and Douglas Kellner, divides postmodernism into two types: ..... as Douglas McGregor's The Humans Side of ..... tive historical description with Mary Douglas'.
ACTA SOCIOLOGICA 2000
Book Reviews David Held, Anthony M cGrew, David Goldblatt & Jonathan Perraton:
Global Transformations. Politics, Econom ics and Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999. David Held & Anthony M cGrew (eds.):
The Global Transform ations Reader. An Introduction to the Globalization Debate. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000.
T
here is no doubt that Global Transformations can be read with pro t by anyone who wants to know what globalization is all about but is not willing to spend months or even years wading through the rapidly growing pile of books that deal with the topic. This is also why this book is likely to appear on the reading lists of many courses in the forthcoming years either alone or with its companion work, The Global Transformations Reader. De ning globalization as ‘the widening, deepening and speeding up of global interconnectedness’ (p. 14) the book devotes 500 pages to a comprehensive treatment of the subject in different periods of history, with an emphasis on the past 150 years. Its chapters are generally organized according to Michael Mann’s IEMP model, which distinguishes between ideological, economic, military and political sources of power, but it departs from this model in three important respects. Firstly, two themes are added by inserting chapters on migration and environmental problems. Secondly, economic power is dealt with in three separate chapters on international trade, nance and multinational corporations. Thirdly, and rightly so, the term ‘ideology