The British Journal of Sociology 2009 Volume 60 Issue 4

Book reviews bjos_1277 833..850

Archer, Robin Why Is There No Labor Party in the United States? Princeton University
Press 2007 368 pp. (hardback) £24.95

In the century since Werner Sombart first asked why socialism had failed to take root in the
USA, his answer – revolving around American prosperity and the ‘comfortable circum-
stances’ of American workers, where ‘Socialist utopias come to nothing on roast beef and
apple pie’ – has been debated with more regularity than insight.
Discussions of American exceptionalism routinely focus on America’s peculiarities. In
comparison to the more homogenous labour movements of late nineteenth-century Europe,
America’s deep-seated racial antagonisms are said to have divided workers; its first-
past-the-post political system left little room for emergent third parties; judicial hostility and
repression prompted unions to play it safe, targeting employers with their campaigns to
avoid inviting further state repression. American ideology, especially its consistent stress on
individual freedoms and egalitarianism, is said to have blocked collective solidarity and class
consciousness, while religious differences among urban workers complicated political
coalitions.
But do these comparisons to Europe really help us understand why there is no labour
party in the USA? Robin Archer argues provocatively, and persuasively, that a more helpful
approach would look to Australia, not Europe, for comparison.At the same time that Samuel
Gompers’ American Federation of Labour was adamantly refusing to countenance a
workers’ party, Australian unionists – organizing in a country where the working class also
lacked strong feudal traditions, faced challenges from immigration, and where race and
religion could have been equally divisive – successfully built a labour party that went on to
repeated electoral victories. For Australian unionists, political mobilization was a key strat-
egy for strengthening workers’ rights: rather than fearing politics might divide their
members and undermine labour unity, Australian activists saw politics as a way to give
workers greater say in setting national policies, benefitting workers’ organizations on the
shopfloor while producing government policies to help workers and their families at home.
Archer’s account is a persuasive one, all the more forceful for its clear writing and
organization, and for the detailed factual illustrations and occasional counter-examples that
support its theoretical claims. Carefully and concisely,Archer shows how the dynamics which
are frequently said to have blocked labour parties in the USA, failed to prevent a strong and
vibrant labour party in Australia at the turn of the twentieth century. Racial antagonisms and
hostility to immigrants divided workers in Australia as they did in the USA, but they but did
not prevent political campaigns or shopfloor mobilization; in Australia, religious differences

© London School of Economics and Political Science 2009 ISSN 0007-1315 print/1468-4446 online.
Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden,
MA 02148, USA on behalf of the LSE. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-4446.2009.01277.x
834 Book reviews

and an egalitarian ideology did not stop labour parties from building real electoral strength
in national contests, nor did those political activities divide the labour movement’s shopfloor
base. Far from discouraging political activism, Australian repression seems to have encour-
aged it, as unionists targeted the state, hoping that once elected, workers’ representatives
could help rewrite the rules of the game.
To what, then, does Archer attribute the strange reluctance of American labour leaders to
create a political party of their own? A key debate at the AFL’s 1894 congress, Archer
suggests, reveals a dynamic that had been at work for at least two decades: while some
activists, especially those within the Socialist Labour Party, interpreted socialist theory to
mean that ‘the establishment of a working-class political party was the essential prerequisite
for economic emancipation’, Gompers and his allies came to believe firmly that the ‘estab-
lishment of economic organizations of workers ought to be the focus of activity, and that
political action would have to wait until a sufficient level of class organization and class
consciousness had been achieved’ (pp. 219–20).
These disagreements hardened into socialist sectarianism, Archer argues, producing an
internal conflict ‘that had all the intensity of sibling rivalry’, an ‘entrenched factionalism’
involving personal attacks and a profound ‘distrust of opponents’ (pp. 221–2). A culture of
factionalism rooted in some twenty years of disagreement over the relative importance of
unions and politics created what Archer calls an ‘either-or mentality’ among leading activ-
ists: Gompers and his allies insisted that efforts to mix unions and politics ‘would be like
mixing “oil and water”,’ risking an explosive combination that might destroy the unions they
had worked so hard to build (p. 224). Their stance fueled as much by long-standing sectarian
disagreements as by their awareness of workers’ political and religious differences, he writes,
AFL leaders feared that ‘the establishment of a labour party, and involvement in partisan
politics, would produce the kind of dissension that would lead to the destruction of their
unions’ (p. 239).
But it is important to note, Archer says, that these were fights between self-identified
socialists, on both sides of that 1894 debate. Far from drawing on American liberalism,
Archer writes, prominent labour leaders within the AFL, as much as within the SLP, turned
to Marx, Kautsky, and other socialist writers to argue their points: they may have moulded
business unionism, but they considered themselves part of the international socialist move-
ment, and insisted that their goal was to see the triumph of the working class.
In shifting the comparative lens to Australia, away from Europe, Archer’s work will surely
give new life to an old debate. That long-standing question of whether, and how, to engage
in politics continues to plague labour unions in the USA, as well as in places where politics
seem more fluid – say, South Africa or Poland, where unionists regularly propose the
creation of parties along the lines of Brazil’s successful Workers’ Party. In those debates,
Archer’s analysis offers new insights into the origins of American ‘business unionism’, and
points to Australia as illustrating an important alternative.
Just as surely, Archer’s conclusions will raise new questions for American labour history,
looking at change as well as continuity. Even if Gompers’ rigid opposition to political
involvement dominated American unions in the time when Sombart first inquired about the
causes of American exceptionalism, that stance cannot serve as the sole explanation for the
pattern’s century-long persistence. Why did American labour remain committed to business
unionism through the 1930s, even when a broad upsurge in labour militance undermined the
AFL and reshaped American unionism? Why did that pattern continue through the 1970s –
long after the labour movement had seriously begun to address bitter racial divisions at
work? And why, in the 1980s, did that tradition begin to change? If older traditions are so
binding, why would keen observers (Milkman, LA Story, 2006) find AFL unions at the
forefront of new campaigns to change the character of American unionism in the early

© London School of Economics and Political Science 2009 British Journal of Sociology 60(4)
 Book reviews 835

twenty-first century in California? Focused as it is on the historical comparison with

Australia, Archer’s book does not address these more contemporary concerns; but his
findings will certainly push us to re-examine American labour’s present, as well as its past.

