The British Journal of Sociology Volume 58 Issue 2 2007 (Doi 10.1111/j.1468-4446.2007.00153 - 3.x) Raf Vanderstraeten - Religions in Global Society - by P. Beyer

The British Journal of Sociology 2007 Volume 58 Issue 2
Book reviews
Baert, Patrick Philosophy of the Social Sciences. Towards Pragmatism Polity Press 2005 210 pp. 50.00 (hardback) 15.99 (paperback) Sherratt, Yvonne Continental Philosophy of Social Science. Hermeneutics, Genealogy and Critical Theory from Greece to the Twenty-rst Century Cambridge University Press 2005 241 pp. 50.00 (hardback); 15.99 (paperback) The promotional hyperbole of publishers is increasingly a burden for authors. Patrick Baerts new book is initially described on its back cover as a ground-breaking new text, only then to be more modestly redesignated as an authoritative textbook. Yvonne Sherratts book is proclaimed in still grander style as a text which forms the essential bedrock of any course in the philosophy of the social or human sciences. Of these descriptions the second classication of Baerts book is the most accurate. Baerts summary of inuential perspectives in the history of social-scientic concept formation is very useful and can be recommended as a current brand-leader amongst textbooks in this eld. It examines the usual theoretical tradition, from Durkheim and Weber, through the Frankfurt School, to Critical Realism and Pragmatism, and it provides highly cogent evaluations of these theories. Naturally, selectively critical views might lament certain lapses of coverage. For example, Niklas Luhmann is not mentioned
in the book. None the less, Baerts account moves deftly between a number of theoretical lineages, all of whose attempts to give foundation for sustainable social-scientic analysis are at once taken seriously and where required eloquently repudiated. In addition to its historical survey, Baert shows a generally very clear understanding of the contemporary theoretical landscape and he effectively enlivens discursive history by illuminating its impact on contemporary debates and theoretical articulations. Baerts own theoretical stance is marked by a pronounced pragmatist bias. He argues that dialogical and self-referential accounts of social knowledge, which reject conceptual ontology and foundationalism, offer substantial advantages over other theories. Such accounts, he claims, allow researchers constantly to revise their own presuppositions and practices (p. 166), they stimulate a contextual richness of theoretical imagination (p. 166), and, because of this, they enable theory and theorists to engage in and modify concrete action situations. Even for readers who do not share this pragmatist preference, this approach is clearly valuable and it marks an important conuence between pragmatism and aspects of critical theory. To this extent, this book extends its scope beyond the provision of reliable summary and it leads theory forward in an engaged and productive direction. One understated strength of Baerts work is that he recognizes the dialogues between
London School of Economics and Political Science 2007 ISSN 0007-1315 print/1468-4446 online. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA on behalf of the LSE. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-4446.2007.00153.x
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her theoretical engagement. However, in my view, although its ambition is admirable, this book is also deeply awed, and it contains a number of problems and misconceptions, the most salient of which are set out below: First, in arguing that the fabric of continental philosophy of social science is derived from textual humanism Sherratt neglects to examine how in many European settings the methodological structure of the social sciences could only be established through a highly contested transformation of the methodologies of the humanities. The entire debate about the relative status of the Geisteswissenschaften and the Sozialwissenschaften is omitted from this book; indeed, the theorists who had arguably the greatest responsibility for recasting the humanities as social sciences, Max Weber and Georg Simmel, are not mentioned once. The reader is thus left to wonder how the methodologies which are scrutinized here account for their objects as specically social, and why the great methodological re-orientation from theological, historical and aesthetic hermeneutics towards an interpretive methodology for social-scientic investigation does not come into focus. Second, in imputing textual humanism as the generic bedrock for continental socialscientic philosophy Sherratt fails to acknowledge that much continental philosophy of society is emphatically anti-humanist, and that historicist accounts of meaning need not necessarily be humanistic. The works of Heidegger, Marx, Lukcs and Foucault all construct meaning historically, yet all are dismissive of humanism. Third, her generalized assumptions about humanism also permit Sherratt to sidestep the (very pressing) need to explain why continental philosophy of social science has to be so clearly demarcated from other epistemologies. As rst witness against her own case, in fact, she actually indicates that there are very many continental philosophies of social science, some of which have a humanistic bias and some of which do not, and some of which as Baert quietly testies cross the English Channel and the Atlantic
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different theoretical orientations and he tends to avoid dramatic classication and axe-grinding. Yvonne Sherratts work, in contrast, depicts theoretical lineages in the starkest and most oppositional terms. Her work is devoted to accounting for and defending a continental philosophy of social science, and she denes this as a line of social-scientic inquiry which is essentially textual and humanistic; that is, which is aware of the historicality of the ideas, concepts and texts which build knowledge and understanding (p. 9), and attentive to the accretions of meaning underlying and prestructuring interpretive acts and conceptual forms. In this respect, she suggests that the dominant approaches in the social sciences in continental European can be traced to a reception of the rhetorical and interpretive traditions of Greek and Roman antiquity. These approaches, she emphasizes, should be strictly differentiated from AngloAmerican social-scientic epistemologies, which revolve around universal concepts which are a-historical (p. 10). Sherratt clearly sees herself as especially appointed to protect continental philosophy of social science, which, she angrily exclaims, is habitually ostracized by the mainstream of AngloAmerican theory (p. 1). Guided by this mission, then, her book contains sections on hermeneutical, critical-theoretical and genealogical approaches to interpretation and concept formation, and it discusses the main theorists, Schleiermacher, Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur, Adorno, Horkheimer, Habermas, Nietzsche and Foucault, who are associated with these approaches. All of these approaches, she argues, are shaped by an underlying sense of the historicality and the humanity of meaning, and by interpretive and consciously situated responses to sociohistorical forms. In this book Sherratt has attempted nothing less than to provide a general explanation of the objectives of continental philosophy as it bears on the social sciences, and her book deserves to nd readers who will take it seriously and be moved to continue
London School of Economics and Political Science 2007
Book reviews
ocean quite frequently and without undue trauma. Surely, we might contest, Heidegger and Marx are not made similar by the fact that they are continental, and both have at least as much in common with (for example) Hume or Mead as they have with each other. If this point is conceded, a less encompassing denition of what it means to think in continental style becomes necessary. Fourth, then, Sherratt in my view also uses intellectual taxonomies far too loosely. One egregious case of this is her study of the emergence of social-scientic hermeneutics in nineteenth-century Germany, to which historicism surely made the weightiest contribution. Here, however, she repeatedly elides historicism and romanticism into one amalgamated outlook and, following Gadamer, she is content to dene the great historicist hermeneuticians, Schleiermacher, Humboldt, Droysen and Dilthey, as representatives of romanticism (pp. 58, 66). To be sure, Schleiermacher was a romantic of sorts. But historicism was the crucial matrix in which the structure of contemporary hermeneutics was rst cast, and hermeneutics remains indelibly marked by historicist impulses, which originally promoted interpretive methods as elements of spontaneous national/historical formation. This conation of romanticism and historicism also means that the interpretation of Heidegger is less than persuasive. In sum, therefore, this book contains a farreaching and original thesis. But a better book on the same themes would be less strident, less dismissive of other views, and (most importantly) less inclined to believe its own publicity. Chris Thornhill University of Glasgow
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Barry, Brian Why Social Justice Matters Polity 2005 323 pp. 55.00 (hardback) 15.99 (paperback) This book is a powerful argument against the utter inequity of the current political and economic system in the UK and against the
way in which a discourse of equal opportunities is used to maintain what Barry describes as the machinery of injustice. It is also a powerful argument for a just society powerful not only in its vision but in the practical rst steps it offers and in its convincing argument that the end of the status quo is an ecological certainty. The only unanswerable question being whether the status quo of the global political system will end up dragging human society down with it into ecological collapse, or whether the prospect of this will galvanize radical action that must necessarily (if it is to be successful) have its foundations built on social justice within and between nations. In essence the book presents a stout defence of the social democratic policies pursued in Europe following the Second World War. These centre on the need to curb capitals ability to shape the body politic, the need to end inequality in income, and the need to ensure the universal equitable provision of health and education. These would not have seemed utopian demands even a couple of decades ago, and it is remarkable that they now require such a thorough defence. Barry presents not only a clear picture of why social justice matters and the rst steps required to achieve it, but also a clear examination of the policies and social consequences of the politics of injustice which have largely replaced the social democratic status quo. The context of this book is the re-emergence of the ideas of nineteenth century Liberalism which idolize competition and the resulting disparities in wealth it brings, disparities which feed further competition on increasingly unequal terms. This revived Liberalism disdains the idea of reducing such disparities in the interests of justice and collective wellbeing, and it is now even less socially responsible than in the past. Its success rests on its ability to shift investment to spin short term prot out of the unravelling of the ecological and social fabric. Neoliberalism disingenuously presents itself as something new globalization when in fact its policies were totally
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porting evidence, anecdotes, quotations and statistics together to present such a vision, and to encourage us to insist that another (just) world is not only possible but that an unjust world cannot endure. Justin Kenrick University of Glasgow
