Review Inventing Ourselves

Book reviews
Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power and Personhood Nikolas Rose, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1996, 35.00, viii + 222 pp. In Inventing Our Selves, Nikolas Rose aims to explore the heterogeneous ways in which the modern self is constituted. As a major writer in the Foucauldian tradition, Rose embarks on this task by beginning to question some of the certainties about the kinds of people we take ourselves to be (p. 1). In the process, he traverses a number of empirical domains but his resolute focus is a complex of issues that entail the psy disciplines (psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy, psychoanalysis), and their links to government and subjectication. For Rose, psy disciplines are intellectual technologies that serve to render visible and intelligible certain features of persons, their conducts, and their relations with one another (p. 10). But psy is also intrinsically tied to a range of accredited professionals and acknowledged techniques that administer persons and rationally manage human resources. Now, while psy features heavily in administration, management, visibilization and so on in a variety of elds such as the military, education, the family, Rose claims something more. Psy, by virtue of its claims to access, map and shape the interiority that underpins human conduct, is inextricably interwoven with all those more or less rationalised programs, strategies, and tactics . . . for acting upon the actions of others, in order to achieve certain ends (p. 12) that is, government in Foucaults sense. In resourcing Western liberal government, psy has been partly comprised of the invention of technologies for governing individuals in terms of their freedom (p. 16). As such, psy has also contributed to the technical means by which persons are governed
The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 1997. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
Book Reviews through, rather than in spite of, for example, their autonomy and enterprise: the forms of subjectication that recent government has entailed forms that stress freedom of choice, authenticity, enterprise and so on are shown to be linked with psy techniques that focus on the enhancements of self-esteem, social skills, empowerment. This summary can do very little justice to Roses complex and variegated project. As is to be expected, this is brilliantly realised. Rose comes at this overarching problematic from a number of angles and addresses, en route, a wide array of issues that have been a mainstay not only of critical studies of psychology but of the social sciences in general. For instance, in asking what it might mean to write a critical history of psychology, he unravels the poverty of social constructionist critiques of psychology (dispensing some of his choicest barbs in the process) and claries the role of psychology in psychologizing human subjects. Contrary to these standard critiques which, amongst other things, in one way or another, bemoan the means by which psy has imposed upon and debilitated potentially free individuals, Rose traces, though mostly in outline, the techniques, practices, strategies of psy that have been instrumental in the denition, valorization and implementation of the free person. From this seemingly limited observation, Rose develops a much broader argument that encompasses the thorny question of the possible role of agency in resistance. In Roses view, the very terms of this question need to be problematised. Agency as a love of liberty or the pursuit of empowerment is not outside of government and psy; resistance or rather, contestation and conict becomes the upshot of the fact that persons live their lives in a constant movement across different practices that subjectify them in different ways and therefore techniques of relating oneself as a subject of unique capacities worthy of respect run up against practices of relating to oneself as the target of discipline, duty and docility (p. 35). But how is one to theorize this getting of agency? Here, Rose draws on Deleuze. Agency is generated in practices through which desires, intelligencies, motivations, passions . . . (p. 189) are folded into us by our psychotechnologies. These foldings, are realised through heterogeneous and distributed means, and because of this heterogeneity and distributedness, render agency (but also such, albeit problematic, givens as the body) altogether contingent. Here, Rose folds into a theoretical vanguard of those who have begun to develop languages for
The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 1997
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Book Reviews tracing the constitutive heterogeneity and distributedness of the human for example, Haraways admixing of irreducible genres, or Latours quasi-neutral vocabulary of actants, hybrids and associations. In light of this esteemed company, it is ostensibly disappointing that Rose doesnt address, or even raise, the issue of how psy might relate to the ways in which the natural sciences have also contributed to government. As authors like Wynne and Irwin, as well as Haraway and Latour, have noted, seemingly innocent expert advice on natural or technological risk (eg follow instructions) shapes, always contingently, comportment not only in relation to self and human others, but also to technology and nature. A supplementary project would, then, begin to interrogate the ways in which these perhaps disparate techniques interweave. This becomes all the more urgent when one takes seriously the notion that self and human others are distributed across these natures and technologies. However, having made this point, it should be apparent that articulating in this way would be nigh on impossible without Roses book. Inventing Our Selves is essential reading. Lancaster University Mike Michael
Constructing Identities: The Social, The Nonhuman and Change Mike Michael, Sage, London, 1996, 12.95, viii + 179 pp. Social psychology has over the past decade proted enormously from a special relationship with Science and Technology Studies (STS). As with all such relationships, there is doubtless the question of the precise role played by each partner and the regard the one has for the other. Constructing Identities is, to my knowledge, one of the few full length attempts to explore how far insights and practices from STS can be viably translated to address social psychological concerns, and is worthy of attention on these grounds alone. Almost inevitably, STS comes across in the text as the more interesting project, which will doubtless do little to reassure social psychologists already unsettled in their professional identity. For Michael, contemporary social psychology, notwithstanding its resuscitation through social constructionist critique and poststructuralist thought, is beset with at least two ills. First, its reliance on the determination of personal identity by the macrolevel: big culture, long-wave historical narratives, or, in its 514
Book Reviews Foucauldian dialects, institutions. Although such a position is supported by a wealth of detail (especially in the power/knowledge led investigations of the latter) there is nay sight of a convincing mechanism. Second, that the turn to discourse, for all its advances, has left all that is properly extra-discursive unexplained and inexplicable. Michael ably demonstrates the interpenetration of the two problems; it is the expulsion of the extra-discursive that leads directly to the difculties in uniting the various levels of analysis. Between persons and big culture (or big history or snug institutions) are whole chains of intermediaries bodies, artefacts, animals and machines upon and through whom the efcacy and durability of social ordering depends. The way is thus paved in the text for the entrance of Actor Network Theory. With the emphasis rmly switched toward networks of heterogeneous elements a multiplicity of humans and nonhumans, materials and techniques (p. 53) Michael sets about substituting ANTs vocabulary of interessement, translation and enrolment for that of rhetoric and argumentation more familiar to social psychologists. Drawing upon Singletons studies of the network forged around the UK Cervical Screening Programme (CSP), a convincing display is given of how ANT can tease out the operations and ambiguities of power as it emerges from a process of network building: the British Government constructed the identities of a variety of actors, including women, pathology laboratories, cervical cells and GPs . . . In terms of the social ordering of the network, it is this very multiplicity that renders it durable (pp. 834). Michael also goes one better, working up the case for ambivalence as a strategy engaged in by actors, where they at once occupy the margins and the core (p. 65) of the network. GPs who constitute an obligatory point of passage for the screening network are described as switching back and forth between taking the role of spokespersons for the CSP and, in contradictory fashion, stressing their own autonomy. Identity is the key here. Ambivalence is a way of negotiating different identities, a means of seeming to be both inside and outside of the network, without having to compromise on multiplicity. Although Michael uses ambivalence to draw attention to ANTs blindspot, namely the managerialist implications of network building, he stops short of exploring what are essentially the more problematic aspects of the approach. Whilst ANT is capable, as the text suggests, of giving an account of how certain identities (and networks and actors and intermediaries) have arisen