Gay W. Seidman
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Bennett, T., Savage, M., Silva, E., Warde, A., Gayo-Cal, M. and Wright, D. Culture, Class,
Distinction Routledge 2009 336 pp. £75.00 (hardback)

This is a landmark text in UK class analysis, indeed for research on class far beyond these
watery borders. In setting out to examine whether Bourdieu’s famous analysis of cultural
differences between classes in 1960s France holds good in twenty-first century Britain, the
authors provide at one and the same time (i) a rigorous reassertion of the importance of class
and social division in the patterning of lifestyles, dealing a serious blow to postmodern
declarations of the ‘death of class’; (ii) a successful venture for Bourdieu-inspired class
analysis beyond the qualitative style it had developed and, therefore, a challenge to the long
dominance of John Goldthorpe and the Nuffield School over statistical analysis of large scale
datasets, and, finally; (iii) an attempt to revise and update Bourdieu’s thought on cultural
differentiation for the new millennium.
The research upon which the book is based comprises a survey of 1564 people, supple-
mented with an ethnic boost sample of 227, on all dimensions of cultural life, from music
tastes, television and film preferences though sport, reading, visual art and more. True to
Bourdieu’s method, and innovative in Anglophone sociology, the authors apply the statisti-
cal technique of correspondence analysis to this data, mapping out the broad contours of the
space of lifestyles and its homologies with the different cultural fields, whilst drawing on
additional qualitative research – focus groups, household interviews with survey respondents
and interviews with elites (CEOs, professors, senior civil servants and the like) – to illustrate
and flesh out the topology of taste.
The core argument flowing from this data is that, yes, there is a clearly identifiable space
of lifestyles in the UK today, but that its structure and characteristics differ from those
identified by Bourdieu.There are, the authors claim, four axes of differentiation in this space.
Firstly, the most significant axis of differentiation is that between those who engage in a wide
array of cultural activities, whether high culture or popular culture, and those who do not,
not, as Bourdieu suggested, between the rare and the common. Crucially, however, this axis
still corresponds closely with occupation and education, indicating what Bourdieu referred
to as total volume of capital. In other words, the central division in the space of lifestyles is
that between an omnivorous – albeit, as Bennett et al. are at pains do demonstrate, a
complex and limited form of omnivorousness – middle class and a more home- or
community-centred working class emphasizing fun and entertainment, with an ‘intermediate
class’ straddling the division rather like the petite bourgeoisie in Bourdieu’s work.
Next, the authors identify as the second axis of differentiation, not hedonistic versus
ascetic distinction corresponding to different factions of the dominant class, as for Bourdieu,
but established versus contemporary cultural tastes – classical music, stately homes, art
galleries and so on versus concerts, urban music and night clubs – mapping broadly on to age
differences. Thirdly, whereas gender played little part in Bourdieu’s analysis, it is found to
pull out the third dimension of the space of lifestyles, with women tending to prefer person-
centred practices and tastes labelled ‘inwardly-oriented’ (romance films, soap operas etc.)
and men preferring fact-based, or ‘outwardly-oriented’, practices (documentaries, sports

British Journal of Sociology 60(4) © London School of Economics and Political Science 2009
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etc.). Finally, there is a weak split between ‘voracious’ consumers of culture, especially high
culture, and ‘moderate consumers’ who are a little more reserved. Although there are no
unambiguous structural correlates for this division, if there is space for Bourdieu’s distinc-
tion between the cultural and economic fractions of the dominant class then it is here.
The findings, along with their theoretical logic, which insists on bringing gender and
ethnicity in as structuring factors, lead the authors to make some pretty significant and
contentious breaks with Bourdieu. They reject, for example, not only the idea of a ‘social
space’ underlying the space of lifestyles, arguing that lifestyle differentiation cannot be
captured by such a class-reductionist concept, but the idea of a unified class habitus on the
basis that the spread of lifestyles between and across classes is simply too much for that idea
to handle. After this, the authors go on to analyse in more detail the cultural ‘fields’ of music,
reading, visual art, film and television and body modification, finding some to be sharply
divided and others to be less so, though still with interesting class divisions when more
fine-grained analysis is introduced. They then explore in further depth the characteristics of
the middle classes, the working class, gender differences and ethnic differences.
For all its fascinating insights, the book is not without it weaknesses. There is a feeling, for
example, that the authors are trying to cover a lot of ground in a quest for comprehensiveness,
and, unfortunately, this leads to uneven coverage. In particular, the qualitative material is
often used very briefly to make a point, losing the rich illumination of everyday life that
Bourdieu provided through vivid description and vignettes, and some topics – differences in
clothing and middle-class identities are prominent examples – are skated over so quickly,
despite being such important areas, as to draw unsatisfactory conclusions. There are also
nagging questions over how much the statistical categories hide – not just concerning cultural
items, which will inevitably miss the subtle ways in which the same practice or taste can be
read or rationalised in completely different ways, but also the unquestioned NS-SEC scheme
for classes which smothers many of the differences Bourdieu specifically distinguished – and
whether the debatable theoretical statements flow from the realities of social change or the
practicalities of methodological decisions. Nevertheless, whatever its minor faults, there is no
doubt the book represents a large step in the right direction for class research.

Will Atkinson
University of Bristol

Bowen, John R. Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves: Islam, the State, and Public
Space Princeton University Press 2007 304 pp. £16.95 (hardback) £11.95 (paperback)
Scott, Joan W. The Politics of the Veil Princeton University Press 2007 208 pp. £14.95
(hardback)

On March 15 2004, the French government passed a law prohibiting the wearing of garments
that represent ‘conspicuous signs’ of religious affiliation in public schools. Although the law
applied to all religious garments including Jewish skullcaps and Sikh turbans, the law was
designed primarily to target Muslim girls wearing headscarves. The two works under review
here are the first scholarly attempts to understand the law on scarves and its immediate
repercussions.
Bowen employs what he calls an ‘anthropology of public reasoning’ (p. 3) to analyse the
headscarf controversy, unpacking along the way France’s particular history of relations
between the state and religion, and the continued importance of its colonial past. As
Bowen illustrates, the French state deploys France’s ‘exceptional’ history as the most