discredited as a result of the economic collapse experienced in the interwar years and as a result of the collective effort involved in the defeat of fascism. Barry starts with the liberal conception of rights the presupposition that all citizens are equal before the law and argues that we do not have equal rights unless we have equal opportunities to exercise those rights. Equality of opportunity requires that in the provision of health services, education and parental income children have equal opportunities available to them to compete with others on the basis of their individual efforts. If we do not push for equality of opportunity in this real sense then we are simply maintaining the machinery of injustice. Pushing for equality of opportunity requires, Barry argues, such measures as a universal unconditional income, taxation to drastically reduce inequalities, and free and equal access to healthcare, education and good housing. These form a straightforward set of policies which are cogently set forward, the argument consistently backed up by solid evidence. At the end of the book Barry highlights the imminent ecological collapse resulting from the unrestricted pursuit of prot made possible by the machinery of injustice. He sees this as potentially providing the spur to action for social and ecological justice. He ends on a very optimistic note with a quote from Charles Kupchans The End of The American Era (2002: p. xvii) which points out how often the world outlook changed in the course of the twentieth century: from pre-WWI optimism to trench warfare; from US prosperity in the 1920s to world depression in the 1930s; from the rise of Nazism to the UN being created by the USA and the Soviet Union; from the Cold War and the threat of annihilation, to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the apparent triumph of neoliberalism. Barry points out that the need for another revolution is obvious, and he points out that it is only possible if we have a vision of where we need to go and how. In this extraordinarily simple and lucid book, Barry weaves striking threads of sup London School of Economics and Political Science 2007
Beyer, P. Religions in Global Society Routledge 2006 323 pp. 65 (hardback) 22.99 (paperback) Since the end of the twentieth century, religion has resurfaced as an important sociological theme. This renewed interest is a result of recent social transformations. Developments such as the Islamic revolution in Iran, the rise of the Christian Right in the USA or the new religious Zionism in Israel have led (among other things) to the question of religions continuing importance in modern society. Instead of secularization, globalization has become an important theoretical context for analysing religion. In his inuential Religion and Globalization (1994), Peter Beyer has been one of the rst to deal with religion in the context of globalization. The book under review is presented as follow-up to this 1994 study. Beyer approaches processes of globalization from a particular perspective. Drawing heavily on the work of Niklas Luhmann, religion is conceived of as one of several differentiated function systems in contemporary society (comparable to the economy, science, law, education, the political system, etc.). The expansive logic of these function systems constitutes the theoretical framework of the book under review. Beyer presents his analysis of the global expansion of the religious system as a case study; Religions in Global Society intends to be both an application of Luhmannian sociological theory to religion and a contribution to the sociological theory of the evolution of world society. Apart from an introduction and a very short conclusion, the book consists of 6 chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 present the
Book reviews
systems-theoretical framework; Chapters 3 to 6 contain detailed case studies. These case studies focus on the religion formation process in different regions of the modern world. In the books longest chapter, Beyer rst analyses two of the three Abrahamic religions: Christianity and Islam (Judaism is not dealt with). Afterwards, he reects in two comparatively short chapters on the realization of Hinduism in South Asia and the construction of Confucianism and Shinto in East-Asia. The last chapter pays attention to new religions (e.g., Scientology, Falun Gong) and non-institutionalized religiosity (e.g., New Age) in different parts of the world. Throughout the chapters with case studies, the focus is on how different religions are or are not incorporated in the global system, how they are or are not able to constitute themselves as a religion in the global system of religion. Beyers purpose here is to analyse how religion as a distinct and systematic unit manifests itself as a plurality of religions. His analyses are illuminating, although his focus on the puried communication of religious professionals (priests, monks, rabbis, mullahs, etc.) goes hand in hand with the neglect of modes of inclusion/exclusion of the lay public in religious communication. In my view, the function of the religious system needs not just to be discussed in relation to the systems functionaries but also in relation to the lay public. There is much to admire in this book. Probably most of all: the wealth of wellpresented data. However, I would have welcomed a different organization of the material. The book is top-heavy. The rst two chapters of the book, which present the exposition of the theoretical framework, consist of around 100 pages. For readers not familiar with systems theory, these chapters will be demanding. I fear that, somewhere in Chapter 2, Beyer will lose quite a few of his readers. Rather than presenting the theory from the onset, the conclusion could have been used to elaborate on the theoretical implications of the case studies Beyers conclusion is only 3 pages long. As the ambiBritish Journal of Sociology 58(2)
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tion is to contribute to sociological theory, more attention to such theoretical conclusions would have been welcome. Raf Vanderstraeten University of Antwerp (Belgium)
Bornschier, V. Culture and Politics in Economic Development Routledge 2005 298 pp. 75.00 (hardback) Prasad, M. The Politics of Free Markets. The Rise of Neoliberal Economic Policies in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States The University of Chicago Press 2006 280 pp. 40.00 (hardback) 16.50 (paperback) Amid the continuing discussions about the role of culture in shaping economic processes and policies, these two new books purport to bring clarifying contributions about the (lack of) importance of cultural factors in the projection, implementation and success of economic policies. The two authors take contrary sides, with Volker Bornschier arguing that culture matters and Monica Prasad ghting the corner of those who afrm the opposite. However, before weighing the pro and contra culture arguments, and before drawing any conclusion, it helps to establish what is talked about here: what is this elusive culture, sometimes endowed with miraculous powers in economic policy, and sometimes denied any role? Taking culture as a starting point for a comparative lecture, this reader had to establish rather quickly that the two authors operate with different, and up to a certain extent incompatible notions. They may be ghting the pro and contra culture corners, but these corners denitely are not in the same conceptual ring. Volker Bornschiers leading question is whether a culture of democratic institutions plays a causal role in economic development: is it economically benecial to have democratic political institutions, or do authoritarian regimes perform as good a job (or maybe even a better one)? Culture of
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Monica Prasads argument, by contrast, is that economic policy is not so much determined by culture as by the system of institutions participating in a countrys economic policy-making, together with the historically developed relationships among these institutions. She sees culture as a set of ideas enunciated within the realm of academic economics and processed into political rhetoric. At times, her concept of culture seems to be co-extensive with that of ideology, and at times with that of expert knowledge. The interplay between forms of economic expertise, on the one hand, and political institutions, on the other hand, is not examined in detail in Prasads book. It is exactly in this respect that social studies of nance, as well as the sociology of scientic knowledge have made some valuable contributions recently, shedding light on the concrete processes through which apparently immaterial ideas become enmeshed in policy-making. The main thrust of The Politics of Free Markets is that immaterial ideas do not shape economic policies. It is rather entangled, historically grown inter- and intra-institutional resources, commitments, constituencies and constraints which do this. Immaterial ideas, or ideology, are mostly used post factum as a way of legitimizing policies already decided upon, as well as for gaining a distinct identity with respect to ones political opponents. Neo-liberal economic policies are a good example in this respect and, in four core chapters of her book, Prasad examines how such policies were adopted (or not) in the USA, Britain, Germany and France. Based mostly on a reconstructive analysis of economic policy cases from the 1980s, the author shows that in the early 1970s the US left advocated a scaling down of state regulation on the grounds that it beneted corporations, not consumers. In the early 1980s, the Reagan administration in the USA, as well as the Thatcher government in Britain adopted such policies not because they were intrinsically committed to a neo-liberal economic ideology, but because they saw that reduced
democratic institutions means here nothing else than systemic trust, a concept Bornschier borrows from the Niklas Luhmann style of systems theory. Systemic trust, in its turn, means (although this is not formulated so by the author) a set of diffuse, generalized expectations about the reliability and legitimacy of a countrys social and political institutions. These expectations derive from the legitimacy of these institutions and, in their turn, contribute to reinforcing it. Surprisingly here, the author chooses not to tie the notion of system trust to Bourdieus notion of habitus, in order to make it clearer and provide us with a better understanding about how this works at the micro-analytical level. Irrespective of this, however, system trust is taken to be at the core of culture and, by using global value surveys, which he combines with macro-economic data, Volker Bornschier argues that trust correlates with economic growth, as well as with innovation and entrepreneurship. By taking systemic trust as an explanatory cultural variable, Bornschier locates himself among those who argue that capitalist development and expansion is fostered by diversied and growingly complex relationships of trust. Yet, there are trust-related differences among developed societies and in the conclusion the author launches the question about which variety of capitalism (the confrontational Anglo-Saxon one, or the negotiated, Rhenish capitalism) is more susceptible to foster political change and technological innovation. There are some differences in the understanding of trust among economic sociologists, however, and we still need empirical analyses (of the sort pioneered by Bruce Carruthers, among others) showing in a meso- and micro-analytical fashion how complex systems of economic trust are set in place and expand. Against this background, this reader asked himself whether the notion of generalized system trust, as used by the author, does not remain too general and lacking micro-analytical moorings, with consequences for its explanatory power.