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Book Reviews and how they have persisted (p. 77), it can only make such an account possible by rst enfranchising the nonhuman other, that is, by restricting their identities and capacities to those made possible by the network. ANT is then itself fairly ambivalent in how it conceptualises the dis-ordered or, as Star puts it, the as-yetunlabelled. Michaels use of ANT is less convincing in some of the other studies reproduced in the book, dealing with discourses around animal experimentation and ionizing radiation. Suggestive as they are of how networks of researchers, participants and natural nonhumans may be constructed in the course of social science, there is a greater sense of the Theory of actor-networks being applied here to case material, rather than a network-materialist approach per se. One of the obstacles faced by the text is that in addressing itself to social psychology, it simply has a great deal of groundclearing work to get out of the way before nding its own voice. Thus, the great dualisms of social psychology (micro/macro; self/other; realism/relativism) are paraded, one by one, before being dispatched by judicious recourse to a well dened facet of ANT. But, as Latour, Law and Callon have been at pains to stress in their recent writings, the ability of ANT to level dualisms comes at the price of generating its own untheorised others, such as selfhood and embodiment, to name but two. It is in the moments where the programmatic concerns are allowed to lapse that the text is most intriguing. Some important links are made, for example, between Latours position on the disciplining of the body by artefacts and Deleuzes reworking of Foucauldian visibilities. This leads to a description of how networked environments make possible, or afford (in J.J. Gibsons sense) certain embodied powers. Pressed a little further, this might lead to a richer engagement with Deleuzes thought on the relation between semiosis and materiality that Michael seems to be all but reaching for elsewhere. Towards the end, the text starts to unravel in a suggestive fashion, questioning its own hybrid network of ANT and psychology Too linear? Not enough uidity? (p. 159) it asks. Well perhaps. But there is certainly enough here to hold social psychologists wondering where to go after the discursive turn. This may though be a place to pause for breath and reorientate, rather than to begin rebuilding the discipline. Keele University Steven D. Brown
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Book Reviews The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power Pierre Bourdieu, translated by Lauretta C. Clough, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1996, 45.00, 475 pp. This book, rst published in France in 1989, is seen by Bourdieu as the rst, provisional statement of his general theoretical position on power and its relation to the reproduction of the dominant classes in France. His aim is to compare the structure of the educational eld to the eld of power, using the statistical homology between them as an indicator of specic causal relations in the eld of power. His argument is that modern societies show a progressive differentiation of social spheres, and he explicitly aligns himself with Spencer and Durkheim on the matter of social differentiation. Bourdieu describes the production of distinct and autonomous elds of power in which specic forms of capital are generated. The separation of military and hierocratic spheres (the state and the Church) in feudalism gives way to a more complex system of elds, ranging from the economic (the sphere of industrialists and managers) to the cultural (the sphere of the intellectuals). Between these two, combining economic and cultural elements in varying degrees, are the elds of politics, the civil service, the professions, and the universities. Bourdieu builds on the argument of Distinction, originally published ten years earlier, which explored the relationship between material (de facto) power relations and their transformation into symbolic power relations that dene legitimate rights and obligations. His question was that of how arbitrary economic and political power is transformed through symbolic strategies of legitimation into a conception of aristocratic excellence. In The State Nobility, he combines these concerns with those of earlier papers on social elds and on strategies of reconversion to present his most comprehensive account of class and status in contemporary societies. The dynamics of power are seen as resulting from the clustering of reproduction strategies into distinct modes of reproduction. Reproduction strategies are the ways in which people attempt to secure the perpetuation of their own advantages and of the particular types of resources on which they depend. Feudalism and capitalism, he argues, involve different modes of reproduction, and capitalism itself shows a transition from the mode of reproduction characteristic of its early competitive stage to that of its later,
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Book Reviews monopoly stage. While in feudalism the Church transformed landlord power into political authority, in late capitalism the school sancties social divisions through the bestowing of academic credentials. Contemporary capitalism, then, has shown a transition from the direct reproduction found in the family enterprise of liberal capitalism to the school-mediated reproduction that operates at the level of the class structure. In an economy based around family businesses, strategies for developing a business are directly linked to and dominant over strategies for reproducing the family. In an economy organised around large bureaucratic enterprises, on the other hand, entry to top positions depends upon the possession of specic educational credentials. Networks of sponsorship based around the school group becomes more important than the direct transfer of privileges through the family. In contrast to the direct mechanisms involved in the reproduction of life chances, this new mode operates at the level of the bourgeois class as a whole. The bourgeoisie employs economic strategies, fertility strategies, marriage strategies, educational strategies, legitimation strategies, and so on that allow the reconversion of one form of capital into another and that reproduce the whole class rather than simply its individual members. The continual use of the term strategy implies a conscious and deliberate process, but Bourdieu emphasises that much of this operates at the level of the unintended consequences of action. In a class-based system, he argues, academic judgements unconsciously reect class and status distinctions. The system of elite educational organisations convert various forms of capital into the kind of capital that is required for access to positions of command. The major schools are differentiated according to their role in class reproduction. The cole Normale Suprieure mainly valorises the assets of the cultured bourgeoisie (school teachers and others) and so enables its children to enter cultural positions through the study of subjects such as French, classics, and mathematics. The cole Polytechnique and the cole des Hautes tudes Commerciales mainly valorise the assets of the haute bourgeoisie (commercial and industrial executives) and so allow its children to enter business positions. The cole Nationale dAdministration valorises both the economic and the cultural capital of those from politics and the civil service to allow their children to enter these same professions. The book consists of a massive and very impressive marshalling 518
Book Reviews of empirical data on economic and political recruitment, and data directly on the structure of the academic eld. Much of this comes from Bourdieus early research in 1963, which has been mined in many of his publications over the years. The argument is developed through a series of separate diagrams essentially factor analyses of schools and disciplines that he uses as models, or maps, of the educational eld. Combined with systematic and powerful theorising, these produce a compelling and plausible account of the structure of power in France an account that Bourdieu sees as rooted in a more general model that can be applied to all complex industrial societies and not only to France. A major theoretical limitation is the failure to theorise a concept of class itself, or to allude to any particular theories on which Bourdieu draws. As a result, the term is used rather loosely, and it is not clear in what sense and in what respects the various bourgeois groups that he discusses are in fact members of a single social class and have shared economic interests rooted in property ownership. It is striking that Bourdieu engages in no debate with any of the leading theorists of class in contemporary society. Weber is, of course, considered, but none of those who have looked at the contemporary capitalist class (for example, Poulantzas, or Wright) are even referenced in footnotes. Neither, incidentally, is there any engagement with other theorists of power or any signicant consideration of class and power. (There is not even any attention to the work of writers such as Marceau, who have made interesting uses of Bourdieus own work.) Bourdieu is a man who has made up his mind. This lack of engagement is particularly noticeable when he goes beyond the question of the owners and controllers of economic capital. In relation to those involved in this the core of the bourgeoisie by any denition Bourdieu is excellent, exploring the complex historical interplay of economic capital and social status in industry, commerce, and nance. When he extends his concerns to the top civil servants and politicians, who are considered much more briey, he is less compelling. In particular, he does not show how the changing mode of reproduction well demonstrated for those who depend on economic capital impinges on those in politics and the state administration. They are recruited through similar mechanisms, but what is it that makes them members of a single bourgeois class with distinct economic interests? Bourdieu does, however, show how status considerations can tie diverse groups together into a state nobility
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Book Reviews that is at the heart of his bourgeoisie. The role of the state as guarantor of academic titles allowed the old noblesse de robe to be transformed into the contemporary technocrats of the state and the economy. The language of this book is cumbersome and dense quite unnecessarily so. This is not the fault of the translator, as all of Bourdieus books have this character, both in translation and in the original French. This makes his work a pain, rather than a pleasure, to read, and it frequently leaves his meaning and his arguments frustratingly oblique. This reader, at least, is left angry and disheartened that one of the leading social theorists of our time should have such disdain for his readers that he does not bother to try to write clearly. It means I am certain that Bourdieus work has had less impact than it deserves. The State Nobility is likely to become yet another largely unread classic. University of Essex John Scott