© London School of Economics and Political Science 2009 British Journal of Sociology 60(4)
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common justification of the headscarf ban. Religious wars among the Catholics and
Protestants and then the Catholic Church and the secularists have been constituted as the
raison d’être of the system of laïcité. In this particular system of control, organized
religion or le culte, is supposed to remain in the sphere of the private and not stray into
the public realm. Religious rituals can be organized only in the relevant institutional
spaces such as churches and synagogues, and these are expected to be regulated and con-
trolled by the French state in order to ensure public order. Supporters of the headscarf
ban in public schools are quick to point out that the French state plays a historic and
impartial role as the guarantor of organized religion, and the ban is not specific to Muslim
symbols. Yet, as Bowen nicely demonstrates throughout the text, recent social anxieties in
French society have facilitated a general misperception of Muslims as the particular group
who systematically threaten the public order through public ritual practices such as sac-
rifice, scarf-wearing, and prostration. Bowen argues that although the scarf and the
mosque ‘are not objectively more visible than the nun’s habit and the cathedral’, they are
‘subjectively shocking’ because they are paradoxically both foreign and non-foreign
(p. 20). On the one hand, they are new and unprecedented in the public realm; on the
other hand, they are a familiar remnant of France’s colonial past in North Africa. In either
case, as Bowen argues, Muslims are perceived as frustrating and threatening, and thus
subjected to state control.
In the second part of the book, Bowen evidences a broader social perspective on the
headscarf ban by paying attention to the role of media images and the television in shaping
public opinion in its favour. He shows how various media invoked the veiling issue in debates
about violence against women in the poor suburbs. Attributing the problems in poor suburbs
to Muslim culture rather than to urban social problems, the media images provided ‘proof’
that the headscarves signified oppression. This served to stigmatize not only Muslim women
but also Muslim men. The author points out that the most effective leglitimizing strategy
of this perspective has been the production of insider/nativist discourse: the perspectives of
Muslim women against headscarves have been volunteered as the representative voices of
all Muslim women in the media condemnation of a ‘fundamentalist’ Islam that denies
women’s rights.
Bowen also outlines feminist divisions on the headscarf issue. Against feminists who
defend the free choice of Muslim girls to wear headscarves, Republican feminists argue that
individuals mistakenly think that they exercise a free choice, yet these choices further limit
their freedom. In the Republican view, since patriarchy shapes existing free choices, Muslim
women might be unaware of available alternatives. This portrayal of the Muslim women,
however, has led to a denial of agency and legitimized certain interventionist state policies
and assimilative projects in the name of public order.
Unlike Bowen, who traces the political developments that resulted in the ban, Joan Scott
offers a provocative deconstruction of the symbolic meaning of the ban itself. Scott’s book is
short, concise, and reader-friendly. Her tight focus on particular issues – racism, secularism,
individualism and sexuality – evidences the various ways in which the particular history of
the French state has become deeply embedded in cultural norms.
For Scott, the formal objectification of Muslims as a single, inassimilable cultural group
constitutes a performance of the legitimacy of the French Republic. Even though a very
small number of students wear headscarves, the ban has acquired a strong symbolic content
that reiterates the idea that assimilation is the only way for Muslims to become ‘French’. The
author argues convincingly that the ban is symptomatic of France’s failure to integrate its
former colonial subjects as full citizens. Scott’s work recalled to mind Nietzsche’s wonderful
aphorism:‘As the power and self-confidence of the community increase, the penal law always
becomes more moderate; every weakening or imperiling of the former brings with it a

British Journal of Sociology 60(4) © London School of Economics and Political Science 2009
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restoration of the harsher forms of the latter’ (Neitzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans.
Kaufmann and Hollingdale, 1969: 72).
Scott’s analysis puts forward a liberal view that defends the individual against community
norms, but she also successfully develops that perspective with reference to ideas about
ensuring the public good and social harmony. According to Scott, the banning of the head-
scarf has in fact failed to reconcile religious and ethnic differences in public and has further
exacerbated tensions in French society. Thus, Scott argues, emphasis on homogeneity is no
longer a feasible strategy for France to ensure the public good.
The headscarf controversy has been a hot issue in France since 1989, and these works
contribute to an evolving and diverse literature on cultural rights, public space, and feminist
perspectives on these areas. Both books invite us to re-think the historical formations of the
secular public sphere and the recent challenges that European Muslims have posed to that
order. Both works are full of theoretical insights.They articulate clearly the ways in which the
French Republican elite attributes social disorder to headscarf wearing, and thus engage with
the social construction of ‘good Muslims’ versus ‘bad Muslims’.The books are a must-read for
those who want to grasp the political, social, and cultural implications of headscarf banning in
France, and its implications for multi-culturalist discourse and practice more broadly.

Mustafa Gurbuz
University of Connecticut

Elliott, Anthony Making the Cut. How Cosmetic Surgery is Transforming Our Lives
Reaktion Books 2008 152 pp. £14.95 (paperback)

Increasing numbers of people, particularly in the western world, have been undergoing
various kinds of cosmetic operations ever since the early 1970s. More recently, the media has
produced makeover shows like The Swan and Extreme Makeover. This, along with the
ubiquitous advertising and sales of cosmetic projects, the celebrity cult which has us carefully
tracking the nips and tucks of the rich and famous, and the availability of cosmetic surgery
on credit, have made cosmetic surgery acceptable and available to people who would
otherwise find it too costly.
This book was written against the backdrop of the enormous expansion of cosmetic
surgery and the kinds of concerns which this raises. Elliott is concerned that cosmetic surgery
has simply become another ‘life choice’ and that it feeds into the insecurities bred by late
modernity – fears about not being able to hold onto a job or a relationship, insecurities about
identity, and, above all, dissatisfaction with one’s ageing body. In his view, cosmetic surgery
has become an answer to these fears, while, at the same time, accelerating them as people
become caught in the impossible search for a youthful body, frozen in time. These concerns
are hardly new, of course, and, indeed, there is already a broad corpus of critical literature on
the cosmetic surgery craze, written not only by sociologists, cultural theorists, medical his-
torians, but – unsurprisingly – also by feminist scholars who have done much to understand
and explain why women in particular engage in a practice which is dangerous, costly, and
demeaning and how this might be viewed as part of the gendered and racialized culture in
which we live. Elliott dismisses this scholarship, however, arguing that it is naïve, overly
esoteric, and basically useless for helping the reader ‘get closer to the cut and thrust (sic.) of
cosmetic surgery’ (p. 34). Instead he promises to provide a ‘brand new’ and much more
‘sociological’ perspective on what compels people to put themselves under the knife.
The book is somewhat meagre, encompassing just four chapters and without a biblio-
graphy or index. It is uneven, written in an associative rather than an analytical manner,

© London School of Economics and Political Science 2009 British Journal of Sociology 60(4)
 Book reviews 839