Book reviews
intervention or privatization, respectively, when appropriately marketed, were popular with voters.This popularity, in its turn, had to do more with historically grown and institutionally determined practices of management than with the electorates love of free markets. Conversely, what is known today as economic neo-liberalism did not catch on in Germany and France not because their dominant classes and governments were not committed to markets (they very much were), but because inter- and intra-party relationships, as well as the concrete constellations of political actors were different from those of the USA and Britain, respectively. With that, Prasad launches an attack both on the notion of national cultures as an explanatory factor for economic policies and on the (at least in Western Europe) quite popular thesis about varieties of capitalism, according to which political actors sustain the economic policy which is most efcient for the economic prole of their country. (Bornschier, by contrast, seems to adhere to this thesis.) She shows that actors act opportunistically, sustaining and promoting those economic policies which, in the given, historically produced context, are susceptible of encountering less resistance from intra- and extra-institutional opponents, as well as from the public. With that, Prasad seems to have formulated an important argument against ideas, or culture as a causal factor in economic policy-making. Yet, while nishing the book, this reader asked himself if culture isnt actually brought in through the back door, especially when the author is talking about the entrepreneurial politicians characteristic for the USA, as opposed to Frances technocrats and to Germanys conservative working-class ideology, for instance. Notions such as entrepreneurial politicians or technocrats, as used by Monica Prasad in her book evoke not only concrete, institutionally anchored actors, but also cultural types or gures deeply embedded in the practices of political institutions in the respective countries. I suspect, therefore,
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that culture might still play a more important role than the author is willing to acknowledge. At the same time, we are confronted with a more fundamental question: can/ should culture be treated as something abstract, or ideational? Culture has concrete, material shapes; as such, it cannot be easily taken out of economic life or out of economic policies. Reducing it to abstract ideas or trust runs the danger of diminishing the knowledge benet readers might draw from such books. Alex Preda University of Edinburgh
Delanty, Gerard and Rumford, Chris Rethinking Europe: Social Theory and the Implications of Europeanization Routledge 2005 232 pp. 19.99 (paperback) This superb book represents a quantum leap in thinking about Europe and the emergent eld of Eurosociology, represented also by such thinkers as Ulrich Beck, Gran Therborn and Peter Wagner. Delanty made his reputation with a book in 1995 on historical and current conceptions of Europe; Rumford with an equally path-breaking sociological study in 1992 of the European Union.Their respective emphases are visible in, roughly, the rst and second halves of the book, but the text hangs together well as a whole. The authors focus their rethink on the notion of Europeanization, which is indeed emblematic of the polarization of much of the European Studies literature along Wright Millss distinction between grand theory (here often in an essayistic form) and abstracted empiricism. Europeanization has come to prominence as a way of conceptualizing the convergence of economic, political and legal institutions across (and to some extent beyond) the member states of EU, as the result of its direct agency or its centripetal inuence. At the more speculative end, it has been used to outline the lineaments of an emergent European polity. This is of course a thoroughly
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leads to a more illuminating and multidimensional account of governance in the EU polity. To say that Europe has to be seen as a world region might seem obvious enough, but there remains a long-standing dislocation between a literature in International Relations (and its elder sister, Sociology) focusing on global processes and a European studies literature relatively isolated from these concerns. What is required is a theory of society (p. 154), but one which does justice to the interpenetration of the local, the national and the global, in Europe as elsewhere. William Outhwaite University of Sussex
worthwhile enterprise; Vivien Schmidts new book on the interaction of the EU and national polities is an outstanding example. But Europeanization as Delanty and Rumford understand it is a much broader social process, located in a context of modernity, globalization and cosmopolitanism. The Europe which is emerging is in a sense postEuropean in its increasingly circumscribed place in the world, its hybrid diversity and openness, just as the EC/EU extends beyond its relatively homogeneous central Carolingian heartland on an Eastern trajectory which has no obvious end-point this side of Vladivostok. The EU is of course a major part of the story, but it is not, the authors insist, the whole story. And to be a European is not to be a Franais(e), Deutsche(r) or Brit writ large, just as the emergent EU polity is not a replay on a grander scale of Italian or German unication. A polity, Delanty and Rumford stress, is not the same as a state: dened as the institutional structure of a political community through which society constitutes itself . . . it does not presume a unity between territory, society and political organization. This more abstract conceptualization ts a corresponding model of European society which must be seen in the cosmopolitan terms of international society and world society (p. 161). This in turn, the authors suggest, implies rethinking the concept of civil society, where this is seen as a domain of associational life relatively independent of state apparatuses and market processes. The dominant approach to viewing European civil society, which sees it either as the aggregation of national civil societies or the pet project of a European supra-state, is . . . deeply awed. (pp.1801) Its focus on collective representations is one of the strengths of the book, but one of the more institutional chapters, on the European Social Model, also points outwards to questions of the nature of European space as a tool of EU governance, the non-state qualities of the EU polity, and the globalized institutional moorings of European (civil) society (p. 119). This approach
Gray, J. Domestic Mandala: Architecture of Lifeworlds in Nepal Ashgate 2006 180 pp. 45 (hardback) Domestic Mandala is a captivating ethnography of domestic architecture of the Chhetri clan in Kholagaun, Nepal. It is an important book for all of those interested in the relationship between people and their residential environments. By engaging with the Chhetri house as a materially built, ritually constructed, and practically dened spatiality it effectively overcomes the notion that domestic environments are mere settings for everyday life. Gray argues that the Chhetri house, in all of its modalities, both represents and reveals the Chhetri cosmology. The book rst approaches the house as a designed space that serves functional and gurative purposes and turns to the Hindu Vastu Shastra architectural principles to illustrate how the Kholagaun Chhetri build their houses as mandalas, or mystic diagrams representing the cosmos. Gray posits that the house as mandala is based on two spatial modes: the mandalic and the yantric mode. The yantric mode represents the mandalas alignment with the cardinal directions and their relation to different deities; the mandalic mode refers to the conguration of
Book reviews
concentric spaces structured around a central point. The spatial organization of the Kholagaun Chhetris domestic spaces is then analysed looking at both traditional and modern houses. Here, the author suggests that the spatial organization of the Chhetri house responds to the yantric mode: the orientation of the houses main entrance, its interior distribution, and the location of its various functional spaces is compatible with the sacred geography of the cardinal directions. The theme of the house as a materially and ritually constructed artefact is developed by observing the ways in which spatial auspiciousness is built into the house. Auspiciousness, Gray explains, is guaranteed both by scheduling the different stages of house construction according to the homeowners horoscope, and through a series of rituals. As a result, an intimate selfhouse relation emerges in which house and house owner are inextricably linked. The book then proceeds to unpack the processes whereby the house is practically dened and offers a careful account of how the location of the different functional places and everyday domestic activities respond to the mandalic spatial mode. In this mode, domestic practices are organized around and reveal Chhetris ideas about purity (detachment) and impurity (attachment). Finally, the reader learns how Chhetri marriage rites both represent and bring into practice the concentric conguration of the domestic mandala. Drawing from extensive ethnographic material, Gray develops important theoretical arguments that resonate beyond the specicity of Chhetri architecture. The book successfully illustrates the multifaceted nature of domestic space and how its different aspects are mutually constitutive. In doing so, he convincingly argues that the house not only represents Nepali cosmology but is also a positive agent in its creation and reproduction. Through their house, Chhetris gain tacit and embodied knowledge of their cosmology and their lifeworlds as householders. By demonstrating how domestic space is not only a map from which
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the Chhetri cosmology can be read, but is actually a machine for revelation of its fundamental truths, Gray makes an important contribution to the understanding of the relation between people and their built environments. The challenge this book poses for all of those investigating domestic architecture in particular, and material culture more broadly, is how to apply this complex approach in the context of increasingly secularized societies, where belief systems are fragmented, in constant ux, and not readily apparent to the observer. Could we argue that domestic architecture in secularized societies is not only a map where given worldviews and their resulting social relations can be read, but that it also provides tacit and embodied knowledge of these worldviews, thus playing an important role in their production and reproduction? Iliana Ortega Alczar London School of Economics and Political Science
Hull, Carrie The Ontology of Sex: A Critical Inquiry into the Deconstruction and Reconstruction of Categories Routledge 2005 208 pp. 60.00 (hardback) In Carrie Hulls introduction of The Ontology of Sex she recalls a workshop that she attended in the 1990s divided into two sessions, Deconstructing Categories and Reconstructing Categories. Hull relates that the reading list for the rst workshop was full of texts that deconstructed many traditional biological categories: race, gender, mental illness, sex and sexuality. She observed that there was not one text that could address the issue of reconstructing categories. It is this conceptual void with regards to sex categories that The Ontology of Sex wishes to address. Working from a realist perspective, Hull is attempting explore and contextualize, using a number of often unrelated theoretical trajectories (philosophers Nelson