Cultures of Internet: Virtual Spaces, Real Histories, Living Bodies Rob Shields, (ed.), Sage, London, 1996, viii + 196 pp. A number of writers have recently pointed to the strong whiff of utopianism that emanates from much writing about cyberspace and the Internet. If there is one group for whom the topic of the Internet has clearly come as a kind of manna from heaven then it is the publishers of academic books in the broad eld of cultural studies. This book is just one of an ever growing number of recently published collections concerned with the Internet, cyber or virtual culture as their theme. This particular example of the genre contains short introduction from the editor and eleven essays, of variable approach, length and quality. The essays cover a wide range of questions including: free-speech on the Internet; the development of Minitel in France (not strictly part of the Internet); the use of e-mail in Jamaica; the relationship between the body and the Internet; the history of virtual reality; the Internet and the dissolution of the polity; the Internet and the resurrection of the polity; on-line reactions to the death of a bulletin board administrator; questions of community and belonging in Multiple User Dungeons (MUDS); the application of psychoanalytic ideas to on-line communication; and, nally, the (almost obligatory) article by Sadie Plant. 520
Book Reviews This book suffers from many of the problems of all such books of which I want to highlight just three. First, we still know remarkably little quantitatively about the Internet and its users or the uses to which they put the technology. Without a more substantial base of information, we have no idea about how typical the experiences of the Internet (or other online services) reported here actually are. Valuable as qualitative work is, without some wider frame of reference, it always threatens to lapse into the merely anecdotal (as do some of the essays here). Of course, it is possible to give the kind of subjective experience reported here some wider relevance by relating it critically to some broader body of theory. However, with the exception of Mark Lajoies essay on Psychoanalysis and Cyberspace, there is little more in this book than a light coating of fashionable concepts that are uncritically used to provide a little academic scaffolding. Second, much of this book is, like many of the current books on new technologies, technically out of date at the moment that it is published. The pace of change in this area is, or at least is claimed to be, breath-taking, and the detailed descriptions of textbased systems may seem anachronistic today. No one can blame the authors for this. However, the effect on the reader is heightened by lack of a diachronic dimension to many of the essays. Many important questions about the changing culture of the Internet are not really addressed, for example the effects of the advancing commercialisation and corporatisation of the net or changes associated with the expansion of the Internet beyond its home base amongst researchers and academics. At the same time, there is, with a few exceptions (notably Ken Hillis essay on Virtual Reality and, to a lesser extent, Andr Lemos essay on Minitel) little sense of where these technologies or, more importantly their associated cultures, came from and the (social) forces that have shaped them. Finally, there seems to be a massive process of forgetting associated with new information technologies, as though many writers on the topic have fallen for the hype and imagine that these technologies really have transformed society, rendering all that we have learned about communications technologies redundant. This leads to process of rediscovering things that we have known for several decades. Most of the essays in this book exhibit just this effect checking the references reveals that few, if any, of the works cited were published before the mid 1980s. Hence, anyone
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Book Reviews with a background in media or communication studies will be rather underwhelmed by many of the ndings of these essays, for example, that communications technologies have their roots military technology development, that ordinary folks dont just adopt, but rather actively adapt, these technologies. Reading this book is rather like surng the Internet itself the contents are of wildly differing quality; there is little coherence to the whole, there are the characteristic tropes of the Internet (a celebration of the demotic posturing as a celebration of the democratic, the millennial mixture of the apocalyptic and utopian), and so on. What is more this book is often as much a part of Internet culture one might even say hype as that which it tries to describe and analyse: what we could describe as internet.academic.cultural-studies.anglo-canadian. What is surprising, in such supposedly reexive times, is that these writers seem to have such a problem reecting on this fact. University of Newcastle upon Tyne James Cornford
Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows, (eds), Sage, London, 1995, 13.95, 280 pp. What is it to be human in an age of increasingly blurred boundaries between the body and technology? Do virtual reality (VR) and other emergent technologies offer the potential for new and liberatory forms of post-bodied, post-human subjectivity? Are we all cyborgs now? As outlined in Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows excellent introduction, these and other pressing questions are the themes addressed in this wide ranging and stimulating collection. In keeping with the utopian impulses of numerous other commentators, certain of the accounts offered are broadly celebratory in tone. Michael Heim, for instance, whilst cautioning against the risks of misuse, nevertheless extols the potential benets of VR technology, his enthusiastic yet teacherly stance curiously reminiscent of the commentaries on LSD offered by gures such as Timothy Leary in the 60s. Elsewhere, Sadie Plant weaves a compelling and provocative blend of history, psychoanalysis, anthropology and philosophy, her cybernetic feminist account chronicling womans place in the development of the computer, 522
Book Reviews whilst claiming the space beyond the screen as female and dangerous: the place of womans afrmation (Plant, 1995: 60). For Plant, cyberspaces liberatory potential lies in its offer of the possibility of activity without centralized control, an agency . . . which has no need of a subject position (Plant, 1995: 54). The majority of the contributors are more cautious however, with several highly critical of the transcendentalist position which Plants stance arguably represents. In their analyses of various literary and cinematic texts, Kevin McCarron and Samantha Holland both point to the hostility to the esh apparent within the Cyberpunk genre, examples of which tend to reproduce and reinforce the Cartesian mind/body dichotomy, re-asserting the position of the (masculine) subject in the face of encroachments by technology (Holland, 1995: 166167). As Holland also points out, whatever the potential for post-gendered cyborgian identities, in actual cyborg texts (Holland, 1995: 165) masculine and feminine characteristics tend to be heightened rather than subverted (see also Clark, 1995: 1256). Moving away from such textually-oriented analyses, the contributions by Deborah Lupton, Vivian Sobchack and Anne Balsamo are also highly critical of claims surrounding the postbodied, post-gendered potential of the new technologies, each, in different ways, stressing the continuing and undeniable materiality of our lived, eshy selves: as Lupton somewhat ironically notes, while [t]he demands of the eshly body compel computer users to distract themselves from their pursuit to seek nourishment . . . [t]he idealized virtual body does not eat, drink, urinate of defecate (Lupton, 1995: 100). In thinking through Baudrillards (1991) appraisal of J.G. Ballards Crash, which displays a view of the body always as thought object, never as lived subject, Sobchack wishes the former a little pain to bring him (back) to his senses (Sobchack, 1995: 207). For Anne Balsamo, our analyses of the techno-body need to move beyond a focus simply on the body of the user/consumer, and also consider the laboring body: often invisible in postmodern discourse. But . . . centrally involved in the reproduction of various technological formations (Balsamo, 1995: 227). Kevin Robins, similarly, reminds us that the techno-cultural developments currently underway are not taking place in a vacuum, and must, if we are to properly understand their implications, be situated in the broader context of social and political change and upheaval (Robins, 1995: 146). Arguing that we urgently need to
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Book Reviews de-mythologize virtual culture (Robins, 1995: 153), Robins is critical of notions such as virtual empowerment, which he sees as solipsistic, entailing a refusal to recognize the substantive and independent reality of others and to be involved in relations of mutual dependency and responsibility (Robins, 1995: 144). As I hope to have indicated, then, this is a far-reaching and wide-ranging collection, which, in grappling with the sorts of questions noted, should be of substantial interest to a far wider audience than the title might suggest. There are some minor mistakes here and there Robert Wilsons paper on prosthetics, for instance, misleadingly perpetuates some of the myths surrounding male genital piercing (Wilson, 1995: 255). More importantly, I would have liked to see greater consideration given to the lived(sub)culture of cyberpunk. Those who Featherstone and Burrows describe as keen to devise experimental lifestyles and subcultures (Featherstone and Burrows, 1995: 3) dedicated to living out the cyberpunk aesthetic, are mentioned in the editors introduction, but this theme is not taken up in any of the subsequent papers. That said, this is a strong, provocative and important edited collection, which deserves to be widely read. Well balanced in terms of material, it is not only suggestive of many avenues of further research, but should also prove invaluable in the teaching of related undergraduate courses in sociology and cultural studies. University of Southampton References
Baudrillard, Jean, (1991) Jean Baudrillard: Two Essays translated by Arthur B. Evans, Science Fiction Studies 18: 30920.
