Reviews 55
on such a (statistically unlikely) goal. Eck-
stein also suggests eliminating any admis-
sions advantage slots on sports teams, espe-
cially at DIII and Ivy League schools. The
latter would most likely meet with the
most opposition, particularly among the
upper-middle class families who are such
a large part of the pay-to-play college
pipeline.
Given the overall popularity of sports in
the United States—and especially college
sports (reflected in over 25 million people
watching two basketball games in March
2017)—it is clear that this book has a relevant
message. Not only would How College Athlet-
ics Are Hurting Girls’ Sports interest instruc-
tors of undergraduate Sociology of Sport
courses, but it also could be a good fit for
introductory courses. Eckstein shows how
to treat a major part of everyday life with
a sociological lens, a critical thinking skill
vital for all students, athletes and non-
athletes alike.
Technosystem: The Social Life of Reason, by
Andrew Feenberg. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2017. 235
pp. $35.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780674971783.
GEORGE RITZER
University of Maryland
gritzer@umd.edu
Technosystem: The Social Life of Reason is the
latest in a long line of books and articles on
the philosophy of technology by Andrew
Feenberg, a student of Herbert Marcuse and
holder of the Canada Research Chair in Phi-
losophy of Technology at Simon Fraser Uni-
versity. The seven chapters in this book are
derived from a series of essays published
by the author over the last decade. As a result,
the book suffers the usual fate of such
efforts—it is repetitive and not nearly as
coherent as would be a totally original book.
The main title of this book—Technosystem—
is somewhat misleading since it is not so
much about technosystems, but is rather
a summary and critical analysis of what var-
ious scholars, famous and not-so-famous,
have had to say about technosystems, or at
least some of the issues that relate to them.
Thus the book deals with a who’s who of
scholars in and around this area of study,
including Marcuse and other critical theo-
rists, Heidegger, Arendt, De Certeau, Fou-
cault, and Lukács, as well as such lesser-
known scholars as Albena Azmanova, Gil-
bert Simondson, and Don Ihde. Ideas
derived from these thinkers constitute the
bases and take-off points for the develop-
ment of Feenberg’s own thinking on
technology.
The subtitle of the book, The Social Life of
Reason, is more meaningful substantively. It
suggests the aspects of this work that are
likely to be of greatest interest, and most rel-
evant, to sociologists. (Of course, sociologi-
cal theorists would find virtually everything
about this book of interest.) This is especially
true of the occasional excursions into the role
of technology in medicine, the environment,
the status of women, and especially the
Internet. However, sociologists need to be
forewarned that they will need to wade
through some heavy philosophy to get to
the sociology.
Feenberg’s central point, articulated in var-
ious ways, is that society and technology co-
produce one another. According actors and
the social a central role in technology, Feen-
berg sets the stage for his central argument
about the need for a ‘‘gestalt switch’’ in think-
ing about the structure of modernity. This
involves a move from a focus on those who
create and control technology to a focus on
the struggles over technology between the
creators/controllers and those who use or
are affected by it.
Rejecting the grand narratives common to,
among others, critical theorists, Feenberg
focuses on the local struggles common to,
among others, the specific areas mentioned
above. Thus, the future does not lie in the res-
olution of society-wide struggles such as that
between the proletariat and capitalists, but
rather in the successful settlement of a series
of local struggles. There will not be one grand
resolution of dialectal tensions, but rather
a series of resolutions of more specific con-
flicts. These, however, will not lead merely
to reform, but rather to changes of epochal
significance, such as ‘‘environmentally
sound technology, the emergence of new
possibilities on the Internet, the material
Contemporary Sociology 48, 1
56 Reviews
consequences of changes in the status of
women’’ (pp. 116–17). This focus on local,
context-bound progress is not Marx’s clarion
call for societal, even global, revolution.