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ries by poststructuralists and the kinds that are known by our experience of the world. These kinds, in a poststructuralist account, cannot be pinned down outside of the language that created them. They therefore cannot be adequately addressed in terms of their physical and biological manifestations. As well as this failure in the logic of poststructralist thought, Hull, via her critical realist approach, also identies what she sees as the political consequences of such trends in thought. She surmises that poststructualism, through its reluctance to engage with conceptual denition, is ultimately politically impotent. Whilst there is no denial from a critical realist perspective, that categories are socially mediated, the inability to acknowledge categories of sex means that no conceptual political language can be generated. Although Hull writes an informative account of the deconstruction of sex categories through her discussion of relativism, behaviourism, post-structuralism and constructivist feminism, the plea to take critical realism seriously is excessive. This comes at the expense of recognizing the politically meaningful analytical approach that poststructuralism can offer. Anyone engaged in dealing with sex categories and their deconstruction is by now conscious of the frustrating tendency to lose the real world effects and embodied experiences of such categories in language games. However, apolitical naval gazing is not always the end product of such an approach. On the contrary, this ability to unpick and play with such categories and recognize them as political deployments embedded within particular societal, temporal conditions and networks of power, is often incredibly meaningful, specically in terms of thinking about their reconstruction. Unfortunately due to its overbearing calls for critical realism to be taken seriously The Ontology of Sex, it is unable to play with categories in this way. Megan Clinch London School of Economics and Political Science
Goodman, W.V.O Quine, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler), how the deconstruction of sex has become possible. These links, for Hull, also counter the claims by poststructuralist thinkers, specically Foucault, that their work does not depend on a coherent theoretical background. The ensuing chapters address how Hulls realist perspective can both challenge the nominalism, relativism and assumed behaviorist tendencies of poststructuralism and feminism and still address their goals of eradicating sexual hierarchy by challenging hegemonic social norms. She attempts to give a voice to contemporary realism which, she claims, has not been given a fair chance to defend itself against poststructuralism and constructivism (p. 1). Where traditional realism afrms the world contains universals, such as sex categories, that are independent from language and culture, Hulls contemporary realism posits that there is no necessity to prove such certainties. Specically, what contemporary realism wishes to address is not the identication of such universals, but to provide the most convincing answer to the question what best explains our knowledge? (p. 83). Subsequently, causal structures, categories or kinds, such as sex, which are afrmed as something that pervade our experience the world over are, through their persistence, construed to some extent as universal. However, instead of these universals being proved by logical proof a priori, they are for contemporary critical realists a posteriori knowable from our experience of the world. Whilst these kinds are obviously socially generated, their persistence in the way we know the world mean they are proof that the world does have structure. According to Hull, by taking kinds seriously, as persistent evidence of universal structures, critical realism can attend to sex inequalities far more meaningfully than poststructuralist and feminist accounts, as provided by Michel Foucault and Judith Butler. For Hull there is a disconnection between the deconstruction of sex catego London School of Economics and Political Science 2007
Book reviews
Hunt, S. Religion and Everyday Life Routledge 2005 200 pp. 65.00 (hardback) Martin, D. On Secularization: Towards a Revised General Theory Ashgate 2005 206 pp. 55.00 (hardback) 16.99 (paperback) Mitchell, C. Religion, Identity and Politics in Northern Ireland Ashgate 2006 178 pp. 47.50 (hardback) 15.99 (paperback) Stephen Hunts book is one of a Routledge The New Sociology series and, as one would expect from an articulate and experienced teacher, it offers an excellent summary of contemporary topics and theoretical approaches in the sociology of religion. Secularization, post-modernism, new religious movements, the New Age, fundamentalism; it is all there and it is all well done. His treatments of topics such as the rational choice explanation of religious behaviour are fair and sensible. My only criticisms concern the series format. To keep costs down, a headache-inducingly small font has been used and tight word limits mean that sometimes threads end just as Hunt gets interesting. For example, he challenges those revisionists who offer contemporary New Age and self-religions as refutation of secularization by noting that they will be hard to sustain over generations since personal belief-systems would have to be re-invented again and again, and mystical experiences experienced anew (p. 169). And there he stops just as I am looking forward to the elaboration of a fascinating point. A novice lecturer faced with the need to teach a sociology of religion course could build it around this slim book without misadventure but I would have enjoyed it being Super-sized. Claire Mitchells book is an extension of a very good doctoral thesis and it is a thoroughly competent rst work. It aims to describe the basic contours of religion and religious divisions in Northern Ireland and to explain what part various aspects of religion may play in the enduring political and social conict. She is rmly of the Religion Does Matter school and makes a persuasive case. Religion is obviously a crucial marker of division but Protestant and Catholic are
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not just the coloured tabards that identify opposing teams in practice football matches. Religion thoroughly permeates Irelands history and provides a great deal of the ideological underpinning of political differences. Though religious observance has declined, the churches remain important centres of community life. Religious leaders remain important public gures (and over 60 per cent of the elected representatives of the largest unionist party that led by the Reverend Ian Paisley are born-again evangelical Christians). And much of the population continues to see their religious differences as important to their communal identities. There is little in Mitchell that will surprise the experts but the book is very well-written and makes good use of current survey data in its always-reasonably-presented arguments. This book should be compulsory reading on any course on contemporary Northern Ireland. The third book is very different. David Martin is one of the Anglophones leading sociologists of religion and he started his career in an era when academics read more than they wrote. Hence he is extremely knowledgeable. His theorizing is carried not by sociological abstractions but historical and cultural nuggets: for example, he says: In the Byzantine tradition divine and human sovereignty are placed in intimate juxtaposition at the sacred heart of the city, whereas in a Western Renaissance city like Florence we see the incipient separation of powers in the two distinct spaces of Cathedral and Signoria (p. 78). Fine if you know about Byzantium and the Signoria in Florence; hard work if you dont. Martins work is also made somewhat difcult by its format. His research on Pentecostalism has been reported in two continuous monographs but the bulk of his work has been published in volumes of short pieces. In most of its subject matter this book is a return to A General Theory of Secularization (Blackwell, 1978) and it has the same form: a collection of lectures. The format ensures that most are lively and provocative but it does explain why those who
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This moves the debate on considerably. The key issue is not secularization versus a steady-state religious economy (as Americans such as Rodney Stark present it). It is whether each wave leaves as much possibility for further Christianization as its predecessors. But this collection is far more than a series of erudite contributions to a well-rehearsed argument. Every page and almost every paragraph contains a brilliant observation that will provide enough stimulation for a doctoral thesis. This is not a meal to be consumed at one sitting: it is a very large box of exotic chocolates to be dipped into often and each intellectual taste explosion savoured slowly. In brief, we have three excellent books: two that score because they are well-written and efcient and one that is opaque but brilliant. Steve Bruce University of Aberdeen
have not read Martins entire corpus can disagree about his stance on the issue of the title. Does he support the secularization paradigm? Well, he keeps describing historical changes as secularization and offers general explanations of the phenomenon. But he also repeats his 1966 criticism: that the secularization paradigm is ideologically informed and is routinely deployed without due regard for its limitations. There is a consistent big story at the heart of Martins work and it is explained here better than anywhere else. Christianity has at its heart a dialectic between the world and the kingdom of God. The result is intermittent ferment within Christian civilization, because God is distinguished from Caesar, and Church from State, and because the inner kingdom of the spirit bursts the bonds of the letter of the law and of the institution (p. 3): clear echoes of Weber and Troelstch there. Elements of Christianity are themselves self-defeating: The Gospel itself lays down the cultural slipways of secularization, making it difcult for the institutional Church to resist a momentum in which it shares (p. 3). Secularization is thus not a single one-and-for-all process (and certainly not an ordained fate). Rather there have been successive waves of Christianization, each of which carries its own secularizing dynamic. There was rst a Catholic Christianization in two versions: the conversion of monarchs (and then of their peoples) and the conversion of the urban masses by the friars. There were then two waves of Protestant Christianization: one trying to extend monasticism to all Christian people (one element of which is familiar to us as Webers Protestant ethic thesis) but effectively corralling them in the nation (p. 3) and the other realized in the creation of evangelical and pietistic sub-cultures. This latter itself appeared in waves: the Methodist and Pietist movements in eighteenth and early nineteenth century Europe, Pentecostalism in Europe and America in the early twentieth century, and now Pentecostalism spreading through Latin America, Africa and Asia.