with undigested bits of theory along the way. The book draws primarily from media
reports of the surgical exploits of celebrities (Pamela Anderson, Britney Spears) and, to a
lesser degree, ordinary people who tell their stories to journalists or appear on prime time
TV. Elliott informs us that he has also conducted interviews with individuals who had had
or were contemplating having some sort of cosmetic intervention (from Botox to face-
lifts), but he doesn’t give further information about where or how he found his informants,
nor how many interviews he conducted. He proceeds to ‘condense’ these interviews into
fictional narratives, taking, as he puts it, ‘the liberty of speaking for the people I have
interviewed. . . . I have tried to capture more precisely what is going on in (their) minds’
and ‘to grasp something of the concrete experience of cosmetic surgical culture’ (p. 12).
This method might seem rather odd to many sociologists who are likely to believe that
interviews should inform and help develop social theory (why else should one do them?).
But, as it turns out, even these fictionalized narratives are few and far between because
Elliott finds the media, in fact, more helpful when it comes to getting to the truth of why
people have cosmetic surgery. Without taking into account any of the literature on how to
‘read’ media in a critically and in sociologically informed way, he regales the reader with
stories of people who are pathologically obsessed with their bodies, afraid of growing
older or of not being able to compete in corporate culture, and who look to cosmetic
surgery as a solution to their problems.
The book becomes more sociological and less sensationalist in the last two chapters when
Elliott attempts to link the cosmetic surgery craze with globalization – and, indeed, this is its
main contribution. He touches briefly on a wide range of sociological theories (drawing on
Bauman, Urry, Held, Lemmert), and then moves to some of the excesses of cosmetic surgery
– from package deals which allow for several operations to be performed at the same time,
to the rising incidence of surgical holidays to Thailand or South Africa which can be ‘booked
at a moment’s notice and taken in five-star comfort’ (p. 106). His main concern, however,
is the wide-spread culture of instant obsolescence. Ultimately, in our refusal to accept
our ageing bodies, he argues, we have disowned death (p. 139).
In Elliott’s view, the globalizing economy of advanced capitalism with flexible work,
short-term contracts, unprecedented levels of outsourcing and age discrimination produce
the insecurities that compel individuals to put their bodies under the knife. Nothing is valued
that isn’t new (including one’s track record on the job). Given the ability of culture to
penetrate people’s bodily identities, it is not surprising that bodies, too, come to be viewed as
a collection of dispensable and disposable parts. Cosmetic surgery provides the perfect
solution – allowing people to purchase a younger, more dynamic appearance which will
allow them to remain competitive.
I agree that globalization should be at the centre of a critical sociological analysis of
cosmetic surgery. Cosmetic surgery cannot be viewed as a local phenomenon, but rather
needs to be situated in the context of global economies, information technologies, medical
tourism, and a globalizing popular culture. Unfortunately, Elliott is preoccupied almost
exclusively with the circumstances and problems of the rich and famous: the affluent
western consumer of cosmetic surgery. He does not consider what cosmetic surgery might
mean for the more ‘ordinary’ recipient who cannot afford the sand-and-sea surgical safari.
Nor does he look at what the globalization of cosmetic surgery means for less-affluent
nations where, in some cases, medical tourism is a staple of the economy. He makes assump-
tions about why ‘we’ have cosmetic surgery without taking into account the ways differences
in race, class, or gender intersect in individual decisions to undergo surgery: for example,
does eyelid surgery have the same meaning in the West as it does, say, in South Korea or
China? Nor does Elliott ask what cosmetic surgery might mean in a culture where ageing is
a desirable sign of status or where death is not sequestered but acknowledged. In short,

British Journal of Sociology 60(4) © London School of Economics and Political Science 2009
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while Making the Cut promises a ‘new’ sociological analysis of cosmetic surgery, it falls well
short of providing it.

Kathy Davis
Utrecht University

Fuller, Steve New Frontiers in Science and Technology Studies Polity Press 2007 232 pp.
£55.00 (hardback) £16.99 (paperback)

Here is a standard story that both guides and is rejected by Steve Fuller in New Frontiers in
Science and Technology Studies. In the 1960s, there was a debate between the respective
followers of Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn over the nature of science, and more importantly,
over the nature of history and philosophy of science. Popperians argued for an explicitly
normative study of science, building on an image of science as taking theoretical risks, and
checking those risks with empirical data. Kuhnians argued for an explicitly non-normative
study of science, building on an image of science as a closed community working within its own
traditions and developing its own practices. In Science and Technology Studies (STS), the
Kuhnians won, and the field developed enormously from its roughly Kuhnian starting points.
For a number of years, Steve Fuller has been arguing against Kuhn and in favour of
Popper. New Frontiers is of a piece with that earlier work. Against Kuhn, Fuller has argued
that the Kuhnian framework is covertly normative and adopts poor norms, that science be
autonomous and esoteric. In favour of Popper, Fuller argues that he was right about two
things. First, given the results of research in STS over the past thirty years, he correctly
emphasized the openness of science, the fact that the past does not determine science’s
future, or what we might call the contingency of science. Second, Popper’s fallibilist vision of
science provides a basis for a good model of the governance of science. For these reasons,
Fuller says that the central question of the book is: ‘what is the normative import of
contingency, rather than necessity, as the modality for making sense of science and technol-
ogy?’ Although the book is not tightly structured around that question, I think that Fuller
correctly identifies that as a key question.
The book is somewhat mis-titled. It is not really about new frontiers in STS, but new
arguments about old frontiers. And one is not apt to learn very much about STS, which is
often simply a character in Fuller’s narratives: this is a book for STS insiders to grapple with.
There are three sections to the book: the ‘demarcation problem’, or the problem of how
to find criteria that distinguish between science and non-science; the ‘democratization
problem’, or the problem of how to democratically govern science; and the ‘transformation
problem’, or the problem of establishing the goals toward which we want to bend or direct
science and technology. All of these are longstanding questions. Fuller gives a somewhat
contrarian pro-demarcation answer to the first, and less contrarian republican and progres-
sivist answers to the second and third.
Though Fuller presents the book in part as a battle against the Kuhnian tradition in STS,
Kuhn’s legacy in STS was not primarily substantive, a point that Fuller himself makes!
Instead, Kuhn’s legacy was probably the image of a newly opened intellectual space that
could be filled by iconoclastic thinking about science. Even the view that STS should be
non-normative is probably a minority view among people working in the Kuhnian tradition.
Of course, many within STS may not themselves engage in normative work, but they do not
reject its value.
New Frontiers is apt to give most readers a feeling of vertigo. Many of Fuller’s arguments
depend on something like an intellectual form of gossip. In each section, Fuller is apt to drop

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 Book reviews 841

references to a half-dozen, and perhaps many more, important thinkers. He links them
through innovative interpretations, lineages and affiliations, and brings them to bear on
topics on which they may not have well known positions. With the exception of two distinc-
tive sections – one a critique of Chris Mooney’s The Republican War on Science (2005), the
other a discussion of the controversy surrounding Bjørn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environ-
mentalist (2001) – Fuller’s prose establishes historical trajectories around various points
plotted in an intellectual-historical map. The result is that the book is not truly a coherent
argument, but is instead a large collection of small intellectual histories, connected with each
other through a number of themes.
Some of Fuller’s histories are (typically contentious) gems, introducing vibrant new ways
of thinking about people and positions. Often, they are simply difficult: he makes few
concessions to readers who have not read what he (very impressively) has, or are not
prepared to challenge his sweeping statements. As a result, like many of Fuller’s books, this
book is best read in small chunks. A reader who takes the time to grapple with his pro-
nouncements will learn a tremendous amount. They may not be convinced by the arguments
they find there or the characterizations of different figures’ positions and contributions, but
in the process of working out what Fuller is claiming, and deciding whether it has plausibility
and relevance, they are sure to find themselves thinking interesting thoughts. Fuller’s work
exemplifies the Popperianism he espouses, in that it is always taking risks. And it exemplifies
his opposition to Kuhnianism, as well, in its refusal to belong squarely within an intellectual
tradition.