Paul Sweetman
Feminism and Criminology Ngaire Nafne, Polity Press, Oxford, 1996, 39.50, paper 12.95, vi + 192 pp. In her preface to International Feminist Perspectives in Criminology (Rafter and Heidensohn, 1995), Meda Chesney-Lind asks the question: What would criminology look like if womens experience was at the centre rather than the periphery of the inquiry? (p. xiii). There have been several attempts to answer that question (for example, Gelsthorpe and Morris, 1990; Howe, 1994; Rafter and Heidensohn, 1995) but none as elegant and imaginative as Ngaire Nafnes latest book, Feminism and Criminology. 524
Book Reviews Nafne takes as her starting point a belief that something has gone wrong with criminology as a discipline, that it has been subject to intellectual closure as a consequence of its unwillingness to reect on and question its own world view, or to engage with feminism. Her aim is to explore this mindset from an explicitly feminist perspective (p. 10). To achieve this objective, she embarks rst on a re-appraisal of the history of criminological ideas and then, using the examples of rape and feminist crime ction, suggests ways in which an ethical relation between the sexes might be constructed which might, in turn, enable us to re-envision justice, not [just] to assure equal access to our justice system as it is currently constructed (Klein in Rafter and Heidensohn, 1995: 233). Nafne divides the history of criminological ideas into three broad traditions: empiricism, interactionism and discourse analysis. The empiricist, or conventional scientic, tradition within criminology has assumed the existence of a neutral, investigating, knowing subject (criminological man) and an investigated, knowable object (criminal man). Interactionist, or partisan, criminology produced appreciative standpoint (male) researchers and working class (male) offenders, who should be regarded as true social critics, rather than real criminals (p. 44). Left realists discovered victims and Foucauldians discovered power and discipline but always through a masculinist prism which purported to be gender-neutral. Feminist criminologists (Nafne uses the term very loosely) have engaged with all three traditions, attempting to redress the balance of gender visibility. Feminist empiricism has contributed primarily to understandings of victimisation and the treatment of female offenders. Standpoint feminism has demonstrated that the experiences of crime and criminal justice are different for women and deconstructionist feminist research has raised awareness of the signicance of language for the maintenance of gendered power relations within both criminal justice and criminology itself. The aim of the second part of the book is to explore ways of thinking differently about women, men and their relation to crime. Nafne starts this endeavour with an exciting and risky discussion about the law of rape. She suggests that a reconceptualisation of the law from a feminist perspective might empower women, not by strengthening their claim to victimisation but by making it possible for them to negotiate sexual relationships with
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Book Reviews more condence and authority. Such an approach might invite the criticism of victim blaming but this would be ill-founded. Using the example of the courtesans of Lucknow, Nafne argues that women gain strength in their sexual dealings with men by satirising the demands of conventional femininity, mimicking them, while distancing themselves from them. Women, she claims, appreciate that they are more than they are putting themselves out to be (p. 116). This, for me, is the high point of a book which seems to lose its way a little from here. Rather than pursue the implications of this for the law of rape, Nafne then turns her attention to a different (though ultimately complementary) issue the emergence in crime ction of the female investigator. Using the work of Sara Paretsky, Patricia Cornwell and Helen Zahavi, Nafne traces the portrayal of strong, independent women who can handle and understand male violence and, in the case of Zahavis Bella, a female serial killer, respond in kind, inverting the power relations in sexual encounters. The purpose of the second part of the book is to challenge stereotypical representations of the relationship of women to crime and the received wisdom about the nature of consent in sexual relations. The hypothesis that women are constantly engaged in ironic acts of negotiation with female life (p. 117) and that this perspective is absent from criminological and legal literature seems to be an important and original insight and it is frustrating that this was not pursued further. Instead Nafne seems to take an easier way out, leading to a more obvious and less provocative conclusion. In the nal chapter, Nafne asks how we might construct an ethical non-violent relation between the sexes. This involves opening up conventional criminology through an appreciation of the Otherness of Woman, through an acceptance of difference rather than succumbing to the desire to assimilate and deny separateness. It means bringing in women and other exiles from the cold and listening to what they have to say. Feminism and Criminology is beautifully written and Part 1 in particular communicates a sophisticated theoretical analysis in a very accessible way. The strength of Part 2 lies in its creativity and its invitation to think differently about women, men and crime. It is a ne contribution to feminist scholarship in a discipline which persists in pushing women to its margins and which, according to Nafne, has a lot of catching up to do (p. 141).
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Book Reviews References

Gelsthorpe, L. and Morris, A., (eds), (1990), Feminist Perspectives in Criminology, Open University Press. Howe, A., (1994), Punish and Critique: Towards a Feminist Analysis of Penality, Routledge. Rafter, N.H. and Heidensohn, F., (eds), (1995), International Feminist Perspectives in Criminology: Engendering a Discipline, Open University Press.
Keele University
Anne Worrall
Crimes of Style: Urban Grafti and the Politics of Criminality Jeff Ferrell, Northeastern University Press, Boston, 1996, 19.00, xii + 236 pp. I hope this wonderful study of the heavily criminalised Denver hip hop grafti scene in the 1980s and early 90s will disprove publishers denials that there is a market for ethnography, by becoming a mainstay of reading lists. It evokes the spirit of Becker and Polsky, the excitement of classic Social Problems articles and, with few numbers, creates its epistemic authority from a rhetoric of presence: deep immersion in an urban netherworld and the bringing of its richness to textual life with the arts of thick description. A tendency to romanticise the deviant is a small price to pay for meeting characters like Eye Six, who, though young, poor, black and with limited schooling, developed crude territorial tagging into complex displays of technical and thematic virtuosity in the more expansive throw ups and pieces with which they turned drab walls and billboards into deant art galleries of the streets. Following Jack Katz, Ferrell blends the phenomenologists precise attention to situational detail with the interactionists concern for the situations social negotiation and construction . . . A nights tagging . . . evolves out of prior tagging experiences, networks of friendship among the writers and technical and aesthetic expertise developed over the course of writers careers (p. 167). These elements interact with interruptions, episodes of conict and other contingencies of shared experience. Intense rivalries between crews of writers over their aesthetic status as kings or disparaged toys were played out through complex codes of practice, including dissin the spraying out of rivals work. However, this local subcultural activity was embedded in the
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Book Reviews wider national hip hop movement and also evolved through complex dialectical interaction with coalitions of moral entrepreneurs urban managers, politicians, police and commercial interests who demonised the writers. The coalitions had, by the early 1990s, become networked into a nation wide movement to stamp out the phenomenon, or at least to tame it through regulation and the restriction of writing to inoffensive, safe locations. In turn, the war themes of anti-grafti discourse linked with a series of other wars (eg against drugs and gangs), which targeted the young from poor places and social groups. The wider context for these social control offensives was seen as the domination of social and cultural life by consortia of privileged opportunists and reactionary thugs; the aggressive disenfranchisement of city kids, poor folks, and people of color . . . and . . . the careful and continuous centralization of political and economic authority (p. 16). The nal chapter sets out a broader agenda for anarchist criminology, which is viewed as a critical tool to oppose all hierarchical systems of domination, including capitalism, the nation state, the organised church and patriarchy. It draws on the work of the Birmingham cultural studies school, the aesthetic visions of British punks and new wave musicians, with The Clash, Billy Bragg and The Smiths making cameo appearances; and the demonisation of young people is countered with the claim of The Who that the kids are all right. For Ferrell, political economic domination has a counterpart in epistemic claims about universal knowledge and truth, in this instance, through a hegemony of style. The appreciation of buildings stripped of unsanctioned notices and posters, of well-landscaped yards cleared of weeds and clutter, of streets swept free of litter (and bums) of cities free of grafti is in fact an aesthetics of authority (p. 180), which legitimates political control over property and space. In opposition, grafti as a crime of style offers active, playful anarchistic resistance (p. 187) to this hegemony, in the name of an aesthetic diversity or pluralism (p. 187). This is seen as part of a wider battle to reclaim control over the streets and other so called public spaces, seen as increasingly under the control of government and corporate authorities. This embrace of pluralism is reinforced in Ferrells echoing of Kropotkins critique of the laws intolerance of human ambiguities and the way that legal authority involves an inequitable intrusion into every corner of our lives (p. 191). However, Ferrells narrowly selective narrative of anarchist 528
Book Reviews thought highlights the urban and labour based traditions of the Wobblies and Emma Goldman, which temper individual freedom with social obligations; but this plays down or renders problematic other strands. We can cite, for example, rstly, the rural antistatism which could be said to underpin the racist and survivalist groups holed up in Montana, elements of which have been incorporated by Gingrich style neo-liberals; secondly, the egoistic and masculinist strains of anarchism. If street criminals can be implicitly anarchist, does this apply to Katzs (1988) interviewees who savoured the sadistic pleasures of violence? And what are the precise resistances involved in drive by shootings and the practices of gangs like LAs Crips and Bloods? Are the kids always alright to each other? As Stan Cohen (1980) argued, maybe we should accept that young people involved in crime and youth subcultures can sometimes be racist or in other ways malevolent. The imputation of radical motives or resistance is not always convincing. In addition, European social democrats (eg the Left Realists) would stoutly defend the role of law and the state as instruments which can (if minimally) create positive freedoms, protect the weak and effect a measure of economic redistribution. It would be useful if Ferrell were to engage with European criminologists in the anarchist inspired abolitionist camps, such as Joe Sim, Willem de Haan and Ren van Swaaningen, who have had to grapple more directly with social democratic discourses and practices.