Konrad, M. Nameless Relations: Anonymity, Melanesia and Reproductive Gift Exchange Between British Ova Donors and Recipients Berghahn Books 2005 286 pp. 25.00 (hardback) 15.00 (paperback) Conducted prior to the recent decision to end anonymous gamete donation in the UK, this study makes a timely and distinctive contribution to anthropological theory. Existing approaches to kinship and assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) have tended to address individuals in their capacity as known relations (p. 11). In contrast, Nameless Relations scrutinizes kinship under conditions of anonymity. In doing so, it problematizes the popular belief that anonymity constitutes a barrier to social relations. Additionally, by examining what happens to the gift of ova donation in the context of anonymity, it challenges the assumption that gifts can never be given between strangers.
Book reviews
These arguments are set out in Part I, and then developed in the main body of the book (Part II), which reports ndings from an ethnography of anonymous ova donation in the UK. The data provided are derived primarily from in-depth interviews with altruistic ova donors (i.e. those who have not experienced infertility problems but who wish to help other women) and recipient women who have (successfully and unsuccessfully) used donated ova in their attempts to conceive. Considering that little is known about the motivations of anonymous ova donors, Chapters 35, which address their accounts, are the most absorbing sections of the book. Given the different circumstances in which women decide to donate, it is unsurprising that their collective views are complex and contradictory (p. 20). However, Konrad highlights the similarities in womens narratives, particularly their simultaneous reinforcement and refutation of biomedical discourses that conceptualize women who donate ova as passive bodies from which a resource is harvested. In challenging these discourses, women frequently envisage ova donation as their active support of other (unknown) women, a process which allows them to strengthen and reshape their visions of themselves as social agents. In relation to these ndings (and indeed, throughout the book), Konrad successfully employs the comparative methods of anthropology. In particular, she draws on literature concerning the peoples of Melanesia, and their view of persons as a series of divisible and exchangeable parts. This allows her to undermine Western assumptions that the removal of parts from bodies automatically equates with their commodication. In theorizing the way that persons and their gifts are thought about by those involved in anonymous ova donation, Konrad suggests that the concept of transilience is useful: Instead of thinking of a centralised ego from which things radiate outwards and to which things/relations are impelled to return (and belong), we may imagine modes of
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transilience. Within transilient social space the category of the person becomes socially prominent for the relations of support it traverses (p. 49). The need to critically re-examine what we mean by persons, relations and gifts in the context of anonymous ova donation is further articulated in Part II in relation to recipient women (Chapters 68), who may themselves become donors through their decisions about their so-called spare embryos. Part III discusses practices that are intimately linked to ova donation (e.g. stem cell research) and reveals the relevance of the studys ndings within this wider arena. While the books contributions to anthropological theory are undoubtedly fascinating, I would argue that it is most important for the contrast that it sets up between womens experiences and the narrow frameworks within which ova donation and its research applications have been debated and regulated. In this respect, it is a vital resource for all those who are involved in ARTs (e.g. clinicians, research scientists, policy makers, social scientists etc). However, on the basis of its (at times) complex linguistic style, I would question how accessible this otherwise excellent book would be to those outwith the social sciences. Sin M. Beynon-Jones University of Edinburgh
Krippendorff, Klaus Content Analysis. An Introduction to its Methodology (2nd revised edition) 2004 London, Sage 440 pp. 69.00 (hardback) Franzosi, Roberto From Words to Numbers. Narrative, Data and Social Science 2004 CUP 504 pp. 27.95 (paperback) Arguably, garments have a fashion cycle, so do social science research methods. When I entered university in the late 1970s content analysis (CA) scored high in the hierarchy of methods. Soon it fell from grace and became the bogeyman for any lecturer
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data and these need analyses. If I dare a prediction: we will see text mining as an area of developments of semi-automatic if not automatic text analysis to arrive on a large scale. Hopefully, we will soon see a common software platform for text analytic routines which provides the researcher with what SPSS or similar did for statistical routines. Beyond their communality in hailing the human coder, these two books clearly differ by exemplifying two outlooks, the semantic and the structural use of content analysis. In semantic analysis the researcher seeks to characterize the discourse of X at time t and make inferences to its context. Semantic analysis has its origin in propaganda analysis and in the psychology of expression where the source is mysterious. Krippendorffs fully revised and extended 2nd edition of his classic introductory text of 1980 does encyclopaedic justice to the progress of this type of analysis. It has three parts, conceptualization, components of CA, and analytical paths with an extended discussion of the reliability and validity problems. The latter includes a detailed exposition of the agreement index Alpha and its extension to unitizing, and an overview of the range of computer-assistance that is available. The inferential and constructivist logic of complexity reduction remains the key feature of Krippendorffs presentation: content analysts infer answers to particular research questions from their texts. Their inferences are merely more systematic, explicitly informed, and (ideally) veriable than what ordinary readers do with texts (p. 25). Thus CA is a method among others that moves the researcher from a large amount of text to a context of understanding; and this constructive effort of the researcher requires ratication by scientic peers. The analysis focuses on textual representations and how these express, appeal to and refer to a social context. The second use of content analysis is presented by Franzosis fascinating book. In structural analysis the researcher is not interested in discourse and representation
intent on demonstrating how unintelligent empirical research could be. But CA survived conveniently suited to the nine month post-graduate teaching cycle: its takes one session and the student is magically empowered to conduct or appreciate empirical research. This leaves CA with a somewhat dubious reputation. It also does not help that CA never managed to spin-off a large commercial industry like focus groups, questionnaires and opinion polls did, which puts many young and ambitious content analysts into a disadvantage on the labour market. While in the past serious CA had its bottleneck in data collection. The text gathering absorbed most of the project funding and effort, and by the time coding fatigue set in, the results often turned out nave and supercial. The IT revolution of the 1980s and 1990s changed this situation. Some newspaper archives are now accessible on-line back into the eighteenth century (!!), and the WWW and internet are an extraordinary data dungeon. Henceforth, the bottleneck is analysis. These two books clearly mark the culmination of a recent revival of CA sparked by the ready availability of data materials of all kinds. Jointly they hail the human coder as indispensable, but demonstrate two different uses of CA: semantic and structural analysis. Both books leave behind the false expectations raised in the 1960s (e.g. by the General Enquirer programme) that the arrival of the computer might nally deliver the objective reading of texts and do away with the problems of interpretation and the unreliability of human coders. To the contrary, computerized text-processing highlights the interpretive efcacy of human coders and the ease with which a computer can get things completely wrong. Automatic text analysis mutated into the more modest computer-assisted content analysis supported by a growing range of analytic routines. The fall-out of 9/11 might move things again, like WWII and the Cold War spurred the development of CA: security surveillance throws up streams of textual
Book reviews
per se, but seeks to observe social action through texts. The origin of this type of analysis is in social movement research and its discontents with social statistics. The fact that ofcial strike statistics only records the number of strike actions and the working hours lost makes a highly uninformative database to study the logic and dynamics of social movement actions, such as workers strikes and other public protests. Franzosi systematizes the analysis of conict events with the creation of a database of logical triplets subject-action-objects plus modalities (who does what how?) which are the structural building blocks common to the narratives and the events to which they refer. Collections of accounts referring to social events are translated into a corpus of tagged texts based on the idea of the story grammar, and the coded narrative data preserves the structural features of the events in a relational database. CA is thus grounded in formal linguistic theory and set theory. As SPSS is not suitable for this type of database, Franzosi develops a computer programme and software package to code and analyse relational data. It reminds us that basic statistics cannot and should not be the only formalism to prepare ambitious students for empirical research. My fascination with this book arises from both content and style. Franzosi presents his approach as a historical quest. It is a book of scholarship and methodological passion. Franzosi is a great fabulator that carries the reader along with engaging histories of the medieval search for an art of memory, the quest of the Alchemists to make gold out of lesser metals, and the rst hand accounts of the discoveries of the Americas. Arguably, this is the only methodology book to be read on a holiday without the risk of boredom. These histories become motivating tales in the quest for a system to capture everything important, to nd something other than searched for and being surprised (Columbus believed to have reached India on a different route, others had to be surprised), and for the transmutation of words into numbers and graphs. The book culmiBritish Journal of Sociology 58(2)