Sergio Sismondo
Queen’s University, Canada

Miller, Daniel The Comfort of Things Polity Press 2008 302 pp. £20.00 (hardback)

It is rare that an academic book can be described as beautiful. Even praise for the best of
ethnographies describes the writing as sensitive, evocative or perceptive, while fine quanti-
tative work is lauded as analytically sharp or insightful. Though all of those adjectives could
be used to describe this book, it would be an injustice to Daniel Miller and to the exquisite
text he has crafted to describe The Comfort of Things as anything less than beautifully
written. With plain yet meticulously detailed prose, Miller investigates the materials of
everyday life: Christmas grottos, holiday souvenirs, record collections and family photos.
Miller examines material objects with an inquisitive enthusiasm that breathes life into what
could have become a long recitation of things, their owners and biographies. Seeking out the
complex connections between objects and people, and the various ways in which identity,
relationships and values come to be expressed through the ordering of things, Miller elabo-
rates a very particular idea of the aesthetic through thirty portraits of individuals, couples
and their homes.
The book is based on fieldwork conducted in co-operation with Fiona Parrott.
This comprised seventeen months of interviews and participant observation in a south
London road (which Miller calls Stuart Street), and its immediate vicinity. The book pre-
sents a rigorous yet accessible challenge to cynical academic views of consumer culture
and materialism that often focus on objects as symbols rather than things that have per-
sonal meaning, and that are embedded intimately in everyday life and relationships. Miller
is not explicit in identifying the writers whose understandings of objects and things in
consumer society are in contrast with his own, but it is a fairly safe bet that Baudrillard
(The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures, 1970; For a Critique of the Political

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Economy of the Sign, 1972) and some of the literature that builds upon him, fall into that
category.
For Miller and the residents of Stuart Street, the notion of individuals drowning in a sea
of interchangeable, alienable consumer goods is not an accurate reflection of daily life in
Western capitalism. Objects within a household have an order, or rather they express what
Miller calls an aesthetic: ‘an overall organisational principle that may include balance,
contradiction, and the repetition of certain themes in entirely different genres and settings’
(p. 293). This aesthetic can be understood as a local cosmology that represents orders of
things, values, people and relationships (pp. 293–4). Miller argues that the order represented
by such domestic aesthetics or local cosmologies is evidence that the post-modern image of
fragmented individualism is not a viable analysis or accurate description of contemporary
western capitalist society. According to Miller the local sense-making and ordering repre-
sented by these household aesthetics provides a new focus for anthropology and, by exten-
sion, for sociology as well (p. 296).
In previous work, Miller has argued that thinking about material culture requires for its
advancement a detailed examination of the diversity of material worlds (‘How Infants Grow
Mothers in North London’, Theory Culture and Society, 1997; A Theory of Shopping, 1998;
Material Cultures, 1998). The Comfort of Things is an example of how to conduct research
that makes such a contribution. Each of the thirty portraits can be taken as an object lesson,
an intricately detailed variation on the broad theme of domestic aesthetics that draws
together a host of observations to present a bigger picture of an individual’s life.We learn not
only about the significance of a profusion of ornaments in an elderly woman’s house, but
the importance of dusting for a blind woman, an activity which becomes ‘a repeated
re-acquaintance with each and every object in the home’, a way to ‘pick up, touch, replace
and recollect each item in turn’ (p. 213). The relationships between people and objects, or
between people, objects and other people, not only represents an aesthetic, or an ordering of
values, but provides a sense of comfort (p. 296). This understanding of material comfort can
take a variety of forms, from tactile sensuality to the simple pleasure of familiarity and
security.
Stuart Street provides an illuminating example of consumer society more broadly. It
reveals the ways in which objects acquire meaning not only through their social lives – as
Appadurai would have it (The Social Life of Things, 1986) – but also in the ways in which
they are assembled and juxtaposed. As such, it is the very organization of things within the
home through which relationships and values are expressed. For example, a couple
expresses a desire for shared experiences through a growing collection of vintage toys
purchased on E-Bay for their young son (pp. 143–52). The accumulation of these old toys
is not only a manifestation of parental love for their child, but an expression of love
between Anna and Louise, his parents, whose collaboration in the quest for nostalgic play-
things is a way of expressing equal and joint care for their son. For Anna and Louise, who
wish they had met earlier in life and shared childhood memories, the toys are a way of
sharing past experience, of showing small pieces of their own childhoods. The toys are not
so much meaningful for their own sake, but within the context of parents and a child, they
take on new significance as ‘forms through which relationships are expressed and devel-
oped’ (p. 152).
The Comfort of Things deliberately avoids an academic writing style: there are no citations
and no references at the end of the text. The book intends to raise questions, to present
objects to think with, to stimulate debate. This book issues not a challenge but an invitation,
an invitation to build upon the ideas it presents and further explore their implications. These
might be in relation to post-modern theories of consumption and the alienable quality of
goods; or maybe further applications or extensions of Miller’s concept of the aesthetic in a

© London School of Economics and Political Science 2009 British Journal of Sociology 60(4)
 Book reviews 843

milieu different from the London households that are the focus here. This particular book
opens up a variety of avenues for exploration, and serves as a reminder of what sociologists
can learn from such rich anthropological research.

Sandy Ross
London School of Economics and Political Science

Olsen, Kevin (ed.) Adding Insult to Injury: Nancy Fraser Debates Her Critics Verso 2008
360 pp. £60.00 (hardback) £16.99 (paperback)

Adding Insult to Injury traces the debates raised by Nancy Fraser’s seminal essay, ‘From
Recognition to Redistribution’, first published in 1995 and reprinted here as the first chapter
in this volume. The title of the book follows Fraser’s original essay in exploring the ways in
which normative theory, particularly in Leftist political circles, has become torn between
claims based on insult (identity recognition) and those premised on injury (economic
redistribution). The structure of the book is organized around four ‘rounds of debate’ in
which Fraser engages with her critics: the first tackles the utility of the distinction between
recognition and redistribution; the second looks at how to integrate these two frames; the
third questions the need to incorporate a third sphere based on issues of political injustice;
and the fourth concerns the philosophical foundations of Fraser’s work.
The book contains a number of important contributions to these debates. In the first
section, Richard Rorty defends a social democratic account which focuses on material
inequality, nicely counterpoised by essays from Judith Butler and Iris Young which argue
more or less the opposite case – the primacy of claims based on identity. Anne Phillips
moderates between the two positions, making the case for a focus on redistribution and
identity. Other sections also work well, featuring seminal contributions from Christopher
Zurn, Kevin Olsen and Rainer Forst amongst others. Essays by Nancy Fraser act as bridges
– and interlocutors – between the sections.
In the main, the book does a sound job of guiding the reader through the terrain which
Fraser’s work has opened up. However, this is also part of its problem. There is nothing here
that is particularly new. As an exercise in tracing the genealogy of these debates – and, as
such, serving as a useful student primer into some significant issues – Adding Insult to Injury
is fine, perhaps better than fine. But those who have already dined out on the intricacies of
these debates will find little but the odd (occasionally tasty) morsel to stimulate the taste
buds.
In terms of its core raison d’être – providing a one-stop shop for engaging with the debate
between Fraser and her critics – I have two quibbles with Adding Insult to Injury. First, as the
editor acknowledges, a central aspect of the story is missing – the debate conducted between
Fraser and the Frankfurt School theorist Axel Honneth over whether recognition should be
seen as prior to other normative commitments. Readers should, therefore, set this volume
alongside an earlier book: Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition: A
Political-Philosophical Exchange (London: Verso, 2003). Second, although the basic struc-
ture of the book is fluent, the essays are well chosen, and the contributors engage directly
with each other, there is very little by way of metanarrative to guide the reader through the
debates. A brief introduction barely even sets the scene for the rest of the book and none of
the subsequent sections are topped, tailed or accompanied by editorial commentary.As such,
it is possible to get somewhat bogged down in what are, at times, fairly dense debates. Some
additional guidance would have been welcome, particularly in thinking about how to assign
segments of the book as teaching tools.

