws, international efforts toward access, social networking and gaming, course management software, and the history and role of public libraries providing accessible materials and online services. Jaeger also breaks down how Internet-related technologies affect people across the gamut of disability labels. Not unlike conflicts in the built environment, features like touch screens that provide access to some people may inhibit access for others. As such, a decentralized disability community does not come together for advocacy about particular access issues. Unfunded government mandates and the low statistics on usage by people with disabilities all contribute to the dilemma being described. These sections depict a complex, avoidable situation. Bornaccessible technologies incorporated during the design phase would cost nearly nothing compared to modifications made later on to rapidly changing systems. Disability and the Internet includes much of the information a reader would expect in terms of issues relating to technology. But unexpected are the interspersed treatments of disability history, the disability rights movement, and Disability Studies frameworks. Jaeger’s deftly-handled synopsis of theoretical perspectives, including the medical, social, postmodern, minority group and diversity models, provides a good standalone overview for a reader unfamiliar with disability issues. The inclusion of theory strengthens the book’s social justice premise. Reviews 89 Because there is so much content, this book would benefit from being broken down into shorter chapters that hold together more tightly. As the book arduously makes the case for access, Jaeger poses counterarguments, but these anti-Internet moments register as missteps. He posits that increased presence online may result in people with disabilities having decreased visibility in society, which in turn could actually erode efforts toward integration. The author also mentions that excessive use of the Internet has been linked causally to a variety of disabilities. But in terms of teaching, these thematic tensions could spark meaningful class discussion. This book is meticulously cited yet not overtly complicated or technical, and inherently interesting to many a webaddicted college student. The title would be well placed on an undergraduate syllabus: our students will be the ones to design future technologies. Change in this sector begins with them. As disability affects the general population increasingly with age, baby boomers who utilize technology presently may also find this topic important. This point is one major triumph of the book: Disability and the Internet thoroughly discusses its subject and makes a case for its relevance to most any reader. Educators, employers, government officials, technologists, designers, researchers, policy makers, and Internet users with and without disabilities all have something to contribute to advocacy. Jaeger’s urgent claim is clearly expressed again at the conclusion of the book: people with disabilities are in a civil rights moment not unlike previous efforts for equal access to education and employment. Until the Internet and related technologies are fully accessible, people with disabilities will be excluded from the Internet age. The Sociology of Architecture: Constructing Identities, by Paul Jones. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2011. 195pp. $39.95 paper. ISBN: 9781846310775. WENDY SIMONDS Georgia State University [email protected] In The Sociology of Architecture: Constructing Identities, Paul Jones makes the case for thinking about architecture as a politicized, commercial, symbolic project that demonstrates a range of cultural ideologies and conflicts. Jones presents an alternate view of the built environment from what practitioners and historians of architecture tend to promote, in which architecture is seen as a series of timeless works of artistic genius. In Jones’ words: ‘‘The highly aestheticized discussions that characterize much of the symbolic capital at stake in architectural theory and practice can lead to an apolitical vision of architecture in which a disconnect exists between architectural form and wider social questions’’ (p. 21). He seeks to address this ‘‘disconnect.’’ Jones recounts several architectural ‘‘case studies’’ that feature ‘‘starchitects’’ engaging with state, public, and corporate interests— and the resulting ‘‘iconic’’ structures that have and have not emerged from these negotiations. The projects Jones considers include: London’s Millenium Dome Project by Richard Rogers, Daniel Libeskind’s Ground Zero Master Plan, Will Alsop’s design for a landmark building in Liverpool, Rem Koolhaas and Jean Nouvel’s European Union’s Brussels Capital of Europe project, and Norman Foster’s reconstruction of the Reichstag in Berlin. Jones documents how conscribed architects are because they have to appease and appeal to various stakeholders in order to obtain the capital necessary to accomplish their art. Jones situates the stories of these projects within a broader socio-historical account of iconic European and American architecture that goes back to the Victorian Era. His accounts demonstrate how political ideologies—ranging from imperialism to multiculturalism—get debated, sensationalized, and represented in the stories of these landmark building design projects. Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 90 Reviews The book is exceedingly well researched; clearly Jones immersed himself in the literature and theory of the fields he discusses (art and architectural history and theory). He also draws on popular critical responses and journalistic accounts of the cases he describes, but not enough to make the stories as engaging as they might be. More behindthe-scenes information and more biographical detail would have spiced up the drier bits. Jones’ critical approach reiterates many of the theoretical tenets of Howard S. Becker’s Art Worlds (2008 [1982]), but that work is not referenced here. It was also surprising not to see mention of recent works on the politics of public art and architecture, such as Alison Young’s Judging the Image: Art, Value, Law (2005) and Cher Krause Knight’s Public Art: Theory, Practice, and Populism (2008). But as far as I know, there is no other book by a sociologist that discusses recent and current architecture in these terms. Jones interrogates the institutional structures of architecture some ways, most notably in terms of class-based power relations, but not others. His analysis could have reached out in more sociological directions. For instance, discussion of the institutional production of elite and non-elite architects—how architecture schools feed elite firms—would have provided useful knowledge of the field as an occupational hierarchy comparable to other elite professions that pervasively impact social life. Jones makes no mention of the race or gender of starchitects, who are nearly all white Western men. An analysis of race and gender politics within the field of architecture would have been worthwhile. Perhaps unsurprisingly, starchitects often come across as slick, elitist, egotistical operators who craft what they say to win politicians’ and competition judges’ favor, as they jockey for large-scale commissions. Rem Koolhaas (whose buildings I love) sounds particularly self-aggrandizing and craftily competitive. Ought one love buildings any less upon learning their creators are arrogant capitalist accommodators who want to be celebrities? (I guess not?) Jones does not take up this issue; as mentioned, he does not focus on the architects’ private lives. He is concerned with their public words, and how what they say exemplifies the Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 institutional interactions that shape public space (and produce such self-presentational tendencies among architects). Jones also could have revealed more about his own views of the architects and buildings he writes about; he tends to draw heavily on the work of other scholars to critique specific projects, and to save his moralizing for the field in general. Jones’ strongest recommendation is this: ‘‘A shift away from the architectural object at the centre of critique, to be replaced with engagement with the social function of architecture —including its wider politics and economy—would pave the way for a more critical architecture that, connected to wider social and political realities, could contribute to social action that challenges existing social relations rather than assisting in the legitimation of their reproduction’’ (p. 166). Jones is prone to longwindedness and vagueness of this sort. How to accomplish this shift remains unclear and difficult to envision, especially given the global capitalistic power dynamics Jones has chronicled throughout his book. He shows that architecture is an elite enterprise embedded in the intersections of several elitist institutions, and unraveling this power structure seems far more complicated than wishing it were not so. The Sociology of Architecture will be a useful resource for scholars interested in the politics of art (architecture in particular), in how cultural and social change affect the built enviroment, and for anyone engaged in the creation of public art or architecture. NAFTA and the Politics of Labor Transnationalism, by Tamara Kay. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 310pp. $29.99 paper. ISBN: 9780521132954. STEPHANIE LUCE City University of New York [email protected] The U.S. labor movement was born as an immigrant workers movement, but despite this, and despite a number of successful cross-border collaborations over the years, mainstream unions were mostly antiimmigrant and nationalist for much of the twentieth century. For example, as late as Reviews 91 1986, the AFL-CIO supported the Immigration Reform and Control Act which established sanctions for employers found hiring immigrant workers. This history might suggest that the emergence of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the late 1980s would lead to a vocal and hostile campaign on the part of U.S. unions against Mexican workers and unions. As Tamara Kay shows in NAFTA and the Politics of Labor Transnationalism, that did not quite happen. Instead, NAFTA created a ‘‘Transnational Trade-Negotiating Field’’ (p. 22) which led to an increase in collaboration between U.S., Mexican, and Canadian unions. A number of unions worked together across borders first in a (failed) attempt to defeat the bill, and next in their efforts to influence the president’s ‘‘fast-track’’ authority and to include a side agreement covering labor rights in the agreement. Kay says that the Transnational Trade-Negotiating Field helped constitute transnational actors and interests. The labor side agreement to NAFTA, the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation (NAALC), went into force along with NAFTA in 1994. The NAALC included 11 core labor principles along with new institutions and mechanisms for dealing with violations of those principles. Although most observers agree that the mechanisms created via the NAALC are ineffective, Kay argues that the process created a ‘‘Transnational Legal Field’’ (p. 22), ‘‘a North American labor rights regime’’ (p. 100), and new legal mechanisms that furthered the transnational relationships between certain unions. Kay argues that while some U.S. unions failed to take advantage of the opportunities created by the NAALC or relied on racist arguments in an effort to defeat NAFTA, others were able to build new relationships and create new openings for organizing through the side agreement. Unions worked together across borders to file complaints to the respective authorities created under the NAALC. In some cases unions worked directly to assist each other’s organizing efforts or even work on joint projects. Furthermore, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the AFL-CIO went on to an historic shift in its position on immigration and orientation toward globalization. Kay sees a direct link between this shift and the relationships built through the work around NAFTA and the NAALC . According to Kay’s findings, unions that were more vulnerable to foreign trade may have been more likely to build transnational relationships in the fight around NAFTA; also, unions with ‘‘progressive leaders’’ were more likely to build transnational relationships even if their unions were not vulnerable to foreign trade. Yet one union that stands out for its racist campaign against NAFTA was the Teamsters, which at that time was under the leadership of the progressive reformer Ron Carey. Kay discusses this complicated case and notes that while Carey and the Teamsters leadership worked to promote an internationalist view that did not scapegoat Mexican workers, others saw the Teamsters rhetoric as among the most racist among the labor movement. Kay then characterizes the Teamsters in the United States as one that did not have progressive leadership. The Teamsters have had a history of contentious internal politics, with sharp divisions between the ‘‘reformers’’ and the ‘‘old guard,’’ and the Carey years were no exception. Although Carey won the presidency, ‘‘old guard’’ Teamsters were still in charge of large Locals, and also still held some staff positions. This makes it difficult to measure what counts as a ‘‘progressive leadership.’’ Furthermore, union leaders might be ‘‘progressive’’ on broader social justice issues, but authoritative and hierarchical in regards to internal union democracy. But if ‘‘progressive leadership’’ is a key variable in explaining unions’ willingness to build transnational relationships, is there a role for rank-andfile union members, particularly those in a hierarchical union? While Kay’s cases are instructive, the implications for current trade agreement negotiations are not as clear. The United States has passed a slew of trade agreements since NAFTA, and is currently pushing one of the most ambitious regional trade agreements ever—the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), with very little apparent opposition or intervention from the U.S. labor movement despite grave concerns from some unions in partner countries. Does this suggest that even the U.S. unions with progressive leaders have concluded that there is little Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 92 Reviews space to influence such agreements without a fight over fast-track authority, or that the openings created by the NAALC or other labor standards offer too little benefit? Is there something unique about NAFTA and the relationships created with neighboring countries, as opposed to potential union partners in TPP countries? In any case, the questions raised by Kay’s research are as relevant today as they were when NAFTA was first negotiated. Unions must resolve how to work together in a global economy if they are to survive, and the lessons here are vital. Social movement scholars will also benefit from Kay’s nuanced analysis of the impacts of globalization. Not all unions are the same, and not all international agreements create the same kinds of openings. This book offers a number of key insights for labor and social movement scholars, as well as activists. The cases here show that globalization and trade do not have to necessarily pit workers against workers, or unions against unions, but can in fact create new spaces to organize. Kay also makes the case that we cannot evaluate NAFTA in a simplistic way, but need to examine the complex impacts on union organizations over time. Muslims in Motion: Islam and National Identity in the Bangladeshi Diaspora, by Nazli Kibria. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011. 167pp. $24.95 paper. ISBN: 9780813550565. MAHUA SARKAR Binghamton University, SUNY [email protected] The end of the twentieth century has brought a significant intensification in what scholars such as Nevzet Soguk and Saskia Sassen have called ‘‘global migrancy.’’ Migration of human beings is of course not new, but as Stephen Castles has pointed out, unlike earlier moments of large-scale human movements across state borders, this new phase has engulfed the entire world. A significant portion of trans-border migration now occurs within the global South, and not just from the South to the more conventional destinations of the wealthy North. Nazli Kibria’s book on transnational migrants from Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 Bangladesh looks at these different patterns of global migration by focusing on both the long-term permanent settlement of Bangladeshis in the United Kingdom and the United States and the more recent movements of temporary contract workers from Bangladesh to the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries and Malaysia. Kibria is also interested in the ‘‘surge of religiosity’’ and ‘‘the expansion of Islamic movements’’ that she sees sweeping ‘‘across the Muslim world’’ since the late twentieth century. The main stated focus in her book is the interaction between these two elements: ‘‘global migrations’’ on the one hand and ‘‘Islamic revival’’ on the other, and she approaches this complex topic through ‘‘a study of movements from the Muslimmajority country of Bangladesh to different parts of the world. . .’’ (p. 1). More specifically, Kibria looks at how diasporic Bangladeshi Muslim families ‘‘organize their community life and make sense of their place in the world’’ with ‘‘particular attention to the dynamics of Muslim identity’’ among them (p. 2). There is a third theme in Kibria’s study: the effect of diasporic life experiences of her subjects on what she describes as ‘‘the religious landscape of Bangladesh today’’ (p. 3). The book consists of seven chapters. The introduction situates Kibria’s research within larger questions of contemporary discourse on Muslims and Islam in the West, and the location of Bangladesh in a global hierarchy of states. The second chapter offers a brief overview of the history and politics of Bangladesh that Kibria argues is important to understand ‘‘the migration experience’’ of Bangladeshis. In the following four chapters, Kibria takes up her three main case studies: long-term Bangladeshi migration to the United States and Britain, and temporary contract migrants in the GCC countries (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates), and Malaysia. Some two hundred in-depth interviews with Bangladeshi (im)migrants and their families, as well as her many insights from extended participant observation among diasporic Bangladeshi communities, constitute the core of the empirical material that Kibria considers in these central chapters. In the concluding chapter, Kibria briefly addresses the question of the impact of return migration on Reviews 93 contemporary Bangladeshi society, especially on changing ideas about religiosity. Two key constructs form the bulwark of Kibria’s analysis of Bangladeshi transnational migrant experiences: the relations between the sending and receiving countries, and what she calls the ‘‘global national image’’ of the sending country. The latter, Kibria suggests, ‘‘can be a vehicle of racialization, or the ongoing construction of migrants as different and inferior in an intrinsic sense. . .[in] the receiving society. . .’’ (p. 8). It can also have serious implications for how migrants from any destination society are viewed in terms of ‘‘their perceived potential for effective incorporation into it’’ (pp. 5–6). One of Kibria’s key contentions in the book is that the negative global national image of Bangladesh evokes specters of ‘‘poverty, political invisibility, and corruption’’ (p. 42). And this, according to Kibria, is a reason why immigrants, especially in the second generation, turn to Islam as a source of pride and affirmation. However as she usefully observes, while Islam serves as a refuge for the first generation Bangladeshi immigrants both in Britain and the United States, for the second generation it can be either a basis for alternative ‘‘political and social integration,’’ as in the case of the United States (pp. 78–9), or a resource to fight back against the dominant racist ideology of the receiving society, as it obtains in Britain (pp. 105–6). This study is valuable in terms of the wealth of information it presents and the insights that the ethnographic material yields. Of particular interest in this respect are Kibria’s discussions of the sharp fall in professional status, the loss of family social capital, and leveling of social class that many middle-class Bangladeshi migrants to the United States routinely experience (pp. 36–41), the growing significance of religion as both a resource against majoritarian racism and a source of intergenerational tensions, especially as it begins to challenge the primacy of kinship in organizing diasporic sociality (pp. 104–112), and the difficulties that short-term contract migrants face in relating their often desperate and precarious life experiences while abroad to family and kin in Bangladesh (pp. 139–141). And yet for all its promises, and perhaps because of them, the book seems to suffer from an unresolved tension resulting from the author’s decision to emphasize the question of Islamic revival and Muslim-ness among Bangladeshis abroad, while relegating global migration to the status of context. It is understandable why Kibria wants to write about a topic as important as Islam and its impact on diasporic populations, but the empirical material Kibria presents in her book speaks far more insistently to issues of migration. Even her two key analytical constructs—‘‘global national image’’ and ‘‘inter-state inequality’’—relate to the problems of being Bangladeshi, not Muslim, in a more affluent receiving context. It also bears noting that constructs such as ‘‘global national image’’ and ‘‘interstate inequality’’ are too broadly and imprecisely defined to have much traction in explaining the specific forms of discrimination faced by Bangladeshi migrants in different receiving contexts. Consequently, we are left with questions about how Bangladeshi Muslim experiences are substantively different from experiences of migrants—permanent and temporary—from other non-Western locations, who face discrimination based on class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, even if not Islam/ religion. Minimally we need some discussion here of the specific mechanisms/institutions that mediate between these large constructs and their effects on migrants. The book also remains largely descriptive in its scope. Kibria does have insights—at times excellent ones—that hint at larger theoretical implications of her study, but she does not distill them adequately for her readers. For instance, she mentions the different uses of religion by the second generation in the United States and Britain, but she does not situate them explicitly within the debates over assimilation versus pluralism that are commonplace within the literature on migration. Or, for instance, she mentions the kinds of prejudice that second generation Bangladeshis sometimes demonstrate against new arrivals from the homeland (p. 91), but she does not comment on the internalized racism and explicit modernizationist discourses that clearly underpin these attitudes. Similarly, her brief comparison of the Bangladeshi diasporic communities in the United States and Britain (pp. 111–112), while rife with promises, does very little justice to a complex question. Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 94 Reviews The book focuses overwhelmingly on the problem of how Bangladeshis think they are being constructed and how they fashion their identities in response to these perceptions. While there is undoubtedly much that is useful and defensible in these perceptions, analysis of empirical evidence, other than the interviews with migrants themselves, might have enriched the study considerably. Wherever the book departs from its specific preoccupation—for instance, in the brief historical account of migration from Sylhet to Britain in Chapter Five, or in the discussion of the conditions in which temporary contract workers in the GCC countries and Malaysia must function—the book gains welcome breadth that helps contextualize issues of identity formation. Finally, a word about method: as mentioned already above, Kibria presents an impressive amount of ethnographic material. While this is clearly the principal strength of the book, it is hard not to wish for a closer reading of the texts, and greater self-reflexivity about the situated-ness of the knowledge being produced through these interviews. For instance, in the preface, Kibria very astutely points out that her family connections ‘‘opened doors to people and places’’ (p. xiii). However, in her analysis she does not reflect on the dialogic contexts of her interviews or the situated-ness of the knowledge they produce. As qualitative researchers have often pointed out, interviewees can over-align themselves with what they perceive as the interviewer’s positioning. While Kibria is surely aware of this contingency of ethnographic research, a little discussion about the process, not just in the field but also at the moment of writing, would be a welcome addition. Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 Restoring Democracy to America: How to Free Markets and Politics from the Corporate Culture of Business and Government, by John F.M. McDermott. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010. 481pp. $69.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780271037240. BERND BALDUS University of Toronto [email protected] During the formative decades of sociology in the nineteenth century, social inequality was its dominant topic. The turbulence of that century, as well as the apparent success of the natural sciences in finding ‘‘laws’’ led early sociologists from Comte, Spencer, Sumner, and Durkheim, to look for determining technical, biological, or functional causes which could explain social inequality as a natural and beneficial feature of all societies. The unspoken corollary was that there was no point in looking for alternative forms of social organization and distribution. Even Marx, for all his calls for class struggle, felt the need to enlist historical necessity as a midwife to assist the birth of a communist society. These ideas left an enduring mark of subsequent sociological work. John McDermott’s book departs from this tradition. It begins with a critical historical outline of the growth of capitalism and democracy from the nineteenth century to the late 1960s. This period of ‘‘the great advance’’ combined increasing economic prosperity with the growth of middle-class cadres, and with substantial gains in working-class political participation. But it also saw the beginning of trends that would herald its end: the emergence of large corporate conglomerates which eventually invaded former state monopolies such as postal services, prisons, military contracting, and financial services. The cadres now joined with elites to consolidate their privileges and became more conservative. Elections increasingly produced semi-representative bodies guided by corporate objectives which they could at best modify and make less socially toxic. By the 1970s, the consolidated interests of corporate elites, governments, and managerial and administrative cadres had produced a new ‘‘intersection society’’ which Reviews 95 dismantled post-World War II social policies, stifled the protest and liberation movements of the 1970s, and reduced the power of workers and unions. Part Two of the book analyzes this intersection society more closely. McDermott argues that it is becoming more integrated and hierarchical and exerts increasing administrative and ideological influences over less powerful segments of society. Classes are replaced by hierarchically structured life courses which channel different social groups into prescriptive templates of employment, income, consumption, and cultural and political participation. These differ from careers in that they cover the entire life span and have distinct entry points, income stages, and socialization and education periods for workers, middle management, and corporate executives. Opportunities for choice and for upward movement for working-class children exist but decline significantly after the school years. These formalized life-course patterns are in turn based on an unequal distribution of ‘‘socially potent assets’’ such as wealth, family position, social connections, and education. These assets allow competing elites to form elite sub-societies which stabilize their position and keep out mutual rivals. Their shared interests arise less as advance plans than as fluctuating ‘‘precipitates’’ of internal conflicts and of opportunities to impose costs on weaker third parties. Their largest and most powerful members provide institutional and ideological guidance to which lower levels generally defer. Their interests also become embedded in the government: policies which contravene their goals are defined as ‘‘controversial,’’ and popular demands and feedback are poorly transmitted. A simplistic populism provides a democratic veneer that legitimates elite privileges and mobilizes popular support. The stability of elite networks is enhanced by rings of defense: social inertia, accommodation structures which suggest that elites work on behalf of at least some interests of lower groups in society, and ideologies and media images which portray alternative social structures as dangerous steps into anarchy while creating ‘‘socially induced superstitions,’’ such as the infallibility of markets and the ‘‘private sector.’’ As a last resource, elites rely on force, a ‘‘police-industrial complex’’ of public and private security forces which, in the United States, has grown to twice the size of its armed forces, and to nearly half the pre-Iraq War defense budget. The third and longest part of the book offers proposals for disentangling this ‘‘hyperdysfunctional’’ intersection of economic and political power. McDermott suggests that this can only be achieved through basic political, social, and economic reforms which can bring about long-term change. These include the creation of a formal ‘‘organizational infrastructure’’ of activists and experts who define common purposes, work toward democratic projects, and act as a counterweight to increasingly ineffectual partisan politics. He also suggests reforming an increasingly militarized police by bringing its operations under the control of a civilian-dominated board chosen by jury selection instead of election or administrative appointment. McDermott’s most interesting proposals concern the restructuring of corporations, employment and political process. He suggests replacing a corporate model that is still based on control by a single private owner with a fundamentally different organization which recognizes the increasing interdependence of private and public spheres of business, and the need for participation by employees, government, consumers, and environmental organizations in corporate decisions. A corporate charter of social responsibility could reconcile interests of owners, employees and public and, by including environmental concerns, of future generations. It would be administered by a board of directors, half of whom consist of public representatives selected by a jury panel process, the other half of a licensed professional management trained in both technical and ethical issues. Firms would have to file corporate impact statements about their activities, and compliance would be enforced by courts, not governments. McDermott suggests equally fundamental employment reforms. Unions should be organized along vocational lines and should move beyond wages and hours toward a more comprehensive interest in workers’ lives from first job to retirement, including vocational training and counseling, and assistance in planning children’s Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 96 Reviews education and career. Low-wage and franchise workers should be organized by town, city, and county to increase their bargaining power to pressure local government, schools and employers. Pools of day-work on demand could offer a liveable wage that replaces welfare and food stamps. McDermott’s final proposals concern reforming international and national economic and political institutions, including a transnational economic parliament, and replacement of the current elected U.S. Senate with one appointed by a jury system to make it more representative and resistant to private pressure groups and lobbies. This is a wide-ranging and stimulating book, although it gets occasionally lost in arcane details and in McDermott’s reminiscences of his 1960s history as a political activist and union steward. His suggestion that current social divisions are based on the possession of socially potent assets and are reflected in distinct life course patterns goes beyond the concept of social capital as a generic functional resource, and is confirmed by life course research which shows the early branching and the progressive constriction of opportunities for entire segments of the population. McDermott also grapples with the theoretical question of contingency and intent in the growth of elite networks, and of functional and harmful consequences of their actions. This is an important problem, though it is not entirely resolved. He is at pains to avoid conspiratorial views of elites and elite power, but describes corporate networks in other passages as having a ‘‘profound and continuing (influence over) cultural change.’’ Similarly, McDermott sees elites as basically necessary because they perform essential organizational and leadership tasks for which their privileges ‘‘constitute a recompense.’’ But he also maintains that the gap between what they give and take can get too large, and that their influence can become ‘‘harmful.’’ Even if McDermott’s book does not resolve these issues, it identifies important problems that are frequently overlooked in the study of inequality: the circuitous route that brings elites to power, the ethical and political consequences that follow from an accurate accounting of the reasons for their ‘‘success,’’ and the more general question of what and who Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 contributes to collectively-achieved results, and how these results should be distributed among those involved. The same holds true for McDermott’s suggestions for reform. It is not often that a book offers a comprehensive, detailed and well thought-out vision of new ways of organizing production, administration, and distribution. Some of these are already successfully practiced in other parts of the world: the German co-determination system, to mention just one, incorporates many of McDermott’s ideas for employee involvement in industrial governance. Apart from their specific merits, these proposals counteract what is perhaps the most basic presumption of all inequality structures: that the current order of things is the only feasible way of organizing the society in which we live. Instrumental Community: Probe Microscopy and the Path to Nanotechnology, by Cyrus C. M. Mody. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011. 260pp. $36.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780262134941. RICHARD M. SIMON Jacksonville State University [email protected] Nanotechnology has become a watchword in many scientific circles, including the social scientific circles that resolve themselves to keep close tabs on the frontiers of the interfaces of science and society. The term is a catchall that has come to encompass any research or engineering that operates in the scale of nanometers (in increments of one billionth of a meter). Nanoscale research has been both celebrated and vilified for its potential applications. Nanotechnologies that could be used to treat disease at the cellular level, for example, could conceivably be converted into stealthy and deadly weapons in the wrong hands. Instrumental Community is simultaneously a history of this consequential new field, and an attempt by Cyrus Mody to contribute to sociological theories of science and technology. As Mody explains, the science of the very small predates the coinage of the label ‘‘nanotechnology’’ (among crystallographers, for example), though its current formulation Reviews 97 has been shaped by the invention and applications of probe microscopy. The dizzying variety of probe microscopy variants and spinoffs (which Mody handles deftly)—scanning tunneling microscopy, atomic force microscopy, Kelvin probe force microscopy, and so on—have in common a physical probe that scans the surface of a sample, producing nanoscale images, and in some cases yielding atomic resolution. The development of the scanning tunneling microscope, the first probe microscope, earned Gerd Bining and Heinrich Rohrer the Nobel Prize in physics in 1986. Instrumental Community is largely a history of probe microscopy (as the book’s subtitle suggests) and how its practitioners forged both the instruments and the networks that gave rise to nanotechnology. That the developers and early practitioners of probe microscopy had to build machines and networks of people to use them is the source of Mody’s concept of ‘‘instrumental community.’’ To Mody, instrumental communities are networks of scientists who are connected by their common interest in an instrument that has potential applications for their research. Instrumental communities both develop technologies and develop research agendas derived from those technologies. Hence, the technologies become instrumental to research programs, and the ‘‘instrumental’’ in instrumental communities takes on a double meaning: a network of researchers who develop a technology (i.e., an instrument), and who also come to depend on that same technology to do meaningful research in other substantive areas (i.e., the technology becomes instrumental). While Mody’s assessment of early probe microscopy as an instrumental community is compelling, the extent to which it adds to sociology’s understanding of scientific research is questionable. ‘‘Instrumental communities’’ are defined similarly to what sociologists have conceptualized as scientific specializations for decades. However, while sociologists have tended to focus on the social dynamics of the development and institutionalization of research topics broadly defined (making few theoretical distinctions between applied and basic research), Mody places particular emphasis on the relevance of probe microscopy as an instrument, arguing that the applicability of this technique to myriad research programs is what accounts for the characteristics of its network of scientists as simultaneously innovators and adopters of probe microscopes. But it is unclear whether, and to what extent a research community organized around a technology differs in structure or function from a research community organized around a theory or idea, or even if the two can be distinguished either empirically or theoretically. Mody seems to imply that they cannot, stating that probe microscopy ‘‘blurs any distinction between science and technology’’ (p. 6), but if this is the case, then the emphasis that he places on it as an instrument (assumedly in contrast to an idea or a theory) is dubious. It may be that Mody would consider scientific communities organized around a theory as similarly ‘‘instrumental,’’ in both senses that he uses this term, but he does not say this. In any event, his claims that an instrumental community ‘‘is a network of individuals who view their involvement with a particular type of instrument and/or instrumentality as ratifying their connection to other nodes in the network’’ (p. 10), and that probe microscopists ‘‘saw themselves as doing something in common with other probe microscopists around the world’’ (p. 10) is a basic assumption made about scientific specializations by sociologists, and does not contribute substantively to our understanding of their dynamics. However, Mody makes a more specific claim about the contributing factors to the success of scientific specializations which are a welcome corrective to recent research on scientific ‘‘movements’’ (Frickel and Gross 2005; Parker and Hackett 2012) that claims their success is a function of the extent to which these communities can create consensus and stymie outside perspectives challenging this consensus. These studies tend to focus narrowly on the earliest stages of development of specializations and ignore processes of diffusion after basic premises have been institutionalized. In contrast, Mody demonstrates that the success of probe microscopy was tied directly to its flexibility. Probe microscopy became standard fare in many different sciences, not because there was wide consensus as to how to use it or Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 98 Reviews even what it produced, but because scientists in other specializations could adapt it to their own needs, and assign to it their own meanings as they saw fit. This highlights the fact that scientists partake in multiple specializations simultaneously, and these inherent overlaps, and the inter-network connections that they imply, must be accounted for in any study of what contributes to the continued success of specializations beyond their fragile early stages. Proponents of actor-network theory (some of whom Mody cites but does not discuss in detail) have studied how facts and artifacts are adopted and adapted according to users’ interests, but this literature (usually associated with explaining the social construction of scientific facts) is seldom connected to the fate of scientific specializations. Mody provides a tantalizing link between these two literatures, but his failure to engage them leaves the task of integration to future researchers. If anyone proves up to the challenge, Instrumental Community will be essential reading. References Frickel, Scott, and Neil Gross. 