References
Cohen, Stanley, (1980), Folk Devils and Moral Panics. London: Macgibbon and Kee. Katz, Jack, (1988), Seductions Of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions in Doing Evil, New York: Basic Books.
Buckinghamshire College
Kevin Stenson
Imagining Cities Sallie Westwood and John Williams (eds), Routledge, London, 1997, x + 289 pp. This book comprises a series of essays mostly taking forward the cultural turn in urban studies by linking it to questions of ethnicity, memory and narrative. This is certainly an interesting
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Book Reviews project. The urban cultural turn, associated with writers reasserting spatiality in social theory, as well as assorted postmodernist and post-structuralist emphases, promises to broaden urban studies from being a rather narrow specialism into an intellectually vital current within the humanities and social sciences. A reading of this book, however, indicates rather starkly the problems facing those writers taking forward this intellectual movement. It remains unclear how the project goes forward from its well established and well known critique of positivist and realist orthodoxies and for this reason the movement seems stuck in an intellectual rut it claims to have left behind. Admittedly, the authors of the various papers in this book do attempt to deploy a number of different strategies to take forward the urban cultural turn. Some writers practice a reexive technique in which they make their own urban experiences part of their story and analysis. This sometimes come off very well. I was particularly taken by Elizabeth Wilsons fascinating account of urban nostalgia, drawing upon her own memories of living in Leicester. James Donalds (partly) reexive piece on imagining the city, which also draws examples from literary work, does not work quite as well since it lacks focus and direction and lacks the precision and clarity of his other work. Chaneys reections on suburbia owes something to his own upbringing. Im not sure if Sojas paper on six discourses on the metropolis is reexive, but it is certainly self-opinionated and self-regarding. I noted, not for the rst time, that women seem better able to write reexively, without sliding into pomposity, than do men. Developing another theme, the city as narrative, other contributors explicitly explore the role of literary methods for analysing the urban. Donald refers to Lessing and Wolffs work, whilst in an interesting essay Roger Burrows considers the lessons which we might learn from the science ction of William Gibson. Neither of these essays really develops this approach with the sophistication and skill of literary urban critics, however. Other essays in the book offer rather bland accounts of broad issues affecting contemporary urbanism, for instance Chaney on suburban culture, Graham on the impact of telecommunications on urban life, MacBeath and Webb on cyberspace. These essays all had their moments (Chaneys in particular), but in none of them did I feel that the authors did anything more than recycle the issues in largely derivative style, and in none of them did I feel that the authors had invested terribly much time and effort. 530
Book Reviews The other essays fall into two types. One group is composed of rather general overviews of particular issues or places. Thus Charlesworth and Cochranes account of Milton Keynes as an Americanised city offers a fairly familiar account of urban change, Hall provides an overview of urban change in Birminghams city centre, whilst Phil Cohens promising study of community and ethnicity on the Isle of Dogs ends up by retreating into clichs and banalities. Hesses account of the problem of whiteness (an essay developing the rather poorly integrated theme of urbanism and ethnicity) seems somewhat out of place here since its interest in the city (as opposed to the nation) is rather tenuous. There is a second group of papers, however, which really appear to care about the places they study, and their enthusiasm and involvement make them much more readable. Max Farrars exciting (though at times rather bitty) study of ethnicity, spatialisation and the politics of time in Chapeltown, Leeds was provocative, whilst David Byrne writes about Cleveland with typical idiosyncrasy and verve (he even uses a few gures in what is otherwise a fairly data-free book!). Taylor and Jamieson, in perhaps the most rounded piece in the book provide an interesting account of the use of images of working class masculinity in the advertising industry. These papers are all (apparently) derived from the 1995 BSA Conference in Leicester on Contested Cities (a companion volume, will have appeared by the time this review is published). Do the papers in this book really represent the best work being carried out in British social science on urban theory, ethnicity, memory and the city as narrative? Although there are some good essays here, I nd it difcult to believe that this is the best overall collection which could have been put together to explore these themes. In particular and with some honourable exceptions the level of theoretical sophistication is really rather weak. Various intellectual currents, such as work inuenced by Lefebvre; actor network theory; social anthropological debates about community, space and place; Foucault; Benjamin; the new urban cultural history and so on could have been mined much more effectively than they are here. The result is a disappointing volume which does not live up to its promise. University of Manchester Mike Savage
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Book Reviews Consumer Culture and Modernity Don Slater, Blackwell, Oxford, 1996, 45.00, paper 12.95, 230 pp. Theories of consumer culture which predict that we are now entering a new era of postmodernity have been at the centre of academic discourse for over a decade. A book which argues that the characteristics of consumer culture are inextricably bound up with modernity (p. 9) is therefore long over-due. The strength of this book is its clarity of synthesis in associating consumer culture with a comprehensive range of sociological literature. The broad structure of the book begins with a survey of classical approaches, followed by contemporary social theory and concluded through a critique of cultural studies. Slater argues that consumer culture has not only been an integral dening feature of modernity, but that the consumer revolution (p. 18) preceded the industrial revolution. The literature of revisionist historians is presented through an original and highly successful looking backwards exercise, through which Slater traces consumer culture from the present day to the early modern period. He thereby highlights the emergence of a new world of goods (a wide penetration of consumer goods into the everyday lives of more social classes) (p. 17) in which fashion and taste emerged as key elements of consumption. Consumer culture was thus born to modernity. This book critically explores the contrasting philosophies through which the project of modernity has been understood. Liberalist traditions are discussed in which consumers are presented as private individuals rationally pursuing their self-dened interests through a mechanism (the market) that socially coordinates individuals actions without compromising the autonomy of their choices (p. 42). In contrast, theories concerning the rationalization (Weber, Simmel) and reication (Lukacs) of social life are then examined. Rather than describing the experience of modern subjects as free and autonomous, these approaches focus on capitalism as constituting a world which is objective, natural and independent of human action, and which comes to regulate human life as an all-encompassing power (p. 117). Drawing upon Raymond Williams conception of culture as a social ideal, Slater shows how an ephemeral modernity dismantles the certainties of traditional societies and causes social pathologies (p. 98), such as Durkheims anomie, Rousseaus concern with the authenticity of human values, and Marxs alienation of 532
Book Reviews subjects and objects. Through a concise discussion of Adorno and Horkheimers culture industry and Tocquevilles notion that desire makes slaves out of men because passion destroys reason (p. 82), Slater illustrates the preoccupation of modernist theorists with a depthless debased mass culture, which undermines culture as a social ideal: if true culture retreats to higher ground as the tide of commerce oods its banks, consumer culture wallows in its mud, an abomination thrown up from its depths. It is a culture that can be bought by anyone with the cash; and it is culture that is produced to be sold (p. 70). This is a theme which can be traced to many postmodern writers such as Baudrillard and Jameson. Regarding contemporary social theory, Slater focuses on the claims of Giddens, Bauman and Beck concerning the requirement of individuals to choose and produce the self via, consumer goods and activities through which we construct appearances and organize leisure time and social encounters (p. 85). This post-traditional self is part of a reexive project (p. 91) in which people are free to choose their identity(ies) but this also makes them responsible for their choice, a responsibility which involves risk and anxiety. Consumer culture offers guidance through the media and experts, but its success receives scant attention. Here the reader is rst introduced to theories concerning late modernization and postmodernism, which Slater astutely criticises for being confused, seeming to indicate both ultimate freedom and ultimate anomie (p. 205). Again, this ambivalence between anomie and the free subject is nothing new and holds parallels with the tensions found in classical approaches between the sovereign rational consumer and the social pathologies associated with mass culture. Slater then examines the meaning and use of things. A justiably critical account of semiotics is presented in which he indicates that while the meaning of things and the concept of needs may be culturally dened, it is through consumption that we make social sense and social order not merely within the connes of a sign system but across a total social eld of practices (p. 151). By summarising the work of Mauss, Douglas, Veblen and Bourdieu, the use of things is presented as mapping the social, a means of symbolically marking social mobility, classication and distinction. As might be expected, issues of cultural capital and information feature prominently in this discussion, but we only nd hints of the enduring signicance of social structure.