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nates in a set of methodological maxims to instruct the novice which show that premodern, modern or post-modern quests might have more in common than commonly recognised. Albertus Magnus and Thomas of Aquinas get for once a rather good press. Franzosi dismisses semantic content analysis; he studies protest actions and not the discourse of the mass media. But I do not see why the logic of story grammar text materials as data, narrative and set theory as foundations once exibly implemented into a computer package, could not be useful also to characterize discourse in time and space. Like Columbus, Franzosis quest might yield something else than intended. His premature dismissal might be a corollary of what an Italian colleague called a book written in anger. One gets a sense of the heroic rhetorical effort of the book to counter a social scientic dualism with a set of ideas that are doubly out of sink with the common mind frame: steering clear of the trodden paths of statistical causality on the one hand and the postmodern dismissal of any formalism as positivist on the other. Here is another third way attempting to avoid the fallacy of the excluded middle: neither-nor is the moral of the story. In summary, it seems to me that for some years to come these two books will have said all that needs to be written in textbooks about content analysis with human coders, and Franzosis is also a fascinating read that carries you into a new world. These books show that CA is without doubt a serious social scientic method that should be part of any research curriculum, and these two books dene its canon. Maybe Max Webers advise to the cultural sociologist will nally be heeded, albeit metaphorically: take out the scissors and start cutting newspapers. We now know much more about why and how we might go about doing that. Martin W. Bauer London School of Economics and Political Science
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Book reviews
ize the modern culture industries. Bootlegging illustrates that contradiction. Record companies routinely condemn bootlegging, often in near-hysterical terms, not as the violation of a trade monopoly (which it is) but of the artists interests. In truth bootlegs benet the whole industry by helping to sustain the illusion of bohemian contempt for exchange value on which the genre rests and on which the prots of the record companies depend. Bootlegs are iconic precisely because they are the unsanctioned record of authentic, spontaneous, or insufciently polished and commercially packaged moments. Fear of lost revenues is misplaced too. Typically they have a very limited print run (around 1,000, and far less than the number of commercial recordings routinely given away by the record companies as publicity); they arise out of a niche market of precisely those hard-core fans who will already have everything legitimately issued by the artist concerned; they act as publicity and bind core fans to the career of particular artists. Marshall argues that the implications of the death of the author are that the input of the public domain in the creation of all works of art should be dened and protected in copyright law. Imagine the (parliamentary?) deliberations over what precisely should be recognized in, say, a rock song, as contributed by the pre-existing culture! An echo remains of the authors (presumably) once-nave assumptions about the authenticity of (at least some parts) of a culture industry he obviously loves. He accommodates it by drawing on that strand of cultural studies that insists on the creative nature of the mass consumers (the fans) appropriation of standardized products, though he never quite squares this with his debt to classic neo-Marxist theories of the cultural contradictions of capitalism. Perhaps, as a sophisticated postmodern, he thinks it possible both to see through the mask and continue to play with/in it. Bernice Martin University of London (Royal Holloway College)
Marshall, Lee Bootlegging: Romanticism and Copyright in the Music Industry Sage Publications 2005 192 pp. 65 (hardback) Despite the promise of its more expansive subtitle, Bootlegging is, indeed, primarily about the practice that arose in rock music from the late 1960s of issuing unauthorized recordings of leading musicians, usually culled from the out-takes of studio sessions or from live concerts. The meat of the research comes in the last three chapters and some of it has already appeared in journal articles. The book, however, expands the context and explores the theoretical and legal implications of the authors ndings. It will be of considerable interest to sociologists of contemporary culture as well as to specialists in popular music and those more widely concerned with the law of copyright in this age of increasingly easy and cheap electronic reproduction in many elds. The language is not elegant but the arguments are very clearly (if rather repetitively) set out as Marshall unfolds a piquant analysis of what bootlegging reveals about the contradictions embedded in the culture industries, and rock music in particular. Copyright initially protected the economic interests of early modern publishers. By conceiving of the author as the inspired creator of what later came to be known as intellectual property, the Romantic Movement gave rise to changes in copyright law that made the Romantic author rather than the publisher central. In fact, Marshalls point is that a rhetoric of legitimation based on the interests of the author came to dominate, though in law authors rights never wholly superseded those of publishers. The paradoxical relation of these two elements is at the heart of his analysis. Following a neoMarxist model drawn from Benjamin and Adorno, Marshall sees the cultural normalization of the concept of the Romantic author in all the arts as a mask (signifying creativity, authenticity and originality) that hides the commodication, alienation and standardization that actually character London School of Economics and Political Science 2007
Book reviews
McKay, Steven C. Satanic Mills or Silicon Island? The Politics of High-Tech Production in the Philippines ILR/Cornell University Press 2006 255 pp. 25.50 (hardback) 12.50 (paperback) This book describes and analyses the consequences of the Philippines becoming important location for multinational high technology production. Going beyond simple economic geography, it also attempts a sociological explanation for the emergent labour relations between the multinationals, the employees, the state and the unions. Thus, half the book describes the interplay between state policies, multinational capital ow and economic globalization, and the other half involves ethnographic research on the factory oor (and its surroundings). McKay argues that while there are many reasons why the Philippines was well positioned for multinational production location, perhaps the most important reason was that the state, under Ramos, decided to actively court foreign direct investment during the 1990s. Although the Philippines had established export processing zones much earlier, the Ramos government made even more concessions to multinationals in order to encourage the location of so-called high technology production. While this raises the spectre of the formation of Satanic Mills, a term rst used by the poet William Blake to describe the exploitation of workers in the cotton processing factories in nineteenth century England, in the Philippines, because the production was high tech and required highly skilled personnel, there was the possibility of emulating Silicon Valley, where there would not only be high growth but also high innovation as well. Hence, the title of this book. Using a whole range of theories and concepts, ranging from Burawoys Manufacturing Consent to Labour Segmentation Theory, McKay analyses the reections of many Filipino employees, ranging from operators to senior supervisors. What McKay concludes, perhaps not surprisingly,
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is that what has taken place in the Philippines, resembles neither the Satanic Mills nor Silicon Valley; in other words, those expecting to nd evidence of sweatshop capitalism or just industrialization will be disappointed. Local institutions which include recent history, local culture and policies (and the non-implementation of policies) have led to the current formation of a contradictory but still uniquely Filipino work relations system. In addition, multinationals are increasingly aware of bad publicity, not to mention disgruntled and workers with low productivity. Hence, a system that is neither perfect nor disastrous: Workers are not badly treated but they are still powerless. Multinationals cannot simply transplant their systems but must make local adaptations to incorporate workers to elicit commitment while retaining exibility. McKays biggest contribution is in the rich ethnographic data found in the later chapters. Here, the writing style must be commended for having a certain journalistic air which really brings the stories of the employees to life without sacricing theoretical rigour. Equally interesting are the authors own observations, having spent a year navigating suspicion in the eldwork sites. For example, the author nds that for the girls (female factory operators), the age of 21 is already so old in the industry. This is because most female factory operators are aged 18, and those above 24 tend to be married (and thus unemployable). Also, McKay notes how gender stereotypes are often contradictory, as men are seen as lazy, sloppy, dgety, error prone, and generally more magulo (disruptive) for operator work but still get hired as supervisors! Researchers who are looking for recent updates on state policy and the impact of globalization in the Philippines will no doubt welcome this book as there are few international publications on the Philippines economy and society. It could be argued that the multiple theoretical explanations used in this analysis might be too messy and complicated, however the reality is that the globalization of industrialization