2005. ‘‘A General Theory of Scientific/Intellectual Movements.’’ American Sociological Review 70(2): 204-232. Parker, John N., and Edward J. Hackett. 2012. ‘‘Hot Spots and Hot Moments in Scientific Collaborations and Social Movements.’’ American Sociological Review 77(1): 21-44. Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination, by Alondra Nelson. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. 289pp. $24.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780816676484. CATHERINE BLISS Brown University [email protected] Body and Soul is a vivid look at the relationship between health, politics, and race through an insightful exploration of the Black Panther Party’s health social movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Alondra Nelson’s original analysis disrupts staid notions of inequality and its discontents by showing Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 how Party members responded to medical discrimination by actively fighting for biomedical integration, alternative knowledge paradigms, and equitable healthcare. Just as the Panther’s novel epistemologies and research frameworks brought light to the systematic embeddedness of black bodies and souls in their communal, institutional, and political economic contexts, Nelson’s analysis of this unique brand of health activism not only locates the Party’s strategies and challenges in its vibrant historical context but also advances our understanding of how the production of knowledge and identity is always situated in interlocking processes of racism, structural violence, and biomedical inequalities. Body and Soul shows that, far from being an essential biological condition, health is a prism for shifting dynamics of power and resistance. The book opens with a look at a 1972 conference in which the Black Panther Party drove home their commitment to serving the black community body and soul. This meeting, at the apogee of the Party’s existence, had Panthers engaged in everything from food and clothing distribution to scientifically characterizing violence and poverty as fundamental health issues. In fact, the Party conducted a wealth of independent biological and social research in the areas of epidemiology and preventative medicine. Nelson uses its organizers’ cry for universal free healthcare and its implementation of sickle cell anemia screens as a window into the Party’s dual emphasis on revolution and medical activism. For the Panthers, selfdetermination went hand in hand with a deeper engagement of the biomedical sphere. Nelson goes on to make a number of key empirical interventions, by showing that the Black Panther Party was a part of a larger movement toward medical civil rights. The Panthers drew on a legacy of health activism forged within slavery and Jim Crow to develop strategies for institution building, integration, and the generation of authoritative knowledge. The Party also synced with global discourses that framed health as an inalienable right, as in the World Health Organization’s 1948 charter. The Panthers sutured these discourses to fight for universal healthcare and an antiracist social order. Reviews 99 Following in the footsteps of movements like the United Negro Improvement Association and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Party spawned self-made and self-run medical facilities, spearheaded policymaking and litigation to integrate the medical workforce, and created national health awareness programs that would empower laypeople to become experts over their own health. Nelson’s treatment of these movements illuminates the full scope of their interwoven genealogies, which stretch from pre-Antebellum to contemporary years. Body and Soul then moves on to reveal the never before examined organizational dynamics of the Party’s clinical domain. Inspired by revolutionaries like Mao Tse Tung, Frantz Fanon, and Che Guevara, the Black Panther Party made health praxis central to their social justice platform. It propagated community service centers as an alternative to the Afro-nationalist and War on Poverty agendas that did nothing to subvert the capitalist underpinnings of the medicalindustrial complex. The Party mobilized against medical exploitation with a coalition of contemporary movements, such as the Young Lords Party. Nelson carefully demonstrates that the network of free clinics they established implemented the Party’s national guidelines, while remaining committed to local divisional politics. Clinics also embodied the nested principle of health and humanity by offering meals and holistic healthcare in conjunction with political training. Finally, Body and Soul details how the Black Panther Party created a robust health science to counteract what members saw as medical genocide on blacks and the poor. In their sickle cell disease campaign, the Panthers made strides in clinical care while arming community members with better understandings of genetics and disease. Their efforts not only provided richer knowledge about the genotypic and phenotypic nature of diseases that disproportionately affected the black community, but also shifted the balance of power from scientific to lay expertise in fighting such diseases. In the Party’s campaign against a UCLA ‘‘biology of violence’’ center that promised to target racial minorities in genetic and therapeutic research, it created an oppositional scientific discourse based on sociological reasons for violence. Forming a legal plenary with other ‘‘rainbow coalition’’ organizations, the Panthers successfully barred the center’s establishment and drew public attention to the medicalization of behavior. Nelson frames these interventions as a response to social movements scholarship. She uses novel readings of civil rights literature and ethnography of ‘‘trusted experts’’ to critique analysts who have depicted the civil rights movement as separate from health social movements. She asks sociologists to instead unearth the alternative healthcare systems and knowledge bases that oppressed communities have generated in response to their conditions, and to analyze these responses in terms of their linkages to broader social justice struggles. Relatedly, Nelson urges sociologists to consider the impact the Black Panther Party has had on the emerging health social movements of the 1970s and 1980s and subsequent health justice frameworks. The Panthers would become an essential foundation for the ‘‘tacit coalition’’ of experts and activists that successfully compelled the U.S. federal government to mandate the inclusion of women and minorities in all public agencies and publicly-funded research. It is from this critical vantage point that Nelson offers the theoretical gem of the citizenship contradiction: the process by which formal rights fail to bear substantive gains in an unequal society. Nelson argues that when institutions, elites, and gatekeepers prevent minorities from access to the basic rights and resources that are needed to obtain equal standing, formal rights like enfranchisement are not enough to bring racially subordinate groups to full citizenship. More theoretical speculation along these lines would have been helpful. The book’s findings could have been read along the grain of the sociology of race and gender, thereby leading to contributions regarding classification and identification processes in the battle for health equality. How did the Party’s own classification processes and strategic essentialisms impact the character and status of its knowledge? Also, given that women were the backbone of clinical efforts, how did different subject positions or identity Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 100 Reviews standpoints affect the proliferation of scientific alternatives? The book also could have been more deeply analyzed in terms of the sociology of science, knowledge, and technology. In notes, Nelson gestures toward a key finding regarding the ‘‘biomedicalization’’ of society. The Party’s ‘‘brokering’’ of science and healthcare suggests that biomedicalization in the form of bodily optimization and health-centrism has a longer durée than heretofore acknowledged. More explicit analysis of self-determined empowerment through healthcare would do much to draw out the broader implications of the Party’s actions. Despite these remaining questions, the book is full of deft analyses and bold linkages between domains too often examined separately: race, science, and social movements. Body and Soul is sure to become required reading in all these areas, and to spawn further research that takes seriously the interdependence of health and politics in an unequal society. Taxing the Poor: Doing Damage to the Truly Disadvantaged, by Katherine S. Newman and Rourke L. O’Brien. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011. 212pp. $21.95 paper. ISBN: 9780520269675. ISAAC WILLIAM MARTIN University of California, San Diego [email protected] It does not come as news to sociologists that fiscal policy is one of the most important influences on the incidence, depth, and severity of poverty. Until now, however, the sociology of poverty and public policy has focused on spending policy. Poor people pay taxes, too, of course; and with Taxing the Poor, we finally have a worthy sociological study of the impact of tax policy on the lives of the poor. Katherine S. Newman and Rourke L. O’Brien document regional differences in tax policy regimes in the United States, and argue that these differences help to explain regional differences in the incidence of poverty-related hardship and social problems. The core hypothesis of the book is that taking money away from poor people harms their well-being. The centerpiece of the book is Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 a series of regression models that test this hypothesis by measuring the effects of changing state tax and local policies on mortality, property crime, violent crime, high school dropouts, births to unmarried mothers, and obesity, all measured annually at the state level. The authors compute the taxes owed by the poor, and show that increases in these tax obligations are associated with small but nontrivial increases in every poverty-related social problem on their list. The causal mechanism is simple: taxation deprives poor people of resources that might allow them to protect their health, stay in school, and avoid crime. These models are carefully specified, and the causal inferences are generally persuasive, though there is plenty more qualitative and micro-level quantitative work to be done filling in the picture. Some of the variance that is here attributed to punitive tax policies might be attributable to punitive shifts in welfare policies that happened in the same times and places, but this is a question for future research. Specialists will want to inspect the details for themselves. In any case, anyone who believes that taxing the poor is harmless now has to shoulder the burden of proof. Another great contribution of this book is to refocus the attention of sociologists on persistent regional disparities in poverty and suffering. Many late-twentieth-century classics in the sociology of poverty concern the northern, urban poor—Newman and O’Brien’s subtitle alludes to Wilson’s celebrated study of poverty in rust-belt cities— but it should come as no surprise to sociologists that the highest rates of poverty, the highest rates of poverty-related hardship, and the most punishing tax policies faced by the poor are in the American South, especially in rural places. The book includes an excellent historical overview of how this pattern evolved. The authors show that southern states introduced regressive tax policies after Reconstruction ‘‘in order to force blacks to go to work for wages rather than engage in selfsufficient farming’’ (p. 12). The regressivity of southern tax systems was then compounded by state sales taxes introduced during the Great Depression, and by tax preferences for business meant to lure industry Reviews 101 south after the Second World War. Once put in the place, regressive tax policies tended to stick, because southern states instituted constitutional limitations on the taxation of property—in some cases, fully a century before the better-known property tax revolt of the 1970s—and constitutional supermajority requirements that were intended to protect the privileged by making it difficult for the majority to raise any taxes on income or property. This chapter could stand alone as a concise introduction to the literature on the history of taxation in the American states. It is critical for the argument of Taxing the Poor because it lends plausibility to the assumption that regional differences in tax policy are exogenous causes of contemporary problems. We can be pretty sure that hardship is responding to tax policy and not vice versa, because the relevant tax policies are unresponsive to contemporary conditions. They are in the grip of the heavy hand of the past. The book concludes with a call for the federal government to take over the financing and administration of TANF and Medicaid, and for states to reform their tax systems for the benefit of the poor. The authors reject the argument that progressives in the United States ought to aim for a Swedish-style combination of heavy taxes on consumption and generous social spending; they are skeptical of such arguments because, they write, ‘‘we don’t believe the guarantee of progressive spending as an antidote to new consumption taxes is ironclad enough’’ (p. 156). Certainly in the current American political climate it is hard to imagine a grand bargain that would couple heavy consumption taxes with increases in social provision. It is also hard to imagine welfare spending becoming fully nationalized. In the short run this book is unlikely to change policy. But it may have a salutary influence on sociology. Students of poverty in our discipline, with a few exceptions, continue to focus on just a few politically salient programs on the spending side of the budget. This focus is myopic. To offer one illustrative example: if ‘‘welfare’’ is the colloquial American English word for means-tested cash assistance, then the largest welfare program in the United States is not Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), it is the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). In the last ten years there have been at least a halfdozen sociology dissertations concerned with TANF, and, to the best of my knowledge, none on the EITC. And this, as Newman and O’Brien point out, is the tax policy that has received the most attention from scholars of poverty! In short, Taxing the Poor is pathbreaking and, more of us should follow that path to find out how far it will take us. There is much more we need to know about how taxes affect the lives of the poor for good and ill. Immigration and Women: Understanding the American Experience, by Susan C. Pearce, Elizabeth J. Clifford, and Reena Tandon. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2011. 309pp. $26.00 paper. ISBN: 978081 4767399. SILVIA PEDRAZA University of Michigan [email protected] To this day, the predominant image of the immigrant is that of a male pauper. Thus, Immigration and Women is a welcome opportunity for Susan Pearce, Elizabeth Clifford, and Reena Tandon to contribute to our knowledge of the gendered nature of migration through interviews. Pearce, Clifford, and Tandon engaged in a mixed-method quantitative and qualitative study: a demographic description derived from the Census and American Community Survey regarding immigrant women, and in-depth interviews (with some participant observation) of immigrant women. The authors derived their sample carefully. The women they interviewed were adults who were at least 18 years of age when they immigrated to the United States. This age cutoff was a wise choice because those who immigrate at younger ages resemble the native-born in values and attitudes, since (depending on their actual age and circumstances at the age of migration) they are re-socialized in the new society to which their families migrated. Adult immigrants, however, were completely socialized in another country and another culture and bring those experiences and values with them to their Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 102 Reviews new home. These they partly retain and partly shed, as their interviews show. They both assimilate to their new home and new culture, while they retain some ties to the old. In creating their sample, Pearce et al. made another wise choice. Since there have always been two immigrant Americas—one working-class and the other professional—the researchers also chose to interview women who exemplified both. Contemporary migration involves a larger professional, well-educated component than in the past, but both types of jobs are represented. The researchers interviewed 89 immigrant women: domestic workers, entrepreneurs, professionals (such as lawyers, doctors), artists, activists, and those in what they call atypical occupations. Still another wise choice in creating their sample was that the researchers interviewed women who came through regular (legal) means as well as women who came through irregular (illegal) means; those who followed their husbands and families as well as those who could only be said to be ‘‘gender pioneers’’; those who left their countries to better their economic situation as well as those who left as refugees, looking for freedom. Gathering the data on the women’s immigrant lives (before arriving to this country and while already here), the authors focused on the structural causes of migration as well as on the agency of the immigrants themselves. As I tried to underscore in the past (Pedraza 1991), both gender and migration are topical areas through which sociologists can try to link structure and agency, macro and micro. Yet it remains true that the sociological tradition has been better at highlighting structural constraints than at explaining agency. Pierce et al. define agency not only as resistance (as is usually the case) but also expand the notion to encompass creativity, relocation, reinvention of the self, leadership, and responsibility for relationships. This makes for a welcome addition to our understanding of agency. Another wise choice in creating their sample was that they sought women (through snowball and convenience sampling) who represented the ethnic groups that were concentrated in particular places—such as Mexicans and Iranians in Los Angeles, Vietnamese in Houston, Haitians and Cubans in Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 Miami. The interviews were conducted face-to-face and respondents chose to give the interview with their real name or with