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Book Reviews While the reader is left with an impression of the main thrust of these theories and a newcomer to Bourdieu would benet from Slaters clear synopsis, the role of consumption in mediating social relations (whether class, gender or interpersonal) is not as fully developed as it might be. The nal chapter presents a nicely packaged discussion of postfordism and postmodernity, in which the reader gains a clear impression of the authors position within the modern/postmodern debate: most of the issues and conceptual tools of postmodernity, if not its conclusions, come out of the very long-term concern with consumer culture that is coextensive with modernity (p. 209). There is however, a danger that the reader may be left with the impression that social life has not changed signicantly during the course of the century. Slater could have emphasised more what appears to be his central argument, that consumer culture, while an increasingly prominent mediator of social life, is still to be understood in terms of the dialectic of modernity, the tension between rational sober, and hedonistic, emotional and insatiable consumers. The well-developed and clear line of thought which runs throughout the book makes it accessible to the advanced undergraduate, postgraduates and scholars, who will benet from an authoritative ordering of the key issues surrounding consumer culture. It is this comprehensive ordering which will make this book an important text within the sociology of consumption. Lancaster University Dale Southerton
Popular Music in Theory: An Introduction Keith Negus, Polity, Oxford, 1996, 45.00, paper 12.95, 243 pp. In recent years there has been something of a mini-boom in academic publications on popular music. While still overshadowed by writing on television and lm, there is no doubt that music is gaining in importance as an object of sustained analysis. At least three developments suggest themselves to explain this. First, the perceived importance of music in all sorts of different environments and contexts; second, the way in which cultural forms have become increasingly interlinked on a number of different planes; and third, the increased interdisciplinary nature of the social sciences and humanities themselves. Keith Negus welcome and insightful book connects to all these 534
Book Reviews dimensions and indeed represents some of the benets of relating popular music to other media; and something that may become popular music studies, if it is not already so, to a wider range of intellectual debates on the topic of culture. In contrast to other characterisations of the eld which also have designs to function as textbooks, Negus organises his review and arguments thematically rather than through a division between production and consumption. His theoretical approach both facilitates and is strengthened by this. Negus spreads his attention far and wide, including discussions of audiences, industry, mediations, identities, histories, geographies and politics. These reviews are never less than informative and all engage the attention. The opening chapters which move from audiences to identities via the industry and mediation are particularly well-paced and coherent. By contrast, some of the later chapters seem less well focused and the discussion of politics suffers from being centred on the idea of the rock era which is very quickly revealed to have signicant shortcomings. A harder target would have strengthened the overall signicance of the argument at this point. However, as he suggests himself in the introduction, it is the concept and discussion of mediation that is crucial to Neguss approach. Negus does not offer this frame as a simple solution to the vexed questions of the complexity of the distinctions and interrelations of production and consumption, but it does function in that discursive space. Three senses of mediation are addressed: as intermediary action, as transmission, and of social relationships. Through consideration of print, radio and video, Negus points toward the struggles which take place around distribution, to argue that There are many mediating links that connect the control of the industry with the creativity of the audience (p. 98). This suggests a new approach to what have often been seen as production or audience issues. The case is well made here and the later chapters of the book, at least implicitly, attempt to show how the approach might deliver in the context of specic discussions. There is much to admire in this perspective, but it does seem to need development, especially I would want to argue in the characterisation and consideration of the audience. In his specic chapter on this topic, Negus seems to end up rather close to recommending a return to Hall and Morleys encoding/decoding model as a mechanism for introducing the corrective of industry
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Book Reviews against the perceived excesses of active audience theory. This seems to neglect the many difculties with such a paradigm which include problems with integrating analyses of the differential social bases of decoding, understanding how the approach can be developed beyond current affairs and so on. Perhaps an alternative might be suggested, which starts from the nature of everyday life. Negus usefully characterises the complexity and different roles of music (as linked to other media) in everyday life, but it is consideration of the way forward that is on the agenda. In that respect, my own view is that the study of popular music is in need of some fresh doses of empirical investigation of the sort of topics considered by Negus, especially space and identity, informed by the type of theoretical consideration engaged in here and elsewhere. This might ultimately suggest that on the analytic and substantive focus should not fall on any one medium or practice, but the complex interactions and re-orderings which seem to be developing with ever increasing speed. One effect of this might be to show that popular music is related to identity in a devastating complexity of ways, which cry out for ordering. It is to Negus credit that he so clearly points up the issues and offers new ways to relocate material in a book that functions as both a clear review that can be recommended to students and as a somewhat iconoclastic re-interpretation which engages the more experienced. In conclusion, this is a signicant contribution to both the constitution of the body of evidence gathered on popular music to date and a book which tends to suggest ways in which that material can be understood in different ways. not the least signicant of its implications is that the bringing together of social sciences and the humanities in the study of a specic area might tend to explode the current boundaries of the consideration of the object of study. Should our focus be on the complexities of everyday life in a media drenched society, rather than the production and consumption of discreet forms and would such a focus be able to overcome such dichotomies and their associated research agendas? University of Salford Brian Longhurst
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Book Reviews Football, Nationality and the State Vic Duke and Liz Crolley, Longman, Harlow, 1996, 10.99, 164 pp. Duke and Crolley have produced a ne and timely study of the relationships that exist between football, the state and national and cultural identities. The book is well researched, being rooted in a wealth of research trips rather than desk-based analysis. It combines the sociological scholarship of Vic Duke, who is particularly well informed on football in East Europe and the Low Countries, and the linguistic and cultural studies skills of Liz Crolley, most at home in Hispanic nations. The nine chapters also include one written by Rocco De Biasi, a leading authority on the sociological dimensions of Italian football. Written in an accessible and engaging style, the text conforms to the Longman formula which favours short and relatively introductory texts, while still providing an academic audience with fresh insights and information on footballs cross-cultural dimensions. The book is attractively packaged through its concise discussion of particular sub-themes, regular subheadings, an excellent index, and the consistent inclusion of photographs from Dukes reliable lens. In addition to an introductory chapter and a concluding piece on women and football, the book essentially consists of case studies of the historical and sociological interplay between the state, nationality and cultural identity within a football context. These case studies are separated into two coherent sections. Initially, it examines those football nations which exist within a single state, such as the four Home Unions in the UK; the Castilian, Basque and Catalan nations within Spain; and the Flemish and French linguistic nations within Belgium. It then turns to examine the more direct, political relationship between football clubs and the state, such as the patronage of East European clubs by major state institutions; Silvio Berlusconis control of the Italian private media, AC Milan and right-wing political strategy; and the employment of the militant barras bravas fans found in Argentinian stadia, to assist major politicos within football and political elections. The studies complement and embellish existing academic research within these areas. While there is a growing body of material available on the situation in the UK, Italy, Spain and Argentina, the book does provide fresh work on these Latin nations, as well as more ground-breaking introductory studies of Eastern Europe and Belgium. The most intriguing chapter considers those anomalous
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Book Reviews football cases, in which particular teams play across the border within other nations. While the more celebrated cases of Berwick Rangers (England into Scotland) and Derry City (North into South Ireland) are examined here, a fascinating short study of Cyprus is also included. Following the invasion of north Cyprus by Turkey in 1974, approximately 165,000 Greek Cypriots were forced to ee south. Consequently, their football clubs were similarly uprooted, but were encouraged to remain within the UEFArecognised Greek Cypriot league of the south, thus symbolizing the unjust reasons for their refugee status. Hopefully, the authors will develop this research area into a full-blown case study. The book clearly has a contemporary relevance to it, at a time when the dissolution and reconstruction of national and cultural identities has become almost an established social process. With the exceptions of Cyprus and Eastern Europe, the content does incline towards those nations where footballs extensive history is in a sense mirrored by the establishment of relatively longeval, if contested, territory-based nation-states. Future academic research would do well to use Duke and Crolleys text as a thematic springboard, for examining the interplay of state-formation, national and cultural identity and football, within dissolved or emergent nation-states. Duke and Crolley have pointed the way here towards addressing the case of old, Eastern European buffer nations. Our knowledge of the deeper relationship between these themes would be enhanced by further studies undertaken within the new republics of the old Soviet Union and Africa, as well as Central America, the Middle East and south-east Asia, where the new football cultures are quickly emerging. Given the books key themes, one weakness is perhaps the incongruity of the nal chapter, which examines women within football. Although this is a contemporary issue that will assist in marketing the book, the specic question of womens football is hardly raised elsewhere, nor are the related themes of masculinity and gender roles. Nevertheless, the book will appeal to a big market, ranging from academics through a large student readership to the coveted lay audience with a general interest in football. The potential size of this latter group is highlighted by the books ofcial launch at the Manchester branch of the specialist sports bookshop, Sportspages, in November 1996. It deserves such a wide readership. University of Aberdeen 538 Richard Giulianotti