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tion of a Caribbean tradition and black racialized identities; and nally, in recognizing the importance of gender and power relations within families, the nal part examines the participation of men in Caribbean households and her data indicates that fathers enjoy a dominant status in the household even if they hold little economic power. However, as she points out, further research on deconstructions of black masculinity within Caribbean families is required in this eld. Overall, Reynolds makes a valiant effort to contextualize her study in the wider literature of black and middleclass white feminist discourses but the book is rather tentative in its approach and whilst the qualitative data is very interesting, it is relatively narrow in scope. The opposite point can be applied to the volume of essays edited by Linda McKie and Sarah Cunningham-Burley. This book on Families in Society makes a valuable and insightful contribution to critical studies of families and personal relationships through the engagement with and the development of boundary studies across so-called public and private lives. Through adopting the boundary metaphor, the various sixteen contributors to this volume, analyse substantive public social policy issues ranging from worklife balance, health, poverty and education, on the one hand, to studying kinship and childadult relations, solo-living, intimacy and friendships in personal lives, on the other. The bridge from theoretical and empirical work to policy analysis emerges since many of the authors are actively engaged in family research through the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships (CRFR). The book has a coherent theoretical structure and is divided into four parts and taken together, it seeks to challenge and appreciate the traditional and contemporary way in which boundaries are both constructed and deconstructed in relation to the changing realities within families and local communities, as well as exploring intimacy and various informal friendship networks. Paradoxically in the light of Reynoldss work, there is not a specic chapter
itself is extremely complex and constantly changing. Alexius A. Pereira National University of Singapore
McKie, Linda and Cunningham-Burley, Sarah (eds) Families In Society: Boundaries and Relationships Policy Press 2005 282 pp. 55.00 (hardback) 24.99 (paperback) Reynolds, Tracy Caribbean Mothers: Identity and Experience in the UK the Turfnell Press London 2005 204 pp. $27.95 (hardback) 14.95 (paperback) Both books explore complex dimensions of families and social change but beyond that, they are different in scale and scope. A central concern of Tracy Reynolds book on Caribbean Mothers is to challenge homogeneous and essentialist constructions of mothering in the UK. Her research is primarily of a small-scale qualitative nature and documents the experiences of a crosssection of rst, second and third generation Caribbean mothers from the post Second World War until the present day. Her in-depth interviews was conducted with forty Caribbean mothers in London with a further fteen face-to-face interviews with mothers mainly in the Midlands(and Hudderseld) which means that reference to the UK in the title of the book is slightly generalized and misleading. The research was undertaken with the purpose of analysing inter-generational similarities and differences on the extent of the maintenance of cultural, social and kinship links to their ethnic origins, whilst at the same time being part of a black and ethnic community. One of Reynoldss main research ndings is that second generation mothers have successfully been able to utilize their child rearing skills to develop strategies that challenge and resist racism in their childrens lives. The four strategies include rst; the psychological and emotional preparation of children for racism; second, parental involvement in education; third, the celebra London School of Economics and Political Science 2007
Book reviews
in the volume which addresses ethnicity and diversities within black families which is a curious omission in an otherwise wideranging and scholarly collection of individual contributors which are too numerous to reference on an individual basis. Overall, this book should be essential reading for social science students, and researchers, with an interest in changing family and personal relationships in society and ought to be widely disseminated. Helen Corr University of Strathclyde
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Petersson, Dag and Steinskog, Erik (eds) Actualities of Aura: Twelve Studies of Walter Benjamin Nordic Summer University Press 2005 297 pp. Euro 25 (paperback) Petersson and Steinskog explain that they are opening up a heterotopical testing ground for the contemporary signicance of Walter Benjamins concept of aura. Setting out from the standpoint of the intellectual laborer a perspective shared by the books contributors in spite of their varied scholarly backgrounds Peterson and Steinskog note the increasing transplantation of academic practice into digital space. By pointing towards interrelations between technological developments and changes in modes of writing, perception and even thinking (p. ix), Benjamins concept of aura is positioned at centre stage. The composition of the book is presented as an editorial experiment which Petersson and Steinskog hold is, in its form, directly related to the concept of aura. If presented graphically in an abstract manner (as done on the books cover) the heterotopical range of essays form an image of a fragmented surface. At times these fragments overlap or seem to be drawn to each other, at other times they seem to repel one another. Echoing the compositorial principle of the Arcades Project the range of essays is a conguration of topical distances and argumentative disparities marked by fragmentary
conceptual overlaps. It is precisely from the tension between distances, disparities and overlaps that the reader is to gain insights into the actuality of the concept of aura. The ambiguity of a Benjaminian concept is addressed by taking a methodological approach that aims to be Benjaminian in kind. The book consists of twelve essays which broadly focus on the task of positioning the concept of aura in the wider framework of Benjamins oeuvre. The individual essays map conceptual themes and spaces in Benjamins writings that are more or less directly related to the concept of aura. Because of the diverse paths that the authors take to get to the signicance of aura in Benjamins work, the reader is given a substantial overview of some of the major Benjaminian concepts (e.g. phantasmagoria, trace, dialectical image, involuntary memory, mimesi ). Working with coherent and graspable examples taken from the realms of lm (Gilloch and Krogholm Sand), photography (Dharvernas), architecture (Steinskog), political propaganda (Fenves) and biotechnology (Petersson), the essays sketch out the interrelationship between, on the one hand, twentieth century technological developments, and on the other hand, changes in modes of perception that have conditioned aesthetic, social and political reproduction. Besides positioning the concept of aura within Benjamins own oeuvre, possible afnities with concepts of equal signicance from the array of Western sociophilosophical thought are explored. In an analysis of the articial fabrication of aura in early- and mid-twentieth century lm, Gilloch draws a parallel to Baudrillards notion of seduction; Bruum Zangenberg discusses the afnity between Leibnizs monadology and Benjamins ontology of lm; Krogholm Sand relates the ruinous characteristics of the auratic moment the strange weave of a bodily presence in space and the image of an absent past, of time itself (p. 120) to Deleuzes crystal-image; and Kang explores the triad aura, phantasmagoria and commodity fetishism.
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Roderick uses the early chapters to explore the context of professional football. He emphasizes the terms of the contractual arrangements, the authoritarian set-up at club level that most players experience, and the typical career path of most professionals, i.e., those few who make it through the club apprenticeship schemes. In these chapters Roderick draws out two linked themes that run consistently through later explorations of footballer identities and insecurities: time the relatively short career life of the professional footballer and uncertainty uncertainties of status, of health, of place in the team, of relationships with managers, coaches, physiotherapists, family. The construction of time and the role of uncertainty play out in the explorations of the books central chapters: professional footballers and injuries. The injuries that players suffer during their working lives are one of the major sources of individual vulnerability. Surrounding the state of being injured is a complex set of institutional norms that structure players identities, sense of self and interactions with other football professionals. Roderick shows how injuries restructure relationships with other players, coaches, managers and the club medical professionals. Injured players have to learn to cope with the possibility of stigma, in the Goffman sense, that may attach to them being considered soft, displaying the wrong attitude or letting down the team in the minds of other club members. Many readers with an interest in the area will be aware of the player whose succession of injuries earned him the nickname Sick Note (Chapter 4). Competitive pressures to keep a place in the team lead players to risk further damage by taking (painkilling) injections, carrying an injury or returning too soon. In short, injuries exacerbate the insecurity that characterises the game by consuming career time and moving players from the team hierarchy. The research is based on interviews with forty-seven male professional footballers; most of whom were under contract to clubs in one of the four major professionaldivisions
Petersson and Kelman address some of the methodological questions that arise in a discussion of the actuality of the concept of aura: How are we to read Benjamins writings today, over half a century after they were written, and how are we to apply his method of analysis to contemporary scholarship. Against the background of contemporary techniques of reproducibility (cloning and digital communications), Petersson analyzes the actuality of Benjamins logic of readability and time. Kelman addresses Benjamins controversial method of forming relations on the basis of non-relationality determined by conguration and presentation. By offering a balance between an internal theoretical discussion of the concept of aura, and its application to examples that are external to Benjamins writing, the book unfolds in the dynamic rhythm of reading promised in the introduction. Hannah Abdullah London School of Economics
Roderick, M. The Work of Professional Football: A Labour of Love? Routledge 2006 196 pp. 80.00 (hardback) 22.99 (paperback) Following a long tradition of research that examines the practices of professional groupings, Martin Rodericks interesting new book explores the working lives of professional footballers. In nine concise and well drafted chapters, Roderick explores issues of context, identity, self, networks and exchanges. The nal chapter, entitled The fate of idealism in professional football acknowledges the place of the research in the tradition of symbolic interactionist studies, whilst commenting upon the transformation of football player to commodity, the crushing importance of time (playing time left, time injured, time in the reserves, time remaining on contracts). Among those classical Chicago school sociologists, the work of Erving Goffman stands out as a key source and inspiration.