a pseudonym. This mix of ethnicities, locales, and occupations makes the interviews they gathered particularly valuable. In addition, at the end of each thematic section, the researchers made the effort to extrapolate from the interview data its policy implications—their contribution to public sociology. Immigration and Women has both strengths and weaknesses—empirically and theoretically. Empirically, a major strength is that the interview materials are rich, have a great deal of depth, and are well presented. The authors write simply and well, engagingly; they allow their subjects to speak while weaving their quotes into the larger points they are making. This way of presenting the interviews follows from the interpretive tradition of the social sciences that focus on the subjective, intended meaning of the people whom one is trying to understand. At the same time, they are careful not to speak ‘‘for’’ them, but as they put it, ‘‘to help amplify voices and to illustrate their heterogeneity’’ (p. 12). This they do well. Many of the issues the researchers tackle in this book are illuminated by these in-depth interviews. For example, Pearce et al. use the interviews to show that the difference between documented and undocumented immigrants is at times not as stark as many imagine it to be; rather than two different groups of people, they are often the same people at different stages of their process of migration. While the point has been made in the past by other researchers, the authors show it through the interviews: women who lose their legal status (e.g., having been students with a visa), becoming undocumented; women who did not have a legal status (e.g., border crossers) and become legal, through marriage to a U.S. citizen or an employment-based visa. Likewise, it has long been known that the root problem with establishing small businesses where immigrants can become self-employed is the problem of capitalization. Pearce et al. show this through their interviews the creative ways in which these immigrant women made good on their culture, their know-how, and their values as resources to become selfemployed, contributing to the sharp increase Reviews 103 in self-employment among women. Even more, their focus on women artists is valuable. Sociologists have never regarded the content of artwork as data on the social processes they study. Pearce et al. show that it is also a form of data, as we can see in the pieces that they include and analyze. These are the strengths of this work. The work, however, is not without its limitations. Its claim that the gendered nature of migration has not been studied is overstated. When I first collected that literature over 20 years ago, that was the case. But since then the study of women and migration has mushroomed, as a generation of historians and social scientists recorded and analyzed their lives. The literature review of this work does not capture it well. Moreover, while the authors stress ‘‘the feminization of migration’’, missing from this work is the recognition that some migration flows are femaledominated (e.g., the Irish over the course of the nineteenth century), others are maledominated (e.g., that of Italians then and Mexicans always, as befits a labor migration), and others are gender-balanced (e.g., the family migration of refugees, whether Jewish or Cuban). Such recognition needs to be both theoretical and empirical. Theoretically, to answer the question of why the Irish exodus of the nineteenth century was dominated by women one needs to read the work of Hsia Diner, who tells us why Ireland became a country that turned its back on its women, and why the kin chain migration progressively became a female chain of mothers, daughters, sisters, and cousins. This was due not only to the devastating famine at mid-century but also to the late industrialization of Ireland, in comparison to other European countries, together with a cultural pattern of late marriage, high rates of celibacy, and an inheritance system where only the oldest male could inherit land. Empirically, to understand the feminization of migration we need to have more than descriptive, easily available data from the census; we need to have a demographic analysis of individual-level data that establishes the incidence of the feminization among various immigrant groups, as just noted, asking and answering questions to which the data can reply. Still, while these are not small problems, Immigration and Women brings rich interview materials for us to consider and a broader definition of agency than was available. As a result, it contributes a great deal to our deeper understanding of the gendered nature of migration, as well as the ways in which human beings marshal their personal resources to reconstruct their lives. I recommend it. Reference Pedraza, Silvia. 1991. ‘‘Women and Migration: the Social Consequences of Gender.’’ Annual Review of Sociology 17: 303–25. Queer Company: The Role and Meaning of Friendship in Gay Men’s Work Lives, by Nick Rumens. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. 205pp. $99.95 cloth. ISBN: 9781409401919. BARRY D. ADAM University of Windsor [email protected] This well-written and insightful book positions itself as part of a research literature that seeks to move beyond sociological preoccupation with couples and families in order to bring relations of friendship to the scholarly table. Male friendship as a cultural ideal in English society seems to have foundered in the eighteenth century with the elevation of the heterosexual couple and a concomitant homophobic policing of male bonding as it began to fall under suspicion of ‘‘sodomy.’’ In our era, the iconic emotionally-crippled male has dominated a great deal of research on men in relationships. Now of course the space of male intimacy is largely governed by the ‘‘gay’’ label in advanced industrial societies, so gay men provide a particularly valuable vantage point for the rediscovery of male friendship. As the author notes, friendship can play a particularly large role in the lives of gay and lesbian people, especially when families of origin are rejecting or uncomprehending. A lot is squeezed from this qualitative study of 33 men in middle- and workingclass occupations in the United Kingdom. Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 104 Reviews All but one is white; racialization is addressed in terms of friends and workmates of the interviewees. Overall this study shows a great diversity of workplace friendships and few dominating themes. Separate chapters are devoted to the friendships of gay workers with heterosexual men and women. Perhaps not surprisingly, these relationships are typically the most important workplace relationships, if only because they dominate the work milieu. Occasionally relationships with heterosexual men and women even stray into the sexual realm. This study explores and troubles the popular literature on the supposedly easy and natural link between gay men and straight women, where ‘‘gay men are positioned as sexually neutral observers and gender representatives speaking for and of the category of ‘men,’ a position that is deeply problematic’’ (p. 115). Particularly interesting are the instances where it is not the impact of the heteronormative organization on gay men that is most noteworthy, but rather the apparent permission that the presence of gay men in the workplace gives straight men to expand the boundaries of expressive masculinity, sometimes to the surprise and even discomfort of their gay colleagues. There are instances of conflict and truculence in the workplace, particularly when heterosexual men refuse the authority of women or gay men in management positions, but overall it may be indicative of the current state of lesbian, gay, and bisexual relations in the United Kingdom that little overt discrimination emerges in this portrait of the workplace. At the same time, there are a number of indicators of the ways in which often ‘‘gay-friendly’’ organizations nevertheless reproduce an organizational heteronormativity that constrains gay and lesbian workers. In some instances, gay workers report feeling pressure from employers to live up to a newer stereotype of being witty, charming, and creative—qualities that may even be marketed to clients. This new construction of gay workers as a particular kind of asset, especially in industries where taste and esthetics are marketable commodities, seems to be an emergent demand of the twenty-first century workplace. One chapter treats the friendships of gay workers with other gay men at work, Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 a relatively uncommon occurrence given that most gay workers find few if any gay colleagues in their immediate surroundings. In many cases, gay workers must look elsewhere for gay friends and potential romantic attachments. Those who do find gay colleagues, it seems, have a wide range of relationships from the solitary to the competitive. Much has been garnered from this book’s 33 interviews, but the evidence is stretched too thin when dealing with the lesbian friends of gay men in the workplace, as it is based on a single case. This kind of relationship is framed largely in terms of the need to remedy the sexism of gay men, without much of a foundation for genuine friendship—this treatment does not begin to get at the real diversity of friendships that can and do exist between lesbian and gay co-workers. Finally, the book invokes the utopian promise of gay men’s friendships ‘‘as a discursive schema for remodelling depersonalized male-to-male relations in the workplace’’ (p. 154), even as it is clear-eyed about the less-than-utopian practices of everyday workplace friendships recounted in an interview as ‘‘gay men’s identities are divided and multiple, with many gay men choosing to disassociate themselves from other gay men in the workplace’’ (p. 151). Work and home are largely presumed to be opposing categories, but this book brings to light the very human relations that emerge in the workplace and contribute to our understanding of the nexus between sexuality, intimacy, and friendship on one hand—and the workplace on the other. The African American Struggle for Secondary Schooling, 1940–1980: Closing the Graduation Gap, by John L. Rury and Shirley A. Hill. New York, NY: Teacher’s College Press, 2012. 261pp. $36.95 paper. ISBN: 9780807752777. MELISSA F. WEINER College of the Holy Cross [email protected] John L. Rury and Shirley A. Hill use a wide array of qualitative and quantitative data to provide a sweeping account of African American efforts to improve secondary Reviews 105 education within their own communities, challenges they faced, and the long-term improvements in educational and socioeconomic attainment that resulted. Encapsulating forty years of educational progress in the United States, zeroing in on the South and then shifting to the North, where the urban educational drama would gain so much attention, the authors are attuned to differences in social class, gender, and the urban/rural divide that not only account for differences in attainment but also shape demands for education. Throughout the book, the power of black communities in broadening their children’s educational opportunities features prominently. Addressing the United States as a whole, with a particular emphasis on the South, Rury and Hill combine a vast array of qualitative and quantitative data to provide a holistic account of black education during this fortyyear period. The authors integrate findings from yearbooks, black newspapers, and oral histories from archival repositories around the country with interviews and IPUMS data, to present regression models comparing factors predicting black and white high school attendance and completion. Although a bit unclear how the specific archival sources and cities were chosen, the multitude of empirical sources used to generate a deep understanding of the experiences with segregation and efforts to improve education during these decades is a clear strength of the book. The expansive review of educational conditions in southern schools highlights both the substandard facilities in rural areas and the ‘‘good schools’’ in urban ones. Integrating existing literature with primary source data reveals anew for readers familiar with these problems the extent to which black students in the rural South contended with crumbling buildings, a lack of facilities such as toilets or running water, a lack of qualified teachers and administrators, and schools held in shacks or homes, churches, and businesses, with two-year secondary schools often grafted onto existing elementary schools. Urban schools, though considerably better than rural schools, with expansive curriculums, highly qualified teachers and administrators from the black middle class, were nevertheless inferior to those of whites. Segregated urban black schools lacked furniture, laboratory equipment and textbooks, or received them second-hand from white schools, and were overcrowded due to the many rural families who sent their children to live with urban relatives for a chance at a better education. After documenting the educational conditions facing black high school students on the eve of World War II, Rury and Hill describe extensively the equalization and integration campaigns that occurred throughout the South. These efforts significantly improved the quality and quantity of educational opportunities for many rural black children, by building new facilities, upgrading existing ones, decreasing class sizes, expanding curricular offerings, creating regional high schools with busses to collect students, and elongating the school year. Yet true equalization in spending or opportunities compared to those available to white students never occurred, especially since many schools continued to lack accreditation. With Brown v. Board of Education looming large, attention shifted toward court-mandated integration. Although beneficial for black students seeking to gain access to quality education, black communities lost longstanding schools featuring caring teachers with high academic standards who imparted knowledge necessary to gain access to colleges and succeed in a racist society. Transferred to formerly all-white schools, black youth encountered segregated extracurricular activities, racist teachers, tracking systems, and rising disciplinary rates that maintained privileges of whiteness in ‘‘integrated’’ schools. Highlighting the impact of the great migration on education, Rury and Hill document the urban schools’ inabilities to provide adequately for the dramatic increase in black high school students seeking to avail themselves of better educational opportunities in Gary, Chicago, Los Angeles, Newark, Cleveland, Baltimore, and New York. Integrated schools located between black and white neighborhoods and those in the heart of black neighborhoods quickly became overcrowded, and existing whites used transfer programs designed to integrate schools to create all-white educational enclaves. Throughout the book, the authors describe protests by whites seeking to curtail African Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 106 Reviews American enrollment in schools, and black efforts to gain access to white schools and improve resources within them. Shedding light on protest by whites in the North is a welcome addition to the literature that largely focuses on the virulent racism faced by highly public integration efforts in the South. In addition, Rury and Hill describe protests by black students in the North linked to the larger civil rights movement that sought both equal resources in their schools alongside culturally relevant curriculum and more black teachers and administrators. For scholars looking to develop more indepth examinations of these protests, as is deserved, the footnotes will be a treasure trove of data with which to begin. Perhaps most enlightening is Rury and Hill’s succinct and well-argued critique of the ‘‘urban crisis’’ (as well as ‘‘stay in school’’ campaigns) in education that obscured the dramatic increases in educational attainment leading to the significant growth of the black middle class. Highlighting that this term came into use only when black students entered the schools, the authors reveal this political language as a tool used by whites to impede integration, particularly given the empirical evidence showing African American graduation rates increasing during this time, and steadily converging with whites. This discourse of crisis justified the increase of black students’ punishment in the form of suspensions and expulsions and reinforced beliefs about blacks’ intellectual inferiority and violent tendencies, and subsequent abandonment of many urban schools by boards who believed black students neither willing to work for, nor deserving of, an education equal to whites. Rury and Hill’s data throughout the book demonstrates the structural factors of poverty impacting African American attainment and how, through their own efforts, African Americans nevertheless dramatically increased their access to educational opportunities and attainment. Indeed, when compared to white students with both parents in the home and those who owned their own homes, African Americans graduated at rates similar to, or greater than, whites. And among those in poverty, African Americans were more likely to graduate than whites. Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 Closing with the 30-plus years after the end of the focus of the book, the authors briefly address changes in economic structures that have led to the continued decline in quality of urban education and educational stagnation for black students. Noting the irony of integrated schools being more prominent in the South and segregation the largest problem in the North, they advocate community-based programs to address the multitude of factors impacting educational attainment. In addition they return to the power of black communities to promote social change, the determination of black students who sought quality education in the face of considerable obstacles, and the centrality of improvements made during the integration era to the development of the black middle class. This book is destined to become the reading list for social scientists, historians, and educational scholars and policy students interested in African American secondary education and minority education broadly. It is also essential reading for graduate or undergraduate courses in these fields, or for those readers simply interested in learning as much as possible about the history of black secondary education from only one book. The Production of Modernization: Daniel Lerner, Mass Media, and the Passing of Traditional Society, by Hemant Shah. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2011. 