Book Reviews Changing Forms of Employment: Organisations, Skills and Gender Rosemary Crompton, Duncan Gallie and Kate Purcell (eds), Routledge, London, 1996, 47.50, paper 14.99, xi + 281 pp. The adjective that best describes this volume is worthy. It is a series of eleven essays from a conference in 1994 accompanied by a brief introduction. Most papers report detail from recent empirical studies about corporations, industrial sectors, the operation of different labour markets and workers experiences of their current jobs. Such chapters are mostly based on sound research which has generated detailed knowledge about issues of importance to the sociology of employment. What can be excavated from such chapters are mostly applications of new data to long-running debates about corporate restructuring, labour market processes, skill levels and gender inequalities. For instance, Gallie shows that most workers think they exercise more skill, hold more responsibility and work harder in 1992 than in 1986. Wajcman provides evidence that it is not the characteristics of women managers, but the organizational culture of even well-intentioned corporations that creates the glass-ceiling effect. The occupation of electronic engineer in Japan and Britain differs because of the nature of workplace learning (Lam). And Gregory and OReilly suggest that the contrasting attitudes of British and French women towards parttime employment in the banking and retail sectors derive from national systems of social reproduction. Changing Forms of Employment is primarily a monument of normal science tentative questioning of the plausibility of generalizations, arguing that the extent of change in particular institutions has been exaggerated or under-estimated, showing that some causes of change are less signicant in particular contexts than has previously been claimed. I certainly do not wish to denigrate the endeavours and achievements of normal social science; it is essential to have accepted understandings of the social processes surrounding employment tested and conrmed on the basis of repeated study. Such scholarship is highly commendable, but not always exciting or thought-provoking. As one would expect of a volume with eminent contributors, there are articles that command attention. Tony Lanes analysis of the restructuring of the merchant shipping industry is arresting. This is partly because it is an industry with some very distinctive characteristics but which has received little sociological attention, so the account is highly instructive. But it is mostly because
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Book Reviews merchant shipping offers an extreme, and decidedly shocking, example of how genuinely global and de-regulated industries might operate. Flags of convenience mean absence of regulation of the sea-worthiness of vessels or of proper training; and when crews are recruited from a truly international pool the consequence is that they often have no common language in which to communicate in a crisis. The safety, employment and environmental issues are matters for serious concern. I also appreciated an analytical and conceptual piece by Bryn Jones which pondered issues like why skills cannot be commodities, what exactly is a market, and what is the best way to conceptualise the social constitution of labour market processes. Briey illustrated by two contrasting case studies of self-employed construction workers and graduate engineers, the essay offered material worthy of subsequent reection. Overall, this is a volume which experts in British sociology of employment will refer to and engage with in some measure, but it is likely to have little impact on the wider sociological community. Lancaster University Alan Warde
Varieties of Transition: The East European and East German Experience Claus Offe, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1996, 45.00, paper 14.95, viii + 249 pp. Seven of these nine essays are revised from Claus Offes Der Tunnel am Ende des Lichts (1994), a title (The Tunnel at the End of the Light) which better expresses his view that the transformations in Eastern Europe will be protracted and difcult. Five of the essays have been published in whole or part in English before. The revised essays are also said to be updated but the only reference later than 1994 is to one of Offes own works. This volume has two main virtues. First, it concentrates not on the empirical detail of transition but on the theoretical, philosophical and legal issues involved. As the theorisation of the unprecedented movement from state socialism to capitalism remains largely unwritten, any help Offe can give has to be welcome. Second, it includes examination of the incorporation of the former GDR in the FRG. This is interesting both in itself and for the comparisons and contrasts it affords with the other CMEA 540
Book Reviews countries in Eastern Europe. Again this is welcome because most other commentators have excluded the German case from comparative analysis. Offes opening discussion of the structure of industrial societies contains some nice aphorisms. The assertion that capitalism fetters the productive forces and state socialist society unleashes them is . . . one of the most unfortunate errors of historical materialism (p. 3). State socialism displays control without selfobservation, capitalism self-observation without control (p. 4). Also state socialism attempts macro-planning, but prompts micro-anarchy in the production process; capitalism couples macro-anarchy at the level of the national economy with microplanning at the level of the individual rm. Offe also argues that the following order of preferences seems to have a great deal of moral plausibility . . . exemplary socialism, exemplary capitalism, factual capitalism, factual socialism (p. 6). Eastern European societies in transition have simultaneously to put in place a new economic order, a new legal and constitutional order and new rules of social organisation. They have to effect the triple transition to capitalism by democratic design. In the process they have to handle the frictions inseparable from changes in social and distribution policy and they have to change elites and deal with displaced functionaries from the old regime. Offe stresses how different capitalism by design is from the development of capitalism in the west and he examines a series of theories and scenarios all of which point more to failure than success. Offe hypothesises that political principles are better than economic performance, and economic performance better than cultural identity, as a source of macro-integration (p. 11), but he also suggests that the ethnication of politics in Eastern Europe must appear rational to many individuals and collectivities insofar as it affords possibilities of mobilisation in the associational wasteland (p. 71) where civil society should be. Why should the restitution of property have a higher priority than, say, compensation for imprisonment? And should restitution extend to property conscated between liberation and the coming to power of communist governments? Should it, too, be offered to those who are no longer nationals of the countries concerned not just to migrs but also expellees like the Germans forced out of Czechoslovakia? And which members of the former nomenklatura should lose their jobs, or even be prosecuted for
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Book Reviews what they did under the old regime? How far should exposure, or what the Czechs call lustration, go? Offe provides no easy answers but he does mount an unusually full examination of the issues for a social scientist, because processes of restitution and lustration are part of a remoralisation of societies whose economic stagnation was only exceeded by their moral bankruptcy. Liberal economists expected a rapid establishment of capitalism in Eastern Europe generally once the shackles of an entrepreneurialism they assumed to be innate were removed. The prospects for the former GDR were thought to be even brighter; the FRG had effected one economic miracle in its post-war reconstruction and it was assumed that it could effect another in its new eastern Lnder. The reality has proved very different; in some respects economic regeneration has proceeded more slowly than in Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary. Offe gives a number of reasons for this, but two are especially signicant. Poles, Czechs and Hungarians have taken responsibility for the reconstruction of their countries. Citizens of the eastern Lnder (Ossis) have not been allowed to take responsibility for their part of Germany. Instead many in public administration, the law and the universities whose loyalties and competences were assumed to be appropriate only for the old regime have been purged in favour of personnel brought in from the west. Wessis have also taken over as managers in most factories. There is also greater solidarity among Poles, Czechs and Hungarians than there is between Wessis and Ossis. Wessis resent the size of the scal transfers from west to east; Ossis resent their lower standard of living and their poorer economic prospects. Complete integration of the former GDR in the FRG will take well into the next century contrary to the original expectations of all parties. University of Salford C.G.A. Bryant
The Rise and Fall of State Socialism: Industrial Society and the Socialist State David Lane, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1996, 45.00, paper 12.95, 233 pp. An era has ended. State socialism in Europe began with the October Revolution in Russia in 1917 and ended with the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. Variants of state socialism may continue in China, Vietnam and Cuba but for how much longer? 542