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844 Book reviews

Beyond these gripes, there are two more general weaknesses to the volume. First, none of
the contributions deals in any great length with ‘stuff’. This is particularly important given
that Fraser is writing in a tradition of zeitdiagnose which seeks not just to generate ideal
theory but to develop critical accounts based on what is immanent within ‘actual existing
conditions’. Whether Fraser’s frames perform such a task is an important issue (see, for
example, George Lawson, ‘A Realistic Utopia: Nancy Fraser, Cosmopolitanism and the
Making of a Just World Order’, Political Studies, 56:4 (2008): 881–906), but it is not one dealt
with here. Finally, but perhaps most crucially, although the book does a service in drawing a
picture of how key debates in Leftist normative theory have developed since the end of the
Cold War, there is no sense offered of ‘what is to come’. This is a real shame given that Fraser
herself is very much a work in motion – her recent work (e.g. Scales of Justice, Cambridge:
Polity, 2008) suggests an emerging research agenda beyond that discussed in Adding Insult
to Injury. As such, the ‘fourth round’ of debates (where this volume ends) is really only a
precursor to a fifth, sixth, seventh and so on. A concluding, reflections piece could have made
this point and explored the parameters of a future research trajectory. Instead, the book ends
with something of a whimper.
All in all, therefore, this is a book which provides a useful first-cut into some of the debates
initiated by Fraser over the last fifteen years or so. The issues raised, particularly the
necessary intertwining of forms of economic, political and cultural exclusion, are, without
doubt, important. But this book serves as an appetizer rather than as a main course: we have
enough to nibble on, but not quite enough to satiate the appetite. As such it is a worthwhile
addition to the bookshelves of those looking for a convenient way into these issues. But it is
also something of a missed opportunity.
George Lawson
London School of Economics and Political Science

Rieff, P. Sacred Order/Social Order: Volume I, My Life among the Deathworks:

Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority 2006 224 pp. £28.45 (hardback);
Volume II, The Crisis of the Officer Class: The Decline of the Tragic Sensibility 2007
188 pp. £28.45 (hardback); Volume III, The Jew of Culture: Freud, Moses and Modernity
2008 217 pp. £28.45 (hardback) Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press.

Philip Rieff (1922–2006) was one of the finest minds of his generation. Freud: the Mind of
the Moralist (1959), a work of imposing maturity, remains the most subtle account of Freud’s
significance for western culture; psychoanalysis is seen as an account, at once more detailed
and far reaching than Weber’s, of how human beings might live in a world that has lost
contact with the ‘commanding truths’ of the Judeo-Christian tradition; in The Triumph of
the Therapeutic (1966), Rieff defended Freud against the Freudians, who had allowed
therapy to triumph over analysis, and the idea of liberation to triumph over ‘interdiction’;
Freud’s message was that all cultures are founded not on what is permissible but on what is
forbidden. This, however, was a message that Freud himself (as an atheist) could not prop-
erly articulate, and so responsibility for the triumph of the therapeutic was Freud’s too. Like
many conservative intellectuals, Rieff was deeply affected by the protest movements of the
late 1960s; Fellow Teachers, from 1972, is mostly an angry diatribe; after it, apart from a few
lecture series and sporadic remarks on his pet hates of abortion and homosexuality, Rieff
stayed silent for thirty years. It seemed that the brilliant descendant of Lithuanian Jews, who
had read everything by the time he was 25 (witness his early pieces in The Feeling Intellect
(1990)), had gone the way of many who, cleverer than the rest us of us, grow bored with
their own intellect and spend their later years as marginal figures given to occasional

© London School of Economics and Political Science 2009 British Journal of Sociology 60(4)
 Book reviews 845

provocation – one thinks of Bobby Fischer, E.M. Cioran, Enoch Powell. It is natural for
older people to say that the world is going to pot and, as with children, we indulge their
readiness to say just what they like about whomsoever they don’t like; but unlike with
children, we do not always find it so charming. At his death he was remembered as the
ex-husband of Susan Sontag (to whose memory Volume I is dedicated), commanding but a
small circle of loyal admirers.
Yet it turns out that there were thousands of pages of drafts and notes, which have now
been edited as the first two volumes of Sacred Order/Social Order, the first appearing just
before he died. The third volume is, with the exception of one piece from 1994, an anthology
of previously pubished pieces on Jewish themes. The editors hope that these volumes will
introduce Rieff to a new generation of readers. They face an uphill struggle; The Guardian’s
obituarist described My Life among the Deathworks as ‘one of the weirdest books ever’. (The
Guardian, 01.08.06) That is wide of the mark, but the photograph on the back flap – Rieff in
pin-striped suit, waistcoat, watch chain, and bowler hat (this from the Benjamin Franklin
Professor of Sociology at Pennsylvania) – should prepare the reader for something
uncoventional. Nevertheless, once you master the esoteric vocabulary there is real intellec-
tual pleasure to be had – much more than this reviewer had feared there would be – in
following the chains of his thinking; its repetitious character is the result of a relentless effort
to formulate and reformulate the big questions in the right way.
The basic argument is that there is no social order without invisible sacred order, and what
we call culture is a ‘transliteration’ of the latter into the former. Sacred order is the source of
all authority, and without authority there is no culture and no social order. These themes are
from Durkheim (order) and Weber (authority), who both failed to treat them with due
seriousness. The whole of Western cultural history can be understood in terms of three types
of culture, which Rieff calls first, second and third. These do not succeed each other chrono-
logically, but nor are they meant as ideal types (Rieffs feeling intellect was blind to the
philosophy of the social sciences); rather they are at war with one another. The first culture –
roughly paganism – is so broad that it includes both Platonic Athens and aboriginal Australia;
it is defined by what he calls ‘primacies of possibility’ (for which Rieff’s shorthand is pop)
from which all agents of authority derive; the second is the culture defined by the ‘command-
ing truths’ of the Judeo-Christian tradition (although Rieff was uneasy with the term); and the
third is, roughly, a modern culture that is an anti-culture, a culture of ‘de-creation’ dominated
by a critical intelligence whose truths are merely negational. The first – pagan – and the
second – Judeo-Christian – both mediate sacred and social order by means of orientation to
what is forbidden, first cultures by means of taboos, second cultures by means of interdictions.
In second cultures, authority does not simply hand down interdictions but also defines the
space of possibility for what he calls ‘remissive’ conduct, or moral loosening; Freud had called
simply for a mature balance between interidction and remission. Where there is authority we
all know where we stand along a line he calls the ‘the vertical in authority’. But when there
is no authority there is not simply remission but also transgression. This is the situation of the
third cultures of the twentieth century West, which are governed by remissive and transgres-
sive elites who foster a repression of commanding truths and of the interdictions that follow
from them; third cultures are also partial recyclings of first cultures’ primacy of possibility (in
that sense they are pop cultures) but without the taboos that secured a place for their
members on the vertical in authority. Pragmatism for instance shares with paganism the first
culture elevation of ‘what works’ above the second culture’s orientation to what is true. It
represents the victory of fiction and its possibilities over truth, and of power over authority.
Stated baldly this sounds hopelessly abstract, and suggests that Rieff is a cultural
conservative who sees relativism and promiscuity all about him. But this is too simple an
interpretation: he is no classicist, nor is he a defender of high against popular culture; the