However, individually and collectively they
add up, in Feenberg’s view, to a major and
much-needed social change. In adopting
this view, Feenburg accepts the more opti-
mistic view of Marcuse rather than the pessi-
mism of other critical theorists such as
Horkheimer.
Technology, to Feenburg, is not, and must
not be, a reified reality. Rather, it is always
imbricated in the lifeworld. It is in the life-
world that perspectives based on experience
are created and found. These perspectives
and their adherents have the ability to not
only inform and modify technology, but to
rein in its uncontrolled development. The lat-
ter is a familiar concern of Marxists and neo-
Marxists, but it is usually focused on the
more general uncontrolled development of
capitalism. While Marxists usually see hope
in the proletariat, Feenburg sees it in the lay-
man’s ‘‘nonformal knowledge’’ formulated
in the lifeworld. This knowledge offers an
alternative to the ‘‘instrumental reason’’
that predominates in much of society, espe-
cially in the realm of technology. Hope lies
in democratic interventions, based on non-
formal knowledge, including ‘‘hacking of
computerized systems, lawsuits, hearings
and forums . . . lay participation in the
work of scientific experimentation and tech-
nical design’’ (p. 132). This will involve and
enhance the dialogue, even the conflict,
across the porous boundary between the for-
mal rationality of the scientist and the non-
formal rationality found in the lifeworld.
Both are rational in their way. A fuller inte-
gration of those rationalities would produce
technologies that are both scientifically and
socially rational. In other words, the needed
dialogue should lead to technical design
codes that are more responsive to the needs
of the public and that integrate its inputs.
The relationship between society and tech-
nology in Feenburg’s work resembles the
intertwined hands of Escher’s famous
print ‘‘Drawing Hands.’’ Like those hands,
society and technology are deeply entangled
with one another (or should be); they are
inseparable.
Contemporary Sociology 48, 1
Feenburg operates from a perspective he
calls ‘‘critical constructivism,’’ which seeks
to integrate the critical macro-oriented think-
ing of most Marxists with social construc-
tionism that is more oriented to the micro-
level of the lifeworld. This leads Feenburg
to a focus on specific contexts and the agents
and their democratic interventions that can
lead to new regulation of technologies, new
designs for those technologies that reflect
the interests of those agents, and even to
the abandonment of such technologies. Feen-
burg sees hope in this, but it is not the mod-
ern hope associated with the grand narrative
of progress, if not revolutionary change, in
the social world as a whole. In the last sen-
tence of the book, Feenburg argues that
‘‘replacing the grand narrative with the
many local narratives will free the imagina-
tion to explore alternatives to both the exist-
ing society and the failed revolutions of the
past.’’ Maybe, but this would require making
the leap from this more limited perspective
to thinking about society as whole and the
forces that might revolutionize it.
Feenburg’s hopefulness extends to the
Internet, which he sees as an ‘‘important
site of public discussion . . . enabling activists
to speak directly to millions of online corre-
spondents’’ (p. 107). While this is true to
some extent, what is ignored is intrusion
into the Internet, especially during political
campaigns, of trolls that are not only not con-
tributing to a truly public discussion, but are
increasingly distorting it. Since these trolls
are largely electronic in nature, this could
be seen as the dialectic of technology striking
back at the agents who are seeking to exert
control through and over it. It is often the
case that we can no longer be sure on the
Internet whether it is a human agent or
a technology (e.g., a bot) that is communicat-
ing with us.
A hot issue, today, is whether people,
including scientists, are losing control not
only of the Internet, especially social media,
but also of other technologies. Instead of fre-
er, more open, more democratic communica-
tion, we are witnessing greater polarization,
universes of alternate meaning, and a shift
to the political right, including a preference
for autocracy. Furthermore, artificial intelli-
gence makes possible a world where not

only laypeople but scientists are influenced,
if not controlled, by ever-more-sophisticated
technosystems. Do the lifeworld and peo-
ple’s experiences in it offer any real hope in
the face of such a reified world that is so dis-
tant from the lifeworld and constitutes a pro-
found threat to it?