Book Reviews Now is a time to take stock and this David Lane does quite brilliantly. For most of the book he connes himself to examination of why and how state socialism rose and fell, but in the nal chapter he also asks a question dear to him what it all means for the future of socialism. Lane opens with as helpful a set of characterisations of socialism, state socialism, the Soviet variant of state socialism, Leninism, communism, and market socialism as any student could hope to nd. He then examines the socialist project in connection with various socialist movements, Marxism, Leninism and Bolshevism, before describing and accounting for the features of the Soviet model and actual developments in the Soviet Union. He stresses how The prot motive and the market had been abolished and replaced by planning; the values of collectivism and equality had superseded those of individualism and freedom (pp. 389), abstracts four principles of Marxism-Leninism as an ideology of development for the early stages, and another four for the period from 1936 to 1991, outlines the within-system contradictions and concludes that Rather than being a catalyst for world revolution, the events of 1917 proved to be a cul-de-sac for socialism (p. 51). Lane then moves to the growth and spread of communism, concentrating on three cases China as an example of autonomous internal revolution, Poland as an example of the imposition of communist rule, and Cuba as an example of an internal or military coup which brought to power leaders who only later declared themselves to be Marxist or Leninist. He indicates how different origins have shaped subsequent developments, and, as throughout the book, what most impresses is the connection of sociological theories, socialist theories, historical events and empirical evidence. I know enough about Poland, however, to query some of the detail. Poland was not partitioned in 1891 (p. 62). Presumably this is a typo for 1791 and a reference to the second partition mooted in that year but effected in 17923, but why the second and not the rst partition of 17713 or the third which completed the dismemberment of Poland in 1795? The restoration of a Polish state occurred in 1918 not 1923; the collectivisation of agriculture peaked in 1954, the year the 1950 six-year plan collapsed, and not 1956, the year of the Polish spring; and the Workers Defence Committee (KOR) was a product of the disturbances of 1976 and not, as is, no doubt inadvertently, implied, an accompaniment of Solidarity in 19801. I just hope readers with interests in other countries do not nd similar
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Book Reviews mistakes. More seriously, I wish Lane had mentioned the innovatory oppositional strategy of new evolutionism associated with KOR. It proposed the (re)generation of civil society rather than a direct challenge to the party-state the course broadly followed by Solidarity in 19801 and points up the political signicance of the second societies which subsequently developed in Hungary and elsewhere. Indeed, I suggest that Lane underestimates the signicance of Solidarity in the fall of state socialism generally. Lanes chapter on market reforms considers theories of market socialism and the reforms instituted in Yugoslavia and China and proposed in Czechoslovakia before the Soviet-led intervention of 1968. Lane argues that economic reforms have in the past undermined central political control and are likely to do so again in China. It is, however, perverse of Lane to devote space to Czechoslovakia where reforms were not implemented rather than Hungary where the new economic mechanism introduced in the 1970s, and the later development of the largest second economy in Eastern Europe, did not spare the communists from defeat in 1989 but did lead to the exchange of systems. On the fall of state socialism, Lane is best on the Soviet Union, Gorbachevs misconceived perestroika, and, his major argument, the defeat of a nomenklatura-dependent political class by an acquisition class (Webers Enwerbsklasse) of intellectuals and professionals condent in the marketability of their skills. There and elsewhere he also stresses the role of the west, including the IMF and the World Bank, as a proxy capitalist class and the irresistibility of nationalism, in the absence of any other ideology, once the authority of Marxism-Leninism and its representatives had been irreversibly weakened. What has been lost for the socialist cause by the collapse of state socialism? (p. 190). Answer: belief in the achievability of full employment and comprehensive social services. How can that be recovered? Answer: it cannot until it is recognised that capitalism is a global system requiring a global socialist response. What then? Answer: just as Lenin once invented a new kind of party, so must socialists now. But how can the wish beget the deed? No answer. David Lanes account of the rise and fall of state socialism and its variations may end lamely, but it is also erudite, bold and, despite its shortish compass, improbably comprehensive. Students will nd it invaluable; specialists will nd it a hard act to follow. University of Salford 544 C.G.A. Bryant
Book Reviews Jean Baudrillard: A Study in Cultural Metaphysics Charles Levin, Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf, London, 1996, 12.99, xiv + 286 pp. This study is a welcome and detailed addition to the steadily expanding secondary literature on the work of Jean Baudrillard. It has the potential advantage of approaching Baudrillards muchmisunderstood theory-ction from a different perspective, that of contemporary psychoanalysis, of which the author is a practising member. The study attempts to cover the entire Baudrillardian oeuvre, from the early 1960s to the present day. This is no easy task however and Levin does not always manage to present a sufciently clearly structured meditation on the many twists and turns of Baudrillards career. At the beginning of his work Levin proposes the term cultural metaphysics (p. 7) to describe Baudrillards general theoretical approach, this is a form of speculative or intuitive social criticism. Levins choice of this term is not entirely efcacious for Baudrillard prefers to write in terms of the social or increasingly of objects or things, and tends to reserve the term cultural for marginal considerations of art, cinema and photography. Further, it is not at all clear that Baudrillard offers a metaphysic, indeed anti-metaphysics may be a better term since although Baudrillard is willing to write on behalf of the world and nature, he rejects any transcendentalism of the subject. In the opening chapters Levin, rightly, situates Baudrillards work in relation to Nietzsche, Mauss and Bataille, emphasising the importance of archaic festival, the gift, and the accursed share in the interpretation of Baudrillards notion of symbolic exchange. Levin then seeks to elucidate his subject by drawing on a range of established theoretical terms; Freuds unheimlich or uncanny, Heideggers gestell or framing, and Kristevas chora, that Baudrillard himself rarely, if ever, uses. Sections two and three of the study establish the main themes of the development of Baudrillards thought and Levin establishes a range of interesting points. Of particular importance here is the considerable distance between Baudrillards work and other, more dominant strands of Structuralist and Post-Structuralist theory represented by gures such as Barthes, Lacan, Foucault and Derrida. As Levin makes clear Baudrillards perspective identies and challenges a wide-ranging complicity between much supposedly radical theory and contemporary market imperatives. This
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Book Reviews occurs through their abstraction or reication of structures, codes and signs, often coupled with a residual ethico-political idealism which for Baudrillard aligns them with the shibboleths of Enlightenment rationalism. Part four of Levins work turns specically to Baudrillards notion of symbolic exchange and although the author approaches this subject with wit and assurance, again certain of the terms of his study continue to be tangential to Baudrillards own. Levins deployment of Freudian psychoanalytic terminology occasionally becomes strained and incautious. In particular, he does not distinguish adequately between the Freudian unconscious, Batailles protless expenditure and most importantly Baudrillards critical re-thinking and departure from these inuences. In fact Baudrillards key work Symbolic Exchange and Death (1993, orig. 1976) makes a powerful case for the irreducibility of the symbolic to the Freudian unconscious. Baudrillards later work evinces a considerable hostility towards both psychology and psychoanalysis and he clearly perceives himself to be operating on different terrain. Further, Levins emphasis on metaphysics leads him to underestimate the extent to which much of Baudrillards analysis is rooted, rmly, in the determination of socio-historical transformation, a project that has many parallels with the Sociology of Max Weber for example. While Levin avoids many of the commonplace mis-readings of Baudrillard he frequently refers to him as a nihilist without substantiating this claim. Part ve of Levins study makes good use of a wide range of tele-visual, cinematic and literary references as illustrations of characteristic Baudrillardian themes. Levin examines the work of Victor Segalen, an important inuence on Baudrillards later theory and offers an interesting discussion of the David Cronenberg lm M. Buttery. Levin is particularly effective in his thorough discussions of the notions of seduction, sexuality and the double. This is a sound contribution to a neglected area of Baudrillards theory which stresses play, game and illusion over xity, nality and identity. The nal section deals with Postmodernist or what Levin terms Postmortemist (p. 209) politics and here the considerable disparities between Baudrillards thought and Levins own concerns become increasingly apparent. A number of conated terms and ideas appear, in particular Levin seems not to distinguish adequately between the symbolic-ritualism-rule and the unconscious546
Book Reviews moralism-law. This is a serious problem since much of Baudrillards work hinges on this distinction. Levin ends his work with a defence of liberal Post-Structuralism and the rational conscience (p. 240) pursuing an individualist-psychologist reading that neither adequately represents, nor critically appraises Baudrillards work. Finally Levin includes a glossary of key terms which provide helpful summaries of a number of Baudrillards idiosyncratic notions but also includes, curiously, terms which Baudrillard does not employ. In summary this is a thorough and original study of Baudrillards complex body of theory. In many areas it is effective but the tone is uneven. Levin deploys a number of infelicitous terms and concepts and ends by diverting, radically, Baudrillards own material. It demonstrates the limitations of a psychoanalytic reading of Baudrillard. Loughborough University William Pawlett
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The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 1997

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