218pp. $69.50 cloth. ISBN: 9781439906248. MARWAN M. KRAIDY University of Pennsylvania [email protected] Widely known as ‘‘the Bible of modernization theory,’’ Daniel Lerner’s 1958 book The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East, continues to haunt academic and political debates. In The Production of Modernization: Daniel Lerner, Mass Media, and the Passing of Traditional Society, Hemant Shah explains why that is the case, in an account grounded in thorough and extensive research, drawing on a variety of institutional, archival, and personal sources. The book is well written and clearly organized. Four chapters tackle Lerner’s ideas Reviews 107 and work in the various institutional settings of his career, with Chapter Two exploring Lerner’s work at the Psychological Warfare Division, Chapter Three his work at Stanford, Chapter Four his tenure at Columbia, and Chapter Five his years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The concluding and sixth chapter explains the remarkable longevity of Lerner’s ideas. The book’s central contribution is its deep and nuanced telling of ‘‘how Passing of Traditional Society came together—historically, intellectually, geopolitically, culturally—. . . and then considers the extent to which Lerner’s ideas influenced development communication as an academic field’’ (p. 8). Based on approximately three hundred surveys conducted in 1951 and 1952 in each of Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, and Syria, Lerner elaborated a social-psychological theory of modernization in which people were classified in one of three categories: traditional, transitional, and modern. In this theory in which being modern is tantamount to adopting Western values and behaviors, the mass media play a critical role because by triggering empathy, a key concept for Lerner, they were the motor of the modernization process. Shah identifies three forces that shaped Lerner’s thesis: Cold war geopolitics provided funds for Lerner’s project because it could help fend off the appeal of communism in the countries under study. The surveys were funded by Voice of America with the objective of mapping radio-listening habits in the Middle East to better counter Radio Moscow. Lerner’s theory, then, is best understood as a product of the Cold War and superpower rivalry in what was then called the Third World. Liberal democracy and market economics were the bedrock of Lerner’s theory—‘‘the ability to buy things and vote were among the clearest indicators of a modern nation’’ (p. 4). The rise of behavioral science in America in the inter-war years (1919–1938) encouraged social-scientific studies of social and cultural patterns, with communication emerging as a central concern. If early American social scientists were perceived to be irrelevant to public issues, then contributing to (first the war effort against the Nazis) the Cold War would burnish their credentials and cement their respectability in society at large. These social scientists, by developing notions such as ‘‘Third World,’’ or ‘‘new nations,’’ also set the ground for a consideration of the world as a non-differentiated Other. Finally, Lerner was influenced by racial liberalism—as Shah underscores, Lerner’s was one of the very first theories of social change grounded in ‘‘mutable cultural characteristics rather than immutable racial ones’’ (p. 4), making The Passing of Traditional Society a progressive work for its period. And yet, to contemporary ears Lerner’s dictum that ‘‘what the West is, the Middle East seeks to become’’ is unequivocally ethnocentric. In this regard it is useful to recall that according to Lerner, the media compelled Middle Eastern Muslims to chose between ‘‘Mecca and mechanization,’’ in a battle that he saw Mecca losing and mechanization winning (how would Lerner have reacted to the Islamic mobile phone, which rings at prayer times and has a compass pointing to Mecca!). The notion of empathy, and the traditional-transitional-modern trichotomy in themselves are not necessarily problematic. They basically say the same thing that some transnational cultural studies scholars say about media and the imagination. They also echo much contemporary advertising and marketing lingo about the power of the ‘‘aspirational’’ in luring the consumer to products. It is rather the directionality of empathy, the one-sidedness of the way that the imagination is supposed to work, that is objectionable. Lerner’s focus on culture, rather than biology, as a shaper of human behavior echoes what Gunnar Myrdal euphemistically called the ‘‘American dilemma,’’ in which he referred to the clash between American ideals of equality and American racist practices. A paternalistic liberalism that called on whites to help their black brethren achieve their full potential was proposed as a remedy. In international relations scholarship of the era, ‘‘brown’’ peoples of the Third World were substituted for the American Negro, mutatis mutandis, and the West took the place of liberal whites in offering a helping hand that would lead non-Western people to modernity, the passport to access being the adoption of putatively Western values and practices. It is useful here to recall the Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 108 Reviews fundamental contradiction inherent to neoconservative understandings of the Arab world. On the one hand, Arabs only understand the language of violence; on the other hand, they are deserving of democracy. In Shah’s words, Lerner’s book ‘‘in some ways epitomizes these American trends in racial thinking’’ (p. 23). With a publication date of April 2011, Shah must have read the final proofs of his book months before the beginning of the Arab uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain. The resonance of Western media coverage of the uprisings with Lerner’s ideas would not have escaped Shah, who noted the eerie resonance of George W. Bush’s Greater Middle East initiative with Lerner’s ideas—and subtitle: ‘‘Modernizing the Middle East.’’ Reading Shah’s book as the Arab uprisings continue to unfold, one cannot fail to appreciate how Lerner’s ideas continue to inform Western understandings of socio-political change in the Middle East, in which information technology, Western influence and Islam, rather than human agency and local struggles, predominate. September 12: Community and Neighborhood Recovery at Ground Zero, by Gregory Smithsimon. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2011. 285pp. $24.00 paper. ISBN: 9780814740859. WILLIAM KORNBLUM Graduate Center, CUNY [email protected] Gregory Smithsimon has produced a compelling ethnographic account of how residents of Battery Park City in lower Manhattan came together to heal and rebuild their community after the attack on the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. His book is commendable as a community study of a very particular type of urban place, and it achieves an extremely important goal of such studies: it becomes a primary historical document in the growing literature about responses to the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history. In doing so, it takes a place with other community studies that have endured, like Middletown and The Urban Villagers, and which continue to inform new generations of scholars Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 who seek to know what it was like to live and work in an historically important community when new social forces were suddenly reshaping the city. Beyond its value for future generations, however, the book is also a measured critique of the urban planning policies that create heavily subsidized luxury high-rise cities within the city. Since this genre of development, which Smithsimon addresses as a form of suburbanization within the city, is occurring throughout urban America, the book provides insights into how such places work as communities and what their consequences tend to be for social relations and class inequality in the larger city. With a population of about 12,000 residents and still growing, Battery Park City is a mixed-use community area located along the Hudson River above Battery Park. At its center is a commercial node of high-rise office buildings, the World Financial Center. The community was physically joined to the World Trade Tower complex by large footbridges that crossed West Street, a continuation of Manhattan’s old West Side Highway which effectively separates Battery Park City from other downtown areas, although not from adjoining Tribeca. Smithsimon reviews the tendentious history of Battery Park City’s creation as an isolated ‘‘urban fortress,’’ of the type so cogently criticized by Jane Jacobs and defended by financiers like David Rockefeller and mega-planner Robert Moses. The story is complicated and as Smithsimon tells, it has a lot to do with the politics of social class, which ensured that the community would be largely homogeneous and upper middle-class or rich (although these terms are difficult to define in a city where the average two-bedroom apartment costs well over a million dollars). As a result, the experience of residents with the 9/11 attacks is not addressed until Chapter Four. The wait is made worthwhile by the high quality of the ethnographic material the author presents in that chapter, and in his subsequent analysis of how residents and community leaders dealt with the disaster. Damage was severe in the community. Toxic smoke kept many away from their apartments for months, and the disruption to community organizations and informal groups Reviews 109 was even worse—it has lasted for years while the 9/11 memorial, the new office tower, and many buildings of Battery Park City itself including the Winter Garden where many community cultural events are held, had to be rebuilt. The majority of residents never returned; newcomers have largely replaced them by now. But in some ways, Smithsimon’s informants tell him, the tragedy helped strengthen their attachments to each other and to the place itself. The availability of parkland and commons of different kinds in the enclave also encouraged a renewed sense of community. ‘‘Both the already-existing urban quality and the exclusive aspect of Battery Park City,’’ Smithsimon writes, ‘‘contributed to a sense of community space that residents valued in their recovery and during the reconstruction of their community (p. 133). At this writing, the new 1 World Trade Center (once called the Freedom Tower) is rising quickly above the memorial to victims of 9/11. A major new transit hub, designed to replace the subway station that was also destroyed in the attack, is ready for use. A difficulty Smithsimon faced in the writing, which he deals with quite gracefully, is that some of the story of rebuilding community in Battery Park City remains to be told. As he conducted interviews and made observations at innumerable community meetings, the residents were still facing serious disruption in their daily lives while the construction and re-construction was taking place around them. How the new buildings and rebuilt facilities will alter their community’s life remains an open question, but Smithsimon cannot be faulted on this score because he has left few stones unturned in his effort to present a balanced and nuanced account of community building as it is occurring in this fascinating part of the city. Smithsimon brings a welcome evenhandedness to his research. ‘‘I had begun,’’ he admits, ‘‘with the intention of writing a critique of it [Battery Park City] as a privatized space and faux-urban citadel, expanding on the postmodern urbanists’ critique with observations from an in-depth study of the place.’’ As often happens among ethnographers who practice their craft and science, his perspectives changed in the field. As he got to know the residents more personally, ‘‘the aggressiveness of the critique became both less supported by what I learned and more difficult to level at a social structure that was composed of actual people I knew and liked and whose opinion mattered to me.’’ He realized as well that ‘‘ethnography had almost always been used by urban sociologists to study disadvantaged people they wished to valorize, not privileged people they sought to criticize, and for good reason: such an intimate method is ill-suited to invective’’ (p. 31). Readers are fortunate that these lessons have helped Gregory Smithsimon produce an outstanding book about affluent people in an exclusive urban enclave that they share with the greater public as well. His account renders them in their particular time and place, without pandering to their sense of entitlement or to their entirely human complaints and conceits. Disciplining the Poor: Neoliberal Paternalism and the Persistent Power of Race, by Joe Soss, Richard C. Fording, and Sanford F. Schram. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011. 368pp. $25.00 paper. ISBN: 9780226768779. SUJATHA FERNANDES Queens College, CUNY [email protected] ‘‘Neoliberalism’’ and ‘‘paternalism’’ are two terms that are not often paired together. Most scholars have conceptualized neoliberalism as a rolling back of the paternalist, welfare state. By contrast, in this book Joe Soss, Richard Fording, and Sanford Schram argue that neoliberalism and paternalism emerged together in American politics and promote a shared disciplinary project. They contend that rather than retreating, the state under neoliberalism is marked by expansions of social programs targeting the poor. The authors see what they term the ‘‘new paternalism’’ informing poverty governance as distinct from earlier forms including slavery and colonialism. The new paternalism is rooted in a language of rights and emphasizes civic obligations as the basis of an egalitarian political order. It is a variant of neoconservatism, finding solutions to perceived social disorder in directive social programs Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 110 Reviews that foster individual competence among the poor. The aim of the new paternalism is to produce new kinds of self-regulating subjects that can integrate individuals into the mainstream. Welfare is not done away with by the neoliberal state, rather it is reshaped to encourage welfare recipients to become self-reliant market actors and consumers. Vouchers and choice programs reposition citizens as consumers who seek goods from other providers rather than trying to improve societal institutions. The other central theme of this book is the importance of race as a key resource in the disciplinary turn. Given that overt racial prejudice has become illegal and racial minorities have entered the middle class, the authors argue that racial schemas provide powerful cognitive structures that guide perception and choice. They develop a model called the Racial Classification Model (RCM) that they test in a range of contexts to show how racial disparities emerge in differential ways depending on the specific configurations of decision-making, policy targets, and political-organizational structures. One of the main case studies explored in the book is that of the Florida Welfare Transition (WT) program. The authors explain that it was not selected because it typifies neoliberal poverty governance, but rather because it demonstrates how all of the elements of neoliberal paternalism operate together. Florida has led the way in devolving policy control to the local level, outsourcing service provision, using information systems to track welfare recipients, and enforcing penalties for noncompliance. The authors focus on patterns of sanctioning and clearly demonstrate how these patterns have been highly responsive to unemployment and seasonal demands for cheap labor in the tourism industry. One of the strengths of this book is the diverse range of methodologies that it combines in the study of neoliberal paternalism. Soss, Fording, and Schram have carried out national and state level analysis through the use of public opinion surveys, program data, and administrative datasets. This statistical analysis is combined with three years of qualitative research in the WT program, including in-depth interviews, observations, Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 attendance at training sessions, and analysis of documents. They also carried out an original statewide survey of WT managers. The varied backgrounds of the three authors which include public policy, political science, and sociology also bring interdisciplinarity to the study which is indispensible for its broader goals. Taken as a whole, the book shows the crucial importance of both statistical and interpretive methods for the study of poverty governance. The statistical and quantitative work helps draw a portrait of the bigger picture, while the textured qualitative descriptions fill in the frame by showing how individual case workers, welfare clients, and administrators respond to and negotiate the programs. The ideas could have been brought to life even more strongly through deepening the portrayals of individuals operating within the matrix of neoliberal paternalist regimes (it would seem that the authors certainly had the material from their many years of exposure to the WT system in Florida) but perhaps that is a project for another set of scholars to undertake. Soss, Fording, and Schram conclude this ambitious volume by anticipating how the current poverty governance regime might shift. Disciplinary governance itself came into being through political struggle, and they argue that it will take either convulsive politics such as during the 1930s or 1960s to enable another shift, or a long-term vision forged over time. One wonders how the authors might view the current global convulsions that began with revolts in Wisconsin and the Middle East, and inspired the Occupy movement in the United States. Might these movements have the longevity and traction to bring about another shift in poverty governance, particularly given the focus of the latter on unemployment, economic inequality and social injustice? Regardless, change depends on understanding the forces that produce regimes of power and inequality, and in this book Soss, Fording, and Schram have given us an excellent elaboration of those forces. Reviews 111 The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, by Guy Standing. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011. 198pp. $29.95 paper. ISBN: 9781849663519. BOB RUSSELL Griffith University [email protected] Guy Standing employs a large canvas and broad-brush strokes in this latest examination of work and employment in the era of contemporary globalization. The Precariat takes up the impacts that globalization is having upon labor markets, the structuring of work and the populations that are charged with carrying it out—although the author’s remit extends beyond these items to also consider the social and political ramifications of globalization. The central thesis of the book is that the globalization of economic life is rapidly giving rise to a new social class—a class in the making—that Standing calls the precariat. This term derives from the noun proletariat and the adjective, precarious, so a literal translation would be that the book is about those who are subject to insecure, precarious employment conditions. However, Standing appears to be unhappy with this translation. Consequently, the precariat is not simply the lower end of the working class, or a new underclass, or for that matter, dispossessed former members of the middle class. Rather, for Standing, the precariat is a distinctive new global class, which has yet to attain recognition of itself. The book may be seen as part of a project whereby this class in the making becomes a class for-itself with a progressive political agenda. Standing defines the precariat in terms of basic forms of security, or more to the point, in the absence of such securities in everyday life. Thus, the precariat lacks labor market security (adequate income earning opportunities), employment security (protections against arbitrary dismissal), job security (stability in the practice of a given occupation), work security (OH and S protection), skill reproduction security (training and apprenticeship opportunities), income security protection, and finally, representational security through collective bargaining and union recognition. As a result, the precariat has only thin attachments to work and to the political identities that ensue from it. Members of the precariat may be found among the ranks of temporary and parttime workers in both the private and, increasingly, within the public sector. They may also be found within new occupational groups such as call center workers or the growing groups of para-professional employees in such fields as law. The precariat is also well represented in certain demographics, including youth, which Standing sees as part of the core of this new formation, and retirees who, either by choice or compulsion, return to the labor force. Other members include visible minorities, the disabled who are forced into employment as a condition of receiving social benefits, an ever-increasing criminalized population, migrants who are prevented from practicing their occupations due to host country licensing restrictions, and women employed in the numerous export processing zones around the globe. For Standing, the precariat is a product of the quest for numerical and functional flexibility on the part of firms and now the public sector. Privatization, outsourcing, and casualization are the main culprits behind the formation of this new global social class. Other precariat traps are related to the commercialization of education and the ensuing debts accumulated by young people who then graduate into labor markets which may not require years of education. Ultimately, Standing is concerned with understanding the political implications that accompany this new class in the making. He puts forward two stylizations in the last chapters of the book: a dystopian ‘‘politics of inferno’’ and ‘‘a politics of paradise.’’ The former is a society organized around the control of the precariat through technological surveillance, crude forms of behavioristic social policy, and the stigmatization of the precariat or at least certain elements of it (migrants, minorities, etc.). Combined with the short-term time frames that precarian existences are organized around, this makes for an ugly future complete with a politics of divisiveness and the threat of neo-fascism, which Standing already sees emerging. Counterpoised to this scenario, Standing presents his alternative, which is founded Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 112 Reviews upon a basic cash income for each citizen, along with quick transition from ‘‘denizenship’’ to full citizenship rights for all members of the precariat including migrants. Such security would permit social actors to engage more fully with work as opposed to labor and would see more time devoted to constructive interactive leisure as opposed to passive play. The book takes the form of an extended essay, consisting of seven chapters. It culls secondary data, mainly published statistics and polling data from around the world, which are used to bolster the theoretical arguments that are being made. The breadth of empirical examples—from Europe, America, China and India—that the author deploys is one of the identifiable strengths of the book, although it is necessary to emphasize that this material is used for descriptive purposes rather than a serious testing of the ideas that are being put forward. The other identifiable strengths consist of prescient descriptions of the precarian condition especially among youth, and intriguing theoretical distinctions in the analysis. On the former point, consider Standing’s critique of multi-tasking, a requirement for many precarians as a lifestyle ‘‘without control over a narrative of time use, of seeing the future and building on the past’’ (p. 130). With regards to theoretical contributions, distinctions between work and labor and work-for-labor and work-for-reproduction provide possible openings for further research. However, it is in the use of new theoretical constructs that Standing runs into trouble. Many, beginning with the notion of a precariat, are underdeveloped. For instance, it is not clear what is to be gained by substituting a notion of the precariat in place of examining the remaking of working classes on a substantially different basis to those conditions that were offered as part of the post-World War II Fordist accord. Aggregating all of the groups that Standing places in the precariat (youth, women of the Third World, para-professionals, etc.) does a disservice to political analysis, notwithstanding acknowledgment that the precariat is a heterogeneous formation. In a similar vein, asserting that the era of globalization came to an end with the GFC (pp. 26, 58) or that neo-fascism is Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 a current alternative in Western societies (p. 148), strike me as misdiagnosed. One is left wondering what has replaced globalization, or how polities with an independent judiciary and periodic elections can be characterized as ‘‘neo-fascist’’? While The Precariat suffers from numerous theoretical ambiguities, it does provide considerable food for thought and as such, deserves to be read, discussed, and critiqued. Ethnographies of the Videogame: Gender, Narrative and Praxis, by Helen Thornham. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. 207pp. $99.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780754679783. SAM HAN Nanyang Technological University, Singapore [email protected] Sociology has been slow to take videogames (and gaming more generally) seriously. It does not, however, have the excuse of not having forbears who have treated games sociologically. There is, after all, Roger Caillois. But his bona fides as a sociologist, admittedly, are at the very least debatable. Ludology, the study of games that has come in the wake of Johan Huizinga’s important work, is an interdisciplinary endeavor including historians, anthropologists and, more recently, media scholars—but not so much sociologists. Hence, Ethnographies of the Videogame is a welcomed sign of the discipline coming to grips with contemporary social realities. Games, and specifically videogames, can no longer be treated parochially. While ‘‘the gamer’’ was in the mainstream viewed as a socially marginal figure, and thusly elided with ‘‘the geek,’’ the rising availability of personal computers and mobile technologies, and the lowering cost of these devices, in today’s digitized world with games integrated into our social networks and mobile phones, prove empirically that videogames cannot be ignored within the discipline. Indeed, part of Helen Thornham’s project is not only to bring videogames to the forefront of sociological thinking, but also to argue that the practice of gaming is inherently social. Going against the grain of much of Reviews 113 videogame theory which according to Thornham, overprivileges the game, she argues that gaming is not a solitary experience but is a social activity. Her central argument then is that ‘‘gaming needs to be reconceptualized, not in relation to what the game offers the gamers, but as a gendered, corporeal and embodied activity, framed by, and deeply contingent on, techno-social experiences’’ (p. 1). In other words, her project is to decenter the game in studies of gaming. Yet a crucial question then emerges: how to study videogames beyond, as Thornham puts it, ‘‘the immediate moment of gameplay’’? This of course is a matter of both theory and method. Theoretically, she draws heavily from feminist media theory, cultural studies and new media theory, mainly in order to suggest that videogame theory has not sufficiently taken into consideration what Thornham refers to as ‘‘the lived relations of gaming’’ (p. 9). This includes ‘‘conversations about gaming, the practices of gaming, and reflections on gaming’’ (p. 8). Her aim is to broaden the focus of scholarly research on games; they are not played in a vacuum. In order to study these lived relations, Thornham uses an ethnographic approach called ‘‘interpretative ethnography,’’ which she, interestingly, associates with the work of cultural studies scholar Ien Ang. She investigates non-familial gaming households across the United Kingdom that play communally in the living room on a central gaming system, not alone on the PC. But she adds an interesting modification to her ethnographic method. She interviews and observes the subjects, and she also videotapes them. She does so in order to view how bodies are implicated in the social gaming experience, and also to play the video recordings back to the subjects to see how they narrate what they are seeing. The social performance of gaming, she suggests, reflects the desire of gamers to ‘‘normalize gaming within their lives through a specific mode of telling which figures it as always-already an intrinsic part of their identities’’ (p. 21). Weaving between ‘‘experience and explanation,’’ this method allows her to explore ‘‘gamers and their habits’’ within the context of relations of the body, technology and place. A privileged theme throughout the study is gender, which she pays attention to via the interpretive lens of ‘‘ontological narrative.’’ Influenced by the theories of Paul Ricoeur and Teresa de Lauretis, Thornham argues that ‘‘the stories gamers construct’’ (the way in which they narrate how they first became gamers, or how often they game, or what they do when they game) ‘‘position them well within a masculine tradition of logic, reason and causality’’ (p. 20). Women gamers thus have an additional burden in this regard. This is particularly acute in the articulation of pleasure. As she notes, during interviews with the women of gaming households, ‘‘female gamers’’ (her term) tend not to stake a claim in the gaming but situate themselves as ‘‘simply’’ joining in. This Thornham calls a ‘‘position of exclusion.’’ Therefore gaming is ‘‘a terrain on which a certain kind of gender is produced, but also. . .a place where masculinity and femininity is managed and negotiated’’ (p. 48). While many of the chapters provide stimulating theoretical discussions and novel empirical data, the strongest is Chapter Four, ‘‘The Practices of Gameplay,’’ where Thornham moves beyond the basic ethnographic method of participant-observation and interviews to employ her videotape method. The analysis she provides of the recordings of gameplay ‘‘shift the focus from what is said about gaming, to the actions of gaming,’’ bringing to light issues of the body in particular (p. 77). Her theory of the gaming households’ formulation of ‘‘the social’’ as physical co-presence, not gaming or talking about gaming but rather being there, is especially useful here. There are some points of minor weakness. First, while there are some quick asides critiquing videogame theory, especially its rather limited understanding of gender, there is very little taking-up of authors such as Alex Galloway, McKenzie Wark, and Lisa Nakamura. A full chapter devoted to this would have substantiated her claim. Additionally, while the use of narrative theory and its connections to sociology in the writings of Anthony Giddens and Pierre Bourdieu is quite unique, it deserves greater explication. These are slight quibbles, as the scope of Thornham’s study is specific to gaming. Lastly, while this book aims to contribute to the study of the cultures of gaming and move beyond the gamer, it seems the most Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 114 Reviews glaring omission (at least in the United States) would be the area of sports games, especially as the heart of Thornham’s project is to argue for the social nature of videogaming today. Although her location in the United Kingdom may be the reason for this, the world of sports-oriented videogames, especially the Madden franchise, deserves some sort of mention. Ethnographies is a book of strong arguments made with the rare combination of theoretical deftness and empirical rigor, and should be thought of as a model for future sociological scholarship in videogaming. It will appeal to students and scholars alike of media, videogame theory, and gender. Unlikely Friends: Bridging Ties and Diverse Friendships, by James A. Vela-McConnell. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011. 240pp. $29.95 paper. ISBN: 9780739148754. PAOLO PARIGI Stanford University [email protected] In his book about unlikely friendship patterns, James Vela-McConnell manages to bring new material to the debate about social boundaries and network homophily. He does so via illuminating insights of how race, gender, and sexual orientation organize and structure individual identities. Do we become friends with people who are like ourselves or do we become friends with people who populate the same social spaces we live in? And how salient are social boundaries in shaping individual identities? These questions are at the center of the book and Vela-McConnell goes after them by using qualitative interviews with people who have been able to construct, by choice or by fortuitous circumstance, friendship ties across cleavages. The unit of analysis for the data Vela-McConnell collected is the dyad, rather than the individual. The use of qualitative tools with network concepts is quite fascinating and one of the book’s main strengths. Indeed, given the salience of the questions the book aims to investigate and consequently, the vast literature that exists (mostly based on the use of Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 quantitative tools, though), the insights we get from the interviews presented in the book are remarkable. As a network analyst, I almost always infer individual motivations, beliefs, and behavior using reference categories such as race or gender. Yet, VelaMcConnell shows that the connection between a categorical identity and an individual’s values and beliefs is a construction not just on the part of society, but also on the part of people studying society like, for instance, me. Indeed the book offers several examples of friendships across boundaries. VelaMcConnell follows a very analytical framework for organizing his qualitative data, something that makes the overarching argument of the book easy to follow. The heart of the book is Chapter Two, where the bulk of the data gets sliced according to the different boundaries each couple of friends crosses: status, gender, age, race, and sexual orientation lines. This is also the most interesting chapter of the book because it contains most of the interviews. The next chapter was more problematic (Chapter Three: ‘‘Social Boundaries in the Context of Friendships’’). The goal here would have been to show how these unusual couples navigate the complexity of their relationships and redefine the meaning of (society-defined) boundaries. What Chapter Three misses, and consequently one of the shortcomings of the book, is an analysis of the institutions that make ‘‘unlikely friendships’’ possible. These institutions are often mentioned in the interviews (a local church, the family, etc.) but Vela-McConnell does not incorporate them seriously in the thread of his theoretical argument. In a sense, he remains a bit too close to his dyadic data to support an argument about the sociological significance of boundary reinterpretation through the experiences of unlikely friends. Not engaging with the role of institutions reduces this chapter to psychological processes occurring within each couple. Part of the reason that the author did not consider institutions more deeply resides in a sort of normative argument weaved throughout the book—that the friendships the author analyzes are not just ‘‘unlikely,’’ they are also ‘‘desirable.’’ The normative argument runs hidden through the book, sometimes in parallel and sometimes Reviews 115 intersecting the book’s main argument. The points of intersection create tensions however, as for example in the section that covers the sense of dissonance with the reference community (gay or African American) that some of the respondents experienced. Here, Vela-McConnell quickly moves the argument to individual psychological factors rather than using the sense of dissonance to say something more about those communities. The normative argument also emerges clearly in how the author constructed the sample of couples to interview. He used a snowballing network approach to populate his analytical dichotomies. Yet, he started the sample from his immediate circle of friends—from the vantage point of somebody who is consciously making crossboundary friendships. While this is obviously an advantage given the topic under investigation, Vela-McConnell seems to ignore the fact that some of his interviewees clearly stylized their lives so that they had ‘‘unlikely friends.’’ To his credit, the author is very well aware of potential selection bias and in general, of the methodological limitations of his analysis. His upfront discussion of how he created the sample of couples, along with the methodological appendix, was quite refreshing and a useful read for people interested in learning about qualitative methods. Overall, the shortcomings in the book’s data selection and argument are much outweighed by the quality of the interviews and the clarity through which the author guides the reader through the argument. For people interested in how to reconcile network ideas with qualitative methodology, this will be an important read. Equally relevant, the book talks to people interested in how social boundaries reinforce individuals’ identities. To both audiences I would recommend reading this book carefully. Generations at Work and Social Cohesion in Europe, edited by Patricia Vendramin. New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2010. 324pp. $59.95 paper. ISBN: 9789052016474. MARK THOMAS York University [email protected] While there is a wide body of research examining changing patterns of work in the early twenty-first century, little attention is paid to the ways in which such patterns have differential effects across generations. Understanding the generational implications of workplace and labor market change—particularly the spread of precarious employment, increasing levels of unemployment, and neoliberal approaches to labor market policy—is the aim of Generations at Work and Social Cohesion in Europe, a collection edited by Patricia Vendramin. In addition, the text also questions the impact of such changes on broader forms of social cohesion, as the contributing authors query whether growing insecurity in labor markets may provide a recipe for generational tension and conflict. The empirical research for the book was carried out by researchers from six European countries between 2006 and 2008, who undertook individual narrative and group interviews with respondents from three age cohorts (under 30, 30–50 years old, and over 50). This highly detailed text is well suited for advanced researchers studying the generational impacts of changing labor markets, as well as those interested in the social dynamics of European employment patterns. The text is divided into three sections. Part I provides an overview of key sociological concepts to the study of generations and work, and identifies major patterns of workplace and generational change in the European context. In the opening chapter, Patricia Vendramin and John Cultiaux note that growing unemployment and employer demands for flexibility are common experiences across many European labor markets, meaning that work patterns are destabilized and in flux. Young workers, who are increasingly well educated, face prospects of employment that do not fully reflect their credentials, while older workers face growing precariousness Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 116 Reviews due to the erosion of longstanding forms of stable employment. Recognizing the central role that work has played historically in providing meaning to peoples’ lives, Lucie Davoine and Dominique Méda examine the ways in which these forms of workplace change have instigated a shift in the value placed on work. They find that while work remains an important and valued part of life for most, this is less so among younger generations. Moreover, a significant number of Europeans are expressing a desire that work should occupy a less central role in their lives, quite possibly due to the erosion of job security and working conditions, as well as the need to create a balance between work and nonwork spheres of life. Part II of the book examines these issues through six country-specific studies. In a study of Belgium, John Cultiaux and Patricia Vendramin note extensive differentiation in attitudes and relationships to work both across and within generational groups. In particular, conditions that may be quite disruptive for older workers (e.g., insecurity) are considered much more normal by younger workers. A noted commonality between generations, however, is an increasing demand for greater balance between work and life outside of work. Götz Richter uses results from both a series of existing surveys and the project interviews to suggest that there is ‘‘no explicitly generational consciousness’’ in Germany (p. 125). Nevertheless, the younger generation expressed a strong desire for the attainment of a high degree of social security, while the older generation not surprisingly expressed a strong orientation toward retirement. Presenting a French perspective, Béatrice Delay, Dominique Méda, and Marie-Christine Bureau discuss the benefits of inter-generational cooperation, particularly through older workers aiding newly hired younger workers with integration into a workplace. Nonetheless, they also identify the potential for conflict between generations, particularly when younger workers are not given sufficient autonomy. Katalin Füleki, Orsolya Polyacskó, and Júlia Vajda contextualize their Hungarian case study in relation to the changing political regime at the end of the Cold War. Through this transition, older Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 workers found themselves in a situation where the knowledge and experience they gained in the communist era no longer had the same relevance, while younger workers were more suited to the emerging economic practices. All generations faced the prospects of rising unemployment and insecurity, however. Looking to Italy, Adele Lebano, Maria Teresa Franco, and Silvana Greco describe the labor market situation as a competition between younger and older workers. During the 1990s, the experience held by older generations gave them an advantage, while in more recent years, the ‘‘flexibility’’ of younger workers, as well as their willingness to accept a lower wage, made them more preferable to employers. Finally, a study of Portugal by Ana Margarida Passos, Paula Castro, Sandra Carvalho, and Célia Soares notes that employers often view older workers as experienced but inflexible, while younger workers are perceived as more likely to promote innovation. Overall, these country-specific studies provide a highly detailed examination of national trends that are well situated within a broader European context. The final section of the text will be of interest to policymakers as well as academics, as it raises policy solutions to both address growing labor market insecurity and promote inter-generational social cohesion. Looking at the European level, Marina Monaco identifies the need to combine an employment strategy that promotes full employment and high quality work with policies that foster cooperation between generations, for example through mutual learning in the workplace and lifelong learning through education and training. Finally, Anna Ponzellini suggests that this process will require stronger policies to facilitate transitions from school to employment, welfare state provisions that promote ‘‘flexicurity,’’ and investments in human capital that support workers’ transitions between different career stages. With this emphasis on the central role of labor market institutions in shaping the experience of work, the text offers concrete measures through which governments, employers, and unions may each play an active role in addressing the growing labor market insecurity faced by workers of all generations in contemporary Europe. Reviews 117 Coming of Age in America: The Transition to Adulthood in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Mary C. Waters, Patrick J. Carr, Maria J. Kefalas, and Jennifer Holdaway. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011. 242pp. $24.95 paper. ISBN: 9780520270930. JEREMY STAFF The Pennsylvania State University [email protected] Have you finished school? Do you have a full-time job? Do you no longer reside with your parent(s)? Are you married? Do you have children? Fifty years ago, many Americans in their early twenties would have answered ‘‘yes’’ to all of these traditional benchmarks of adult status. The transition to adulthood was early and compact, and typically followed a neat progression from school completion to career acquisition, and then to residential independence and family formation. Yet, in Coming of Age in America, we learn that twentysomethings today follow a much slower and more winding path to adulthood. In 2005, for instance, less than 20 percent of Americans in their late twenties had completed school, acquired a full-time job, moved away from their parent(s) home, married, and had children. Only one third of 30- to 34-year-olds had experienced these ‘‘big five’’ markers of adult status. Why does it take so long in this day and age to become an adult? In this terrific edited collection by Mary Waters, Patrick Carr, Maria Kefalas, and Jennifer Holdaway, we hear the voices of young adults from diverse backgrounds who are coming of age in different parts of the country. Their voices do not fit the stereotype of ‘‘slacker,’’ ‘‘twixter,’’ or ‘‘adultolescent.’’ They have not retreated to their parent(s) homes because they are unwilling to grow up and accept the responsibilities that come with full-time work, partnerships, and parenting, nor are they skirting obligations and age-normative commitments because they want to keep searching for the right college major, job, or partner. Instead, we hear stories of how young people are actively striving to establish themselves as adults in a changing landscape. For instance, the decline in labor market opportunities for low-educated workers and the increasing demand for technically-skilled employees has prolonged schooling and delayed career attainment. Dramatic increases in the cost of post-secondary education and housing, as well as the growing acceptance of cohabitation and out-of-wedlock childbearing, have diversified pathways of residential independence and family formation. These are just some of the structural and cultural changes that have made it increasingly difficult to attain the big five markers of adulthood at an early age, and rattled the once normative script of an orderly transition to adulthood. To understand how contemporary young people perceive and manage this turbulent time of life, interviewees were drawn from three existing longitudinal studies: The Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study, the New York Immigrants Longitudinal Study, and the Youth Development Study. Interviews took place in New York City, Saint Paul (Minnesota), and San Diego, as well as in ‘‘Ellis’’ (a renamed town of 2,000 inhabitants in rural Iowa). A total of 437 in-depth interviews were conducted from the spring of 2002 to the spring of 2003, and all followed the same interview schedule. Several themes emerged from the interviews: first and most importantly, orderly, compact, and early transitions to adulthood were the exception. Typically, the march to adulthood was disordered and prolonged: work coincided with school, marriage followed parenthood (if it occurred at all), and some young adults moved back into their parent(s) home after the completion of school or when unions dissolved. Second, local context was key in shaping the timing and sequencing of adult transitions. In rural Iowa, for instance, respondents promptly left the family home to either pursue higher education or to start their own families and continue working in the jobs they held as teenagers. In New York and San Diego, fewer respondents left the family home due to the high cost of housing. Third, childhood advantages had a long reach into adulthood. Successful young adults spoke of how they went to good secondary schools with small classes, and how their parents encouraged them to do well in school, attend college, and prepare for a high-paying career; others Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 118 Reviews talked of how significant others in the wider community made them feel special and destined for greatness. The chapter by Richard Settersten in particular, is excellent, for he drew upon interviews from all four sites to determine when young people started feeling like adults. For some, the subjective progression to adulthood is gradual, as the feeling of being an adult becomes more realized as experiences and adult transitions accumulate. Other young adults identified marriage and parenthood as key turning points that solidified their adult identity. Respondents also spoke of how they felt less like adults when they spent time with parents and siblings or when they stayed out late with old friends. The interviews show that attaining the markers of adulthood does not necessarily make one feel like a full-fledged adult. They also show how experiences such as voting, volunteering, care giving for elders, owning a car, and sitting at the ‘‘adult table’’ at family holiday parties can lead to subtle shifts in viewing oneself as an adult. While reading the chapters, I kept thinking that surely the transition to adulthood is different now. After all, the interviews were completed in 2003, long before the recent economic recession. In the concluding chapter, Kefalas and Carr speculate on how scripts regarding the transition to adulthood may be changing in the post-recession world. For instance, parents may be providing more scaffolding for their adult children who face limited job prospects and high levels of school debt. Thankfully, the interview schedule is included in the appendix so other researchers in new contexts can use it. This edited collection is one of the first to document the subjective experience of young adulthood. It shows how the script for passing from teenager to adult has changed. It is more disorderly and uncertain, and young people feel that it is OK if some of these transitions occur at older ages, such as career acquisition, marriage, and parenthood. Will the ages of these big five transitions continue to stretch further into the fourth decade of life? We will see. But even with ever-older ages of these adult transitions, as Settersten points out, ‘‘chronological age eventually becomes a sufficient condition for adult status’’ (p. 176). Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 The Politics of Child Sexual Abuse: Emotion, Social Movements, and the State, by Nancy Whittier. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011. 260pp. $21.95 paper. ISBN: 9780199783311. CHRYSANTHI LEON University of Delaware [email protected] Nancy Whittier’s The Politics of Child Sexual Abuse: Emotion, Social Movements, and the State describes thirty years of advocacy against child sex abuse. The book delivers a valuable challenge to explanations based in moral panic that devalue both the existence of the problem and the efficacy of those who have organized against it. Whittier gives voice to brave women and men who have insisted on their value, and who have rejected excuses for child sexual abuse. Politics will be appreciated by scholars in gender studies, deviance, and law and society. The account of how child sexual abuse became and has remained such a salient concern for culture and politics has been told before, but not through this kind of detailed interview and archival data. While past analyses have explained the uneasy coalescence of conservative family value movements with feminist and child protection advocacy, Whittier’s data allow more nuanced understandings of the many groups, goals, successes, and co-optations that characterize the social movements against child sexual abuse from 1970 through 2000. Politics is organized around Whittier’s identification of five phases, which present rich new views of advocates who have been criticized for losing their critical edge. Instead, Whittier shows that the various groups worked with the available cultural discourses, and a selection process (p. 15) determined which tactics received widespread attention. In particular, feminist critiques of patriarchy and other structural arguments lost out to the pathologizing and criminalizing that had greater resonance with politics and other public priorities. In the feminist phase (1970s-1980), feminists ‘‘sought cultural change through the creation of new knowledge about sexual abuse’’ (p. 7) that fed into a feminist self-help Reviews 119 phase (1980–82) which challenged professional therapy and popularized therapeutic tools. These foundational phases are important to distinguish from the single issue selfhelp phase (1981–92) which was roundly criticized in the wider culture and within feminist and other scholarship for its perceived over-reliance on recovered memory. This spawned the countermovement (1992–2000) which will be familiar to many in the academy and which threatened to undo much of the movement’s credibility and impact. But the post-countermovement phase (late 1990s to the present) is marked by a continued politics of visibility (Chapter Seven, especially pages 167–169) as well as a wing of the movement directly involved in state practices, including service provision. The author’s forty interviews with advocates form the core of the book and, combined with the theoretical tools that examine social movements and the therapeutic state, provide a significant contribution. From a work of sociology, readers would expect more explanation of the sampling frame, including a justification of the author’s contention that her subjects are representative. Readers will also notice the lack of discussion of the author’s subject position, including any potential biases she may bring to the research and analysis. This is an unfortunate absence, since the book’s largely optimistic view of movement efficacy may be related to the inclination to empathize with the impressive interview subjects, perhaps leading to a confirmation bias. Clearly, much has changed. However whether there is a causal link between the particular advocacy she describes and the salience of child victimization remains unclear, especially given the historical evidence showing that such concerns, although varying in their details, have driven law and shaped culture for decades, if not centuries (p. 7; see also Leon 2011). It would also be interesting to examine whether the overall drop in reported child abuse bears any relationship to the social movements, a drop noted but not examined in this book (p. 216 n. 1; Finkelhor and Jones 2006) In general, Politics highlights the need for a systematic analysis of movement ‘‘success’’ and its definitions. The book begins with sweeping claims, and does provide convincing evidence of political and attitudinal change. But these do not entirely support the broad claims. Within the text, success is sometimes measured as increased awareness, including the achievement of recognition of male victims. But as the conclusion discusses, this success is complicated by the gender privilege and homophobia that have prioritized male victims of Catholic priests, for example. Other markers of success include increased access to treatment from professionals who approach survivors with empathy, and new laws and policies that aim at child protection. But we should not celebrate for long: despite the intense awareness of child sexual abuse that certainly characterizes the current time, little evidence shows headway in addressing the pervasive myth of stranger danger. Our continued assumption that the biggest threats to our children are unknown monsters prevents the kind of mobilization we must take as a society to insist that our government invests deeply in truly preventative efforts, which would include empowering and aiding families, challenging patriarchy and the valorization of aggression, and combating sexism and sexualization of youth by our media. References Finkelhor, David, and Lisa Jones. 2006. ‘‘Why Have Child Maltreatment and Child Victimization Declined?’’ Journal of Social Issues 62 (4): 685-716. Leon, Chrysanthi. 2011. Sex Fiends, Perverts and Pedophiles: Understanding Sex Crime Policy in America. New York, NY: New York University Press. Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 120 Reviews Poor and Homeless in the Sunshine State: Down and Out in Theme Park Nation, by James D. Wright and Amy M. Donley. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2011. 323pp. $39.95 cloth. ISBN: 978141 2842211. EARL WRIGHT II University of Cincinnati [email protected] When people think of Florida, images of sand beaches, sun-fueled outside activities, and limitless orange groves immediately come to mind. When one’s thoughts turn more directly to the Central Florida region, anchored by the city of Orlando, their minds wander into the realm of the ‘‘most magical place on earth’’ and a longing for the type of weather that makes one yearn to spend their retirement years in an area that rarely experiences cold weather. This imaginary world of never-ending joy and happiness constructed by visitors to Orlando stands in stark contrast to the real world everyday experiences of many of the region’s twoand one-half-million residents. While the literal distance between the Walt Disneyinspired American playground and fantasyland, and the region’s poor and homeless is relatively short, the figurative distance between the two can be measured in light years. Poor and Homeless in the Sunshine State is a direct, thoughtful, and potentially policy-impacting examination of the experiences of the poor and homeless in a region long touted as being the ‘‘happiest place in the world.’’ By placing the experiences of the region’s most economically vulnerable population at the center of their analysis, James Wright and Amy Donley provide an opportunity for a group often spoken about, but not spoken to, to present first-hand accounts of their conditions. This book is a positive contribution to the discipline for a number of reasons. First, this project offers first-hand accounts of the poor and homeless on the specific conditions impacting their lives in a methodical, detailed and insightful manner. From addiction to gender differences to racism to notions of what defines true masculinity and to the possibility of overcoming personal Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 failings, the authors allow in a very fluid manner the poor and homeless to provide context and humanness to this very important issue, for which they are impacted but rarely have any opportunity to influence (at least in a positive manner). In so doing, a second contribution of this project is that its presentation of the qualitative research methodology employed carefully balances the typical academic articulation of the collection of data with an effective ‘‘how to conduct qualitative research using in-depth and focus group interviews’’ in such a manner as to teach while informing the reader. Not only does one learn about the condition of the poor and homeless, they are offered guiding points on how to engage in qualitative research while effectively teasing out data making this book suitable for upper level undergraduate as well as graduate students. The last, and perhaps most important, contribution of this book is its potential impact on public policy with regard to the poor and homeless. So often our elected (and unelected) officials propose, develop, and enact policies directed at politically vulnerable groups such as the poor and homeless without having gained a firm understanding of who these people are, how they arrived at this point in their lives, and how scholarly research on the topic can help in the development of effective public policy. In short, policy makers would be well served to take into account investigations like this when developing legislation and/or programs so that they may have a more holistic understanding of the topic. The tradition of conducting research that may be used for social or public policy purposes by interested non-academic parties dates as far back as W. E. B. Du Bois’ works at Atlanta University and Charles S. Johnson’s activities at Fisk University. The authors are following this tradition and this book provides an excellent opportunity for politicians, policy makers, and stakeholders to make informed decisions on the poor and homeless, especially in the state of Florida. The topical foci of this book are the poor and homeless. However, its potential reach includes those interested in urban sociology, research methods, and public policy. This book can be a useful tool in urban sociology courses as it provides first-hand accounts Reviews 121 and perspectives that are often little discussed, even in this topical area. While the authors offer excellent insight into the everyday lives of its subjects (including a contemporary and timely discussion on military veterans) and provide insight into research methods, the authors should be commended for their ability to weave into their narrative a review of the literature that makes even the most novice expert in the field believe they are up-to-date on the major research findings in the area. In many ways the poor and homeless are often reduced to numbers and percents, and portrayed on television within very narrowly constructed stereotypes. By filling their book with the voices of Central Florida’s poor and homeless, Wright and Donley afford them the opportunity to challenge and dispel myths associated with poverty and homelessness while potentially, and circuitously, influencing public discourse and social policy. In short, the authors provide a platform for a group of people who are most informed, yet politically vulnerable, on how policies directed at them actually impact them. Many of us are hopeful that more scholars will follow this model. The City as Fulcrum of Global Sustainability, by Ernest J. Yanarella and Richard S. Levine. London, UK: Anthem Press, 2011. 285pp. $99.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780857287724. ARMIN GRUNWALD Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis, Karlsruhe, Germany [email protected] Usually, political science and architecture are separate fields in modern universities, arranged in different faculties and departments. Research and academic exchange across the borders of these disciplines is by far not self-evident. Ernest Y. Yanarella, professor of political sciences, and Richard S. Levine, professor of architecture, both at the University of Kentucky, describe the beginning of their common and interdisciplinary work: they crossed paths on the main campus of their university and started a conversation about the idea of sustainable cities. This happened in the early stages of the debate on sustainability, more than twenty years ago by bringing together utopias and ideas underlying their different disciplines, such as the polis model of Greek political philosophy, and the ideal of a medieval Italian hilltown, leading to a fruitful exchange over decades. The main result of their common activities, to which the foundation of the Center for Sustainable Cities at their university belongs, and their joint research are collected in The City as Fulcrum of Global Sustainability, which can, in this respect, be regarded as an interim harvest. The point of departure is quite clear and not surprising. It consists of two branches: the global sustainability movement on the one side including its well-known obstacles and hurdles, and the ongoing global urbanization on the other. While urbanization frequently is seen as a threat, at least a challenge, to a more sustainable development, the authors regard urbanization also as a chance in this respect. Their overarching objective is to bring together the normative leitbild of sustainable development and the empirically continuing process of urbanization, including issues of architecture and urban planning, governance structures, and technology. Most of the chapters, in particular the more theoretical and conceptual ones, are reprints while others are original publications. The introduction describes concisely the line of argumentation and gives a brief but excellently written overview and insight into the way of thinking of the authors. In particular, the key message is presented and explained: currently most of the sustainability activities and measures are of the type ‘‘picking the low-hanging fruits’’ which they regard as absolutely not sufficient and even counterproductive (Chapter Five). On the contrary, they propose the more ambitious path to global sustainable development as ‘‘taking the road less traveled.’’ At the heart of this alternative path they see the concept of sustainable city-regions which is explained conceptually and illustrated by several cases. The chapters are arranged within two parts. Part I, ‘‘Strategic Considerations,’’ includes the theoretical and conceptual work of the authors. Starting by scrutinizing the very idea of sustainable development and presenting their self-developed operative approach in this field (Chapter One) Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 122 Reviews this concept is then applied to the field of cities leading to ‘‘The Sustainable Cities Manifesto’’ (Chapter Two). One of the messages is that sustainable development should not be restricted to environmentalism but must include issues of social justice, the way of living and quality of life (Chapter Three). This argumentation is in line with ongoing theoretical developments in the field of sustainability where the environmental aspects are more and more regarded only as being part of a much broader picture including not only social and economic but also ethical, cultural and political dimensions which have to be considered in an integrative way. The place of integration is, according to the authors, the city, or, more accurately, the cityregion. The frequent restriction on cities in their administrative extension is proved to be not adequate in analysing sustainability issues because of the interactions of cities with regions. Therefore the authors propose to regard city-regions as the smallest units of sustainability considerations and offer a ‘‘yardstick’’ to measure and to assess their situation with respect to sustainability: the Sustainable Area Budget (Chapter Five). In this way, the ground is prepared for Part II, dedicated to ‘‘Sustainable Cities Around the World.’’ Case studies include North American cities such as Chattanooga in Tennessee, Okotoks in Alberta, and the Austrian capital of Vienna regarding the railway station plans complemented by considerations on the actual situation, current developments, and perspectives for sustainable city-regions in China. In the last chapter the authors extract the essence of the previous chapters and draw conclusions for the road ahead to sustainability. They regard the usual incremental approaches, which are mostly restricted to ‘‘greening’’ this or that detail, as not appropriate for really meeting the sustainability challenge. The ‘‘less-travelled road’’ they propose relies on a strong understanding of sustainability, the city-region approach and a broad and integrative interpretation of sustainable development involving also social issues. Two appendices include the Charter of European Cities and Towns Towards Sustainability and the description of Emerald City: A Role-playing Sustainability Game, which was presented in Chapter Six. The appendices nicely complement the book. Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 The book is well structured and well written in accordance with the highest standards of the American tradition of scientific writing, being simultaneously precise and understandable. Jargon has largely been avoided, and disciplinary borders of scientific language do not hinder the readability. The authors note that their work was, up to now, better received in Europe and Asia than in the United States. They hope that this book might improve the situation—and I hope that their hope will be fulfilled. In general, the book is a ‘‘must’’ for further work on sustainable development in the field of cities and urbanization, but also beyond. In particular, the conceptual work on sustainable development will be of high value in other fields of sustainable development, too. And, last but not least: the ceterum censeo of the book, ‘‘do not restrict yourself to picking the low-hanging fruits’’ should be taken seriously in many other fields for shaping our common future. Religion in China: Survival and Revival under Communist Rule, by Fenggang Yang. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2012. 245pp. $24.95 paper. ISBN: 9780199735648. GENE COOPER University of Southern California [email protected] Religion in China is a political economic/ sociological study of the post-1949 communist Chinese state’s ‘‘failed’’ attempt to wean the Chinese people away from religion, and of its subsequent attempts to regulate and control the spread of religion in China. As such, it is noteworthy for its institutional history of religious regulation under communism (p. 65ff.), and for its typology of the multiple forms of atheism (militant, enlightenment, and mild) (pp. 45–46 and 62) that have characterized periods in which the intensity of state regulatory measures has varied. It also provides excellent coverage of the debates on the role of religion in society that took place in the Chinese academy in the 1980s, the so-called ‘‘new opium war’’ (pp. 49ff. and 53). Was religion merely an ‘‘opiate of the masses,’’ destined to wither away in the face of modern science-based secular Reviews 123 society, or did it have something positive to contribute which might lead to its persistence? But the book is not an analysis of the content of Chinese religion, its system(s) of belief, cosmology, structure, or practice, and anyone seeking such material would be advised to look elsewhere. Nevertheless, Fenggang Yang’s approach is somewhat innovative insofar as he employs a market perspective to analyze the features of state-religion relations in China, and characterizes that market as tripartite, consisting of red, black, and grey markets. The red market refers to the five stateapproved religions under the control of ‘‘patriotic’’ associations—Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, and state-approved Protestantism and Catholicism. The black market refers to churches and religious activities banned by the state: underground pro-Vatican Catholics for a long period (p. 99ff.), and the house churches (p. 102), as well as a variety of ‘‘superstitious’’ practices. The grey market refers to spiritual organizations, practitioners, and religious practices with ambiguous legal status, which may be construed as ‘‘cultural’’ (pp. 54ff. and 112), ‘‘folk religious,’’ or ‘‘popular religious’’ (p. 23) in nature, and thus escape to some extent the heavy hand of the state. This tripartite approach encompasses the landscape of Chinese religious practice, and therefore is initially appealing, and Yang argues that these triple religious markets may also be found in other nations where conditions are similar—the free market for religion is restricted, and the black market repeatedly and rigorously suppressed (p. 160ff.). Yang goes on to understand the ‘‘economy’’ of Chinese religion as a ‘‘shortage’’ economy, characterized by an artificial scarcity, the result of state restrictions on the opening of new religious sites, churches, and temples. In a shortage economy, consumers must wait for supply, queue up for goods when they become available, and often settle for substitutes in the interim or when supply runs out (pp. 124–5 and 139–40). Under heavy state regulation, the supply of religion in China is suppressed, resulting in ‘‘over-crowded churches and temples. . .filled beyond capacity’’ (p. 144), and the proliferation of substitute ‘‘grey market’’ folk-religious practices, and healing cults (qigong) (pp. 139–40 and 112ff.), all of which would seem to characterize accurately contemporary Chinese religious behavior. Yang argues that the Chinese religious landscape is one of state-imposed oligopoly in which the five religions mentioned above are recognized as legitimate. For Yang, recognition of the phenomenon of oligopoly constitutes an advance beyond sociological investigations of religion in the modern world, which have tended to dichotomize the universe of state-religion relations as either monopolistic or pluralistic (p. 160). Yang then makes the somewhat questionable claim that ‘‘The global fact of religious oligopoly makes it necessary to rethink and reconstruct theories of church-state relations’’ (p. 166). Perhaps. . .but only in the most superficial sense. Yang argues that ‘‘the triple market theory shows that market forces are at work’’ (pp. 122 and 178) in the sphere of Chinese religion. But triple market theory assumes that market forces are at work. It uses the metaphor of the market to describe religious participation in society. And yes, as Yang has shown, the metaphor does work insofar as its three ‘‘markets’’ are exhaustive of Chinese religious practice, and the characterization of the behavior one might expect to find under conditions of shortage is certainly apt. However, here Yang mistakes his metaphor for reality. Does it really make sense to analyze religion and religious participation in terms of markets? Why call these red, black, and grey sectors of the religious administrative landscape markets at all? Are they markets in anything other than a metaphoric sense? A slightly different perspective might describe them more appropriately as spheres of administrative enforcement. In this era when ‘‘rational choice’’ theories abound in the social sciences, it may be fashionable to characterize the practice of religion in market terms. But this exercise is less than satisfying. While the model (or metaphor) ‘‘works,’’ we do not accomplish anything other than describing what exists, without actually explaining what is occurring. Rather than applaud this expansion of the scope of rational choice theory to include the sphere of religion, we question whether we learn anything new in the process. Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 124 Reviews And finally, one minor point, on page 110, there is a typo which only a handful of illuminati who had conducted research there might notice—the city of Jinhua in Zhejiang province, the site of a new Huang Daxian temple, is rendered as ‘‘Jianhua.’’ In general, for those who might not share my skepticism regarding the characterization of religion in market terms, the book presents a novel approach to the study of state policy with regard to religion in China that would be a useful addition to syllabi for undergraduate or graduate seminars in Chinese or comparative politics, and to a lesser extent for courses on Chinese religion. In either case, it would need to be profusely supplemented with additional texts. The Politics of Belonging: Intersectional Contestations, by Nira Yuval-Davis. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2011. 252pp. $46.00 paper. ISBN: 9781412921305. RICHARD LACHMANN University at Albany [email protected] The Politics of Belonging is about the ways in which national identity and citizenship have been undercut and crosscut in recent years by other sorts of identities based on gender, religion, ethnicity, locality, cosmopolitanism, and more. Nationalism, as the author rightly reminds us, is itself a fairly new concept. Until a few hundred years ago, people were subjects not citizens, and had little sense of or loyalty to the political unit of which they were nominal members. Rulers expected little of their subjects and offered almost nothing in the way of rights or benefits. If and when people were asked who they were, or to what group they belonged, their answers highlighted kin, locality, or religion. Thus the era of nationalism, which many authors take as the norm, is in fact from the long perspective of world history a two or three century anomaly which now may be coming to an end and at least is being transformed. Nira Yuval-Davis’ book therefore is welcome and needed. She has read widely and in addition cites lectures and conferences she has attended. Unfortunately, readers Contemporary Sociology 42, 1 who are not already well acquainted with the literature will have trouble following and appreciating her insights into other authors, which at times are cryptic or presented in passing. This is a book for those who already are steeped in these debates. Less knowledgeable readers will not gain much sense of the logic and terrain of competing arguments. The lectures are mentioned more to pay tribute to colleagues than to convey to readers what was said. In any case, few of those lectures can be accessed with the author’s references, some of which are to websites that were taken down before this book was published. Yuval-Davis makes the important point that individuals and social movements do not select identities based on a single characteristic; rather they construct or interpret themselves (and are constructed and interpreted by others) in the intersections of a complex of gender, race, class, nation, religion, kin, and locality. Yuval-Davis goes beyond the mere invocation of intersectionality to show how categories are combined to assert rights, to draw contrasts with or exclude others, and to make claims on states or international bodies. This book is strongest in the many moments when Yuval-Davis brings insight to the ways in which such intersectional links are constructed and deployed. Her discussions of indigenous peoples’ claims are especially insightful in showing how they define land and property in very different ways from nationalist ideologies, and in showing how such claims can be egalitarian or elitist, inclusive, or racist, depending on their context. Similarly, Yuval-Davis brings her deep knowledge of feminist debates and theory, to which she has been for decades a key contributor, to show how feminist commitments to caring could become a foundation for a new progressive politics, even as it has been used on other occasions to justify individualistic claims. The author often is content to present logical possibilities for how identities can be constructed, combined, and used to define and challenge others. Yuval-Davis mixes concrete examples with speculations on possible future identities (especially in her chapter on caring). As a result, readers will have a hard time gaining a sense of historical change from this book. Yuval-Davis has Reviews 125 more to say about when theoretical arguments emerged than she does about when the social movements, political entities, or everyday practices those theories are supposed to explain themselves developed. Readers are not offered justifications for why Yuval-Davis focuses on certain locations, groups or events to study. Yet, the bases for a more historicallygrounded account of how people’s senses of belonging have changed, and how they might change in the future, are scattered and under-theorized in this book. YuvalDavis is concerned mainly with how people think about and construct their identities and then derive claims from their senses of belonging. What is missing is an attempt to address the objects of these claims. We read about social movements, but they come across mainly as places and occasions for asserting identities and creating feelings of belonging. Yuval-Davis’ analysis would have been strengthened by more attention to the interaction between social movements and the powerful actors and institutions against whom those movements struggle. Just as the national identities of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were created, and can be understood only in relation to the aristocracies, corporate groups, kin networks, churches, and imperial powers that were attacked and destroyed by various nationalist movements, similarly we will gain a fuller understanding of the new religious identities, and of the extent to which cosmopolitan, indigenous, or caring identities develop, by tracing the interactions of those social movements with the institutions from whom they seek liberation or upon whom they make demands and extract concessions. Yuval-Davis’ welcome and sophisticated analysis of the intersections among identities needs to be joined with a study of the interactions between challengers and incumbents, between movements and institutions. States remain the object of many if not most demands, and nations still are the terrain on which many social movements recruit adherents and engage in politics. How can we make sense of the causal relationships between the individuals and groups that are creating and recasting their identities and senses of belonging, and the terrains on which they struggle, and the institutions in which identities are recognized with social benefits and obligations? We can best do that through historical analysis. We see the effects of struggle, and of efforts by the powerful to impose themselves on the lives and identities of the rest, by tracing change. The identities that Yuval-Davis enumerates exist in certain times and places. We need to understand when and how they emerge, change in their salience, and lose resonance. Finally, we need to understand that not all potential identities and collectivities are equally viable. Utopias are fun to envision; but both our sociological analyses and our political efforts will be more fruitful if we can place future possibilities in the context of the actual trajectories of past historical development. Yuval-Davis contributes to the conceptual endowment we need to engage in that historical analysis. Contemporary Sociology 42, 1