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846 Book reviews

strength of these volumes lies in the detail and remarkable range of the material he mar-
shalls and in his extraordinary hermeneutic daring. By ‘deathworks’ he means third culture
weapons in a war directed at the second culture that arose out of Jerusalem. Rieff will defend
that culture against the assault; or rather wage his own, one man war on those third culture
deathworks that he has lived among. Volume I begins with a line from Joyce, his pun on
Genesis: ‘Let there be fight? And there was’, and focuses on third culture’s most powerful
representative deathworks, many of which Rieff admires even as he condemns them. Duch-
amp’s first and most famous readymade, Fountain, is a deathwork, but so is Benjamin
Franklin’s persuading Thomas Jefferson to change ‘we hold these truths to be sacred’ to ‘we
hold these truths to be self-evident’, for ‘there is a subtle elimination, or at least reduction,
of the vertical in authority where truths are held merely to be self-evident’ (Volume I: 176).
Robert Mapplethorpe’s self-portrait is a deathwork, but so is Michaelangelo’s Rondanini
Pieta because it fuses Mary mother of God with her son and thereby ‘prefigures the post-
Christian and incipiently feminist assault on the gender of at least the first two persons in the
highest authority.’ (Volume I: 84).
Volume II employs the device of ‘human types’; all cultures have a governing elite or
‘officer class’; that of third culture is in crisis, unable to convey inderdicts or ‘illuminative
certainties’; its representatives are artists and social scientists, the artists producing fictive
deathworks that deny the vertical in authority, social scientists parcelling out the identity of
selves into roles:‘if one knows oneself only by race, or sex, or ethnicity, one can easily fall into
despair. Second world identity balances despair with the sense of inwardness that is insepa-
rable from highest authority’ (Volume II: 8). Upholders of this Second World identity
include Paul and Luther, who were ‘sacred messengers’, as were Socrates, Jesus, and Hamlet
(on which there is a long, stunning chapter here). Yet all such figures face a tragic fate in that
the message they deliver is subject to the distortion that arises from their own worldly
failures; the message of Jesus is an insipid dilution of the commanding truth of Judaism.
The modern writer Rieff admires more than any other is Kafka, the object of a long and
extraordinary chapter that reminds us of the banality of a sociology that would see Kafka as
a prophet of bureaucracy. On the contrary, Kafka’s ‘tremendous ambition was to compel his
reader higher in the vertical of authority . . . Kafka’s art is the art of mortification, the most
purely religious I know in the twentieth century’ (Volume II: 98–9). This chapter alone is an
indispensable resource for anyone who wishes to say something serious about the fate of our
times.

Charles Turner
University of Warwick

Scraton, Phil Power, Conflict and Criminalisation Routledge 2007 265 pp. £70 (hardback)
£24.99 (paperback)

For three decades or more, Phil Scraton has been at the forefront of British critical
criminology.This volume, though never explicitly described as such, appears to be an attempt
to look back over his career and to draw some of the themes together. The subjects surveyed
here range widely, covering such topics as the policing of travelling communities, self-harm
and deaths in custody (police and prison), the Dunblane shootings, the Hillsborough
Stadium tragedy, the rise of ASBOs and the criminalization of children. What pins them
together, partly captured in the title of the volume, is Scraton’s contention that in all these
cases one can see how relatively powerless people, neighbourhoods, groups, and com-
munities suffer at the hands of those with greater economic and political authority.

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 Book reviews 847

The chapters in the volume are somewhat variable in quality; the penultimate chapter on
the war on terror being perhaps the least satisfactory. Those that are underpinned by first
hand contact and research, and where Scraton has had the opportunity to get really angry,
are by some distance the most convincing. In this regard some of his earlier work on deaths
in custody, much of it with Kathryn Chadwick, has been of considerable academic and
practical importance. A full quarter of a century ago, when others were largely silent on the
subject, Scraton and colleagues were highlighting official negligence (to put it at its kindest)
and the failures of statutory forums to investigate fully and openly the tragic loss of life that
was occurring in police stations and in prisons. The campaigning work undertaken by
INQUEST, the body founded at that time and with which they were associated, has been
formidable though, sadly, deaths in custody – especially in prison – remain a significant
problem.
The range of subjects covered in this volume illustrates one of the strengths of much
critical criminology: its refusal to be constrained by official definitions of criminality and to
range much more widely in search of its subject matter. Most obviously here is the
Hillsborough Stadium tragedy. In April 1989 close to one hundred men, women and children
were killed in an entirely preventable ‘accident’ at Sheffield Wednesday’s stadium at an FA
Cup Semi-final. The story Scraton tells of police incompetence, media and political demoni-
zation of the victims and relatives, and the cover-up perpetrated in the aftermath, is harrow-
ing and persuasive. I defy anyone to read the chapter on Hillsborough – and I write as
someone who was already very familiar with the tragedy and its aftermath – and not be both
moved and angered.
The main difficulty with the volume is how to assess the work therein. Scraton regularly
describes his and colleagues’ work as ‘independent’ and this is no doubt done in order to
attempt to indicate the critical approach taken to official accounts and interests. However, in
the book the word independent never appears in quote marks. It is treated, quite uncritically
in fact, as if the label were straightforward and unproblematic. In practice, as Scraton reports,
much of the research reported has very clear interests: that on deaths and violence in
custody, on Hillsborough, and of young people and conflict and women’s imprisonment in
Northern Ireland all have sponsoring bodies for example. This in no way undermines or
detracts from what Scraton has to say, but as with any other sponsor it provides context and
should alert us to interests and allegiances.
Relatedly, though there are clues in the text, one is left slightly unclear about how
critical criminology proceeds. Scraton rails against those critics who seek to dismiss such
scholarship because of its alleged absence of methodological rigour and it is no doubt the
case that there are those in the academic world who hide behind crude positivistic for-
mulations of research activity and dismiss anything that departs from their narrow model.
Nevertheless, it is not unreasonable for readers to question the veracity of what the critical
scholar (or any other style of social scientist for that matter) has to say. There are frequent
references throughout the book to qualitative research and to enabling respondents to
provide their own accounts of particular events. However, there is little discussion of how
such work is done, how data are analysed or how we should assess the claims being made.
Indeed, such is the consistency of view presented throughout that one wonders whether
opposing accounts would ever be heard let alone appear in the text. No challenge to the
central message appears possible. Consequently, my greatest concern with the volume,
notwithstanding the protestation that ‘People are active agents in their own destinies and
are not reducible to mere “dupes” ’ (p. 227), is the conspiratorial feel that consistently
emerges.
As I noted at the outset this volume is something of a retrospective. As such, it is in some
ways an unusual enterprise. It is rare that authors are given such opportunities – or seek to