Curated Stories: The Uses and Misuses of
Storytelling, by Sujatha Fernandes. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2017. 212
pp. $24.95 paper. ISBN: 9780190618056.
JOSEPH E. DAVIS
University of Virginia
jdavis@virginia.edu
‘‘I remember that I was always afraid of
something.’’ So begins ‘‘The Different
Daughter,’’ a short autobiographical story by
Shakila, a young Afghan woman, published
on the website of the Afghan Women’s Writ-
ing Project (AWWP) in 2011. At age 6, her
family fled to Iran following the Soviet inva-
sion. As an outsider, she found life ‘‘in a coun-
try that worshipped sameness’’ very diffi-
cult, and she wove a ‘‘thick cocoon’’ around
herself for protection. Even at 20, she felt
like a child, unsure of herself and afraid to
speak her mind. Then one ‘‘boring, repetitive
day in the library,’’ she discovered a book
that would change her life. ‘‘Reading it,’’
she writes, ‘‘was like having a beam of light
come into [her] dark cocoon’’ and inspire
her to dig her way out. It helped her to ques-
tion society’s values and showed her how to
think independently. Later, after the Taliban
collapsed, her family returned to Afghani-
stan, where she could work and help support
her family. There, she ‘‘still felt the power of
traditions, men, mullahs’’ and the horrors
of war, but she had a new strength. Against
social pressure, she refused to wear the tradi-
tional clothes, paid for the schooling of her
two younger sisters, made her own deci-
sions, and resisted the pressure to marry.
With her education, she can make a differ-
ence, she notes, and fear no longer drives
her life.
Readers of ‘‘The Different Daughter,’’
commenting on the AWWP website, found
it ‘‘inspiring’’ and ‘‘beautiful,’’ a shining
Reviews 57
example of the literary voice that the Project
was set up to develop. Created by the Amer-
ican journalist Masha Hamilton, the AWWP
aims to ‘‘empower Afghan women to tell
their own stories and truths.’’ Working with
Project mentors in creative writing work-
shops, taught online from the United States
and in Afghanistan, Afghan women have
produced a steady stream of personal stories
and poems covering politics, love, and many
other topics. Shakila’s published narrative of
overcoming fear and resisting convention
was a fruit of that effort.
Despite appearances, ‘‘The Different
Daughter,’’ according to Sujatha Fernandes,
who mentions it briefly in her book Curated
Stories: The Uses and Misuses of Storytelling,
is actually an instance of the misuse of story-
telling, an insidious example of what she
calls a ‘‘curated story.’’ By this she means
the personal story of an ordinary, marginal-
ized person that has been produced under
organizational sponsorship and fashioned,
through indoctrination of the author, to ‘‘cre-
ate warm and relatable portraits of others
who are ‘just like us’’’ (p. 2). Portraits, that
is, which are free of complexity or ambiguity
and configure the storyteller as enterprising
and upwardly mobile and (in some contexts)
a model citizen. These portraits, which have
the ‘‘illusion’’ of ‘‘being real and authentic’’
(p. 37) are then wielded by curators as per-
suasion instruments in competitive strug-
gles over power and resources. Thus
deployed, they reproduce dominant power
relations by helping to shift attention away
from oppressive structures and defuse con-
frontational politics.
So, for Fernandes, while Shakila’s narra-
tive might sound like a feminist empower-
ment story, it is nothing of the kind. In her
account, feminism back in the 1970s, like oth-
er movements of the period, drew on collec-
tive and structural-political modes of story-
telling. In these formats, and in conjunction
with adversarial and direct-action tactics,
narrators located themselves in a larger
class or community that was antagonistic to
dominant classes or patriarchal structures.
Their stories were both oppositional and
transformative. But in the intervening deca-
des, social movements grew reconciliatory,
economies across the globe took a turn
Contemporary Sociology 48, 1