Book reviews
in England, ten had retired from playing. Some of those interviewed were well known international players, others journeymen. Understandably concerned that the in-depth interview approach takes the study a little away from classical ethnography, Roderick explains the difculties and sensitivities involved in researching professional footballers lives. However, as a former professional footballer, Roderick is also drawing on his experiences and networks to present his account of everyday work and worries of the professional footballers life. In the aftermath of another failure by a national team, media representations of footballers are seemingly at one in contending that the high salaries earned by the footballing elite of the Premiership has eroded motivation and the willingness to play for country. Leaving aside the point that these are conceptions of an elite, Rodericks book presents another valuable, view of players as market commodity in highly institutionalized clubs, where status, identity and transfer value can easily be altered. Keith Robson Cardiff University
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Smith, J. and Jenks, C. Qualitative Complexity: Ecology, Cognitive Processes and the Re-emergence of Structures in Post-Humanist Social Theory Routledge 2006 302 pp. 75.00 (hardback) This is an important book. The subtitle indicates the subject matter. Basically, it might be said (crudely in contrast with the sophisticated expression of the text itself) that this is a declaration of war on post-structuralism and that the artillery in the war is the conceptual apparatus of complexity theory. It is worth emphasizing that this is a book constructed in relation to social theory, rather than in relation to sociology as a discipline which is also an empirical social science. But that is what it says on the cover: social theory is what it deals with and it does so very well. The book is divided into three sections. The rst The Interdisciplinary Field lays
out the conceptual apparatus of complexity in relation to a developed and interesting review of the implications of the more sophisticated elements of evolutionary psychology for the traditional philosophical discourse in relation to the nature of the social, with a particular emphasis on the meaning of culture. The second Critical Developments is a fully edged frontal assault on post-structuralism. The titles of two of the chapters in this section Complexity theory as a critique of post-modernism and The evolution of intelligence, consciousness and language: implications for social theory indicate the general line of argument being presented. As the authors say Our rst concern is a reappraisal of the relations between systems theory and cognitive processes. . . . the systemic and phenomenological are eventually forced to confound each other. (p. 28). In both sections one and two of the book a central proposition is that we have to dismiss the idea of the world as merely constructed whether this is expressed by Heideggers replacement of ontology by epistemology or by the biological conception of autopoeisis in which the organism constructs the world through the transformation of perception into representation. Part Three, The elds of complex analysis: contemporary complexity theory, is a review of the uses made of complexity in contemporary social theory and to a considerable extent can be regarded as a clearing of the ground with poststructuralism and Luhmanns system theory dismissed from the complexity programme, and with a useful discussion of global complexity as presented in recent debate. The concluding sentence of the rst chapter can stand as a summary of the positions expressed the authors assert their . . . sense of an ontology of qualitatively complex structures in persistent interaction, far from equilibrium; and that sense pervades the book as a whole. This is a comprehensive and scholarly text in which the theoretical apparatus of the whole range of disciplines in which complexity gures is deployed to considerable
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Book reviews
immigrated to the United Kingdom and women born in the UK. (p. 5). Eight chapters trace the dreams, questions and struggles of South Asian women in Britain and other chapters explore religion, mental health, masculinities, racism and low paid workers. Its critique of South Asian patriarchy, community violence, and gender and work critically engages binary oppositions male/female, public/private, honour/shame, secular/religious, universal/ particular. Selected case studies provide a series of well-orchestrated portraits of femininity and masculinity, alongside the social strategies and norms that govern these behaviours. The book explores how women negotiate their experiences through cultural specicity, responsibility, entitlement, traditional roles and equality. For instance, the role of women in intervening with state institutions and how a multiplicity of intersecting discourses add to the ambiguity of growing up in the diaspora. The voices of the South Asian womens movement compete with traditional roles, which cast men as protectors and women as nurturers or objects of sexual desire. By concentrating on the experiences of women, Wilson eloquently captures some of the paradoxes of womens ability to belong to or negotiate within various forms of patriarchy. There are three central themes. First, how gender constitutes a contested area involving women, the state, political parties and community organizations. Secondly, community and religious identity changes when viewed from everyday and local perspectives. Thirdly, the implications of womens action regarding emancipation and empowerment; for example, womens groups addressing the rising number of forced marriages in the UK and the states response. One key argument that Wilson makes is that the state intervention complements and reinforces the interests of patriarchal communities by disregarding womens attempts to emancipate themselves (p. 95). Wilson suggests in her case study of forced marriages that an analysis which sits
purpose. It is certainly the most comprehensive treatment of the themes it addresses which is presently available. That said the very completeness of its coverage in terms of theory raises some rather fundamental issues about what we are doing when we engage in post-disciplinary complexity science. There are points of detail that I would dispute with the authors but the general line of their argument about theory I would endorse. The point is that theory is not the whole of science and that practice matters. It is not that this is wholly ignored but the approach to practice is largely through an interesting, important and convincing argument with actor-network theory the book would be worth reading for that alone. However, that is not enough. The theory research practice divide is articial and misleading. The one contemporary body of social theory which more or less transcends this divide is critical realism but there is no explicit engagement with critical realism in this book. The quotation from De Landa on pages 2478 of the book expresses the relationship between generative mechanisms and structure as well as anything I have ever read. That theme should be taken up. All this said this is an important, scholarly and useful book which is worth the exceptional price demanded for it. A paperback would be a very good thing. David Byrne Durham University
Wilson, A. Dreams, Questions and Struggles: South Asian Women in Britain Pluto Press 2006 208 pp. 16.99 (paperback) This is a captivating book which will inuence many peoples perceptions of South Asian womens lives. Wilson is an activist who has a social, personal and political commitment to her unapologetically feminist approach (p. 3). The book is based on a survey of 42 women from different ages, classes, religions and regions of origin in South Asia. It includes women who have
Book reviews
uncomfortably between universalism versus cultural relativism is needed (p. 95).Through her interactions with women seeking asylum (p. 75) Wilson argues how particular stereotypes are perceived by immigration ofcials (p. 77), and these affect the outcome of these womens asylum hearings. Additionally, immigration and asylum policies have excluded more minority women from refuge services and emergency support. Often the womans right to remain in the UK and receive benets and housing is determined upon her staying with her abusive partner. Social science scholars will nd Dreams, Questions & Struggles invaluable reading. Wilson raises compelling and important questions and an interesting analysis of the future of South Asian feminism. Although Wilson casts a fresh eye on familiar themes, such as race, multiculturalism, citizenship and universalism versus cultural rights, the book could have beneted from a further analysis of the neo-liberal elements of empowerment and provided a further exploration of transformational feminist politics (p. 171). That said, it is a treat to read these papers, since Wilson brings exciting and original perspectives to a broad range of topics. It analyses the differences and similarities between those experiencing sexual abuse, mental health difculties and activists who engage in contesting the traditional roles of womanhood. The sensitive and powerful voices of women are used to explore the dreams and struggles of women growing up in the UK. This is an essential reference book for anyone interested in issues of gender, race, culture, migration, diaspora, and identity. Aisha Gill Roehampton University
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Wilson, T. (ed.) Drinking Cultures Berg Publications 2005 281 pp. 55.00 (hardback) 18.99 (paperback) In light of the huge upsurge in British media coverage of binge drinking, it comes
as little surprise that there have been a number of recent publications that address the cultures of alcohol consumption. Ethnographic studies have provided us with some of the most interesting insights into alcohol use within British society, and Wilsons edited collection of anthropological ethnographies appears to be a useful introduction to the role and uses of alcohol across the globe. Much of the recent research and publications concerning alcohol and alcohol use has focused on the social problems affecting individuals, families and the wider society. Drinking Cultures positions alcohol use as both normal and normative, and explores the cultural dimensions of drinking, as a distinction and a projection of identity within social arenas of ethnicity and local or national identity. The contributors to this book focus on those elements that dene and shape drinking occasions as well as the places and spaces they occupy. Several themes are recurrent throughout this book. All examine drinking practices within the drinking arena and consider the role of alcohol in the construction of identity both on the local and national scale. Focusing strongly on drinking places and spaces is Timothy Halls chapter on the important and intricate cultural meanings applied to the practice of beer drinking in the city of Prague in the Czech Republic. Hall relates the constraints of national identity to gender highlighting the importance of masculinity as an important theme in the understanding and practice of beer drinking among Czechs with the communitas of the pub reinforcing gender distinctions as well as promoting an egalitarian ethic which denies differences of class or status outside the workplace. Within this book, drinking practices are often viewed as drinking occasions, placing emphasis on the role of alcohol as relating to historical constructions. Hence we have Sharryn Kasmir writing about the sociability of alcohol use among the Basques, with links being drawn between drinking behaviour and traditional aspects of Basque character. She describes how the presence of political
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Book reviews
On the whole this book is lively, engaging and often entertaining, which to some extent may be its weakness as much as its strength. While the ethnographies are useful in reminding us that the meanings and uses of alcohol within different cultures vary greatly from the British experience, only rarely do they diverge from rich descriptive passages to address the broader theoretical issues which must surely be central to sociological inquiry. As a result, this book is likely to be most useful to the course convener creating a reading list for undergraduate modules dealing with alcohol use as it provides a rich source of examples for the student interested in gaining a perspective on the cultural importance of alcohol to societies outside the British Isles. Oliver Smith University of York
messages and debate transform the daily habits of frequenting the bar into a performance of identity and political afnity, with the potential to upset the existing cultural and political order and reshape local and national politics. Processes of globalization are also acknowledged, and a discussion of the ways in which the people of Hong Kong indicate identity and class status is provided by Josephine Smart. Smart reveals how Cognac a mainstay of French drinking and an undeniable symbol of French identity has become a commodity accepted as the proper and appropriate drink at wedding banquets, becoming a symbol of afuence and sophistication, penetrating everyday life despite the generally low level of alcohol consumption within homes and other private settings.

The British Journal of Sociology Volume 58 Issue 2 2007 (Doi 10.1111/j.1468-4446.2007.00153 - 3.x) Raf Vanderstraeten - Religions in Global Society - by P. Beyer

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The British Journal of Sociology Volume 58 Issue 2 2007 (Doi 10.1111/j.1468-4446.2007.00153 - 3.x) Raf Vanderstraeten - Religions in Global Society - by P. Beyer

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The British Journal of Sociology 2007 Volume 58 Issue 2

London School of Economics and Political Science 2007

British Journal of Sociology 58(2)

London School of Economics and Political Science 2007

British Journal of Sociology 58(2)

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