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848 Book reviews

take them if presented – and it is commendable that Routledge and Phil Scraton are bucking
the usual trend. What makes this volume especially distinctive, however, is the autobio-
graphical tone that infuses the narrative from time to time. Again, in many respects this is to
be welcomed for, as Scraton reminds us, in C. Wright Mill’s classic formulation, social science
should be the meeting place of the personal and the public. Greater attention to personal
biography in social scientific writing would be welcome. However, that said, I did baulk
slightly at Scraton’s attempts to insert himself in the narrative all the time. There are
undoubtedly occasions where personal connections are important and illuminating. In this
case, by contrast, little was added, and possibly quite a bit lost, in attempting to link an injury
he suffered whilst travelling in Italy to the events of 9/11, or offering the observation that ‘I
was recently a child myself when Mary Bell was convicted of child killing and the memory
of the publicity surrounding her trial remained vivid’ (p. 105). What would have been much
more valuable would have been some reflection from Scraton on what first propelled him in
the direction of critical social research and what has sustained his enthusiasm and energy all
these years.

Tim Newburn
London School of Economics and Political Science

Townley, Barbara Reason’s Neglect: Rationality and Organizing Oxford University Press
2008 pp. 288 £65.00 (hardback) £22.50 (paperback)

In Stephen Greenblatt’s stylish biography of Shakespeare he describes the speculation of an

Elizabethan educationalist scholar that the buttocks were created ‘to facilitate the learning
of Latin’ (Will in the World, 2005). Leaving aside the assumption that ‘Latin learning was
inseparable from whipping’, the case serves to remind us that reason and learning have not
always been associated exclusively with the Mind rather than the Body. In Barbara
Townley’s latest book, corporeal elements of rationality return as she reviews the concept of
‘reason’, and how it is variously mobilized in contemporary understandings of organizations
and theories of social co-ordination. Underlying the book is the spur to understand and
assess the recurrent problems and failures of organizational performance management
techniques (p. 207). Interspersed throughout the book are text ‘boxes’ that exemplify theo-
ries and arguments by reference to a study of the Criminal Justice System in Scotland
undertaken by the author.
Acknowledging that economics, rational choice theory and the like function with powerful
models of means–end rationality, Townley argues that organization analysis now cedes too
much to these ideas in constructing concepts of rationality in ‘opposition’, and is neglecting
to explore other ‘facets’ of the concept. Her conceptual aim is show how Foucault’s concept
of rationalities can help draw together different aspects of reason. Much of the book is
dedicated to relating how concepts of reason and rationality are entwined in other theories
of organizational or sociological action and, to this end, Townley investigates how organi-
zation theory has an intimate relationship to reason. In the central sections of the book she
presents a well-crafted overview of three key approaches to rationality: the Universalist (and
dominant) conception of reason that has been inherited from the Enlightenment, concepts
of rationality that are ‘embedded’ in institutions, contexts or situations, and ‘embodied
rationality’, the involvement of the body’s physical reality in the experience of knowledge,
practice and social interaction.
The approaches most commonly associated with a generalized conception of universal
reason are termed ‘disembedded’. Townley documents how economic theories of individual

© London School of Economics and Political Science 2009 British Journal of Sociology 60(4)
 Book reviews 849

rational actors have been drawn out in theories of organizational decision-making, bounded
rationality, ‘garbage cans’ and the like. Theories of bureaucracy and technology also exhibit
approaches that perceive the enactment of reason in organizational structure, rules and
other accoutrements of a formal order, and in the deployment of technologies that ‘deliver’
outputs in well-defined and predictable means–ends, relationships.
From these disembedded concepts of rationality, the focus shifts in the book to a con-
sideration of how rationality has been conceptualized as a property of, or embedded
within, particular institutions, cultures and situated interactions. Institutional and neo-
institutionalist theories, concepts of culture, and interactionist, practice-based theories of
communities, situated actions, negotiated order and sense-making explore the ongoing con-
struction of rationality and learning in context.
The final key grouping of theories explores the physical nature of embodied rationality. In
contrast to the ideationality of the ‘Mind’s reason’, Townley shows how writers such as
Goffman, Bourdieu and Elias incorporate bodily senses and awareness into explorations of
the management of the body in self-presentation and interaction, the subject’s habitus and
the development of ‘manners’ in court society and accompanying social individualization.
The role of routine, tacit knowledge and habits put on show the ‘knowledge-in-practice’ and
corporeal dimensions of rational actions.The section closes with an overview of relationships
between reason, rational choice and emotion/the unconscious, showing how rational choice
rests upon the desires expressed in preference sets. Without emotion and desire, there could
be no rational choice.
The concluding section finishes with an overview of the facets of practical reason. Townley
draws upon Foucault to argue that within a particular field of activity three ‘axes’ of savoir
(the ‘science’ or knowledge that define a field), connaissance (the systems that regulate a
field’s practices) and subjectivity (how subjects recognize/define themselves in the field)
define rationalities that are variously dis-embedded, embedded and embodied. As such
organization theory and research, Townley argues, should approach the study of reason as a
social practice, encountering the multiple rationalities and practices of ‘being’ and ‘learning
how’ to be rational.
Plainly this is an extensive and strongly motivated book. It is also stimulating, thoughtful
and well-written. If the book’s title is a little unpersuasive (the case for saying that reason has
been ‘neglected’ in organizational studies is not immediately apparent to me before or after
having read the book), nevertheless there is a substantial measure of welcome ambition in
attempting an overview and synthesis of this kind. Almost any study that offers a synoptic
overview of wide-ranging theories in, for example, economics, sociology, organizational
psychology, social theory and psycho-analysis as this does, is inevitably going to compromise
some granularity of detail in return for theoretical and presentational incisiveness, but this
book offers accomplished reviews. The articulation of the Foucauldian axes of rationality in
the closing section (pp. 207–10) ought to have been given more generous development and
explanation, given its centrality to the unifying endeavour of the book. In addition, the links
to the performance measurement in the Criminal Justice System (the text ‘Boxes’) come
across as a little ‘take it or leave it’. These are, however, minor concerns in the context of the
whole venture. In exploring how the concept of reason remain significant to our understand-
ing of social action, Townley has provided management, organization and social scientists
with the opportunity to re-engage with social actors’ and their own rationality.

Keith Robson
Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University

British Journal of Sociology 60(4) © London School of Economics and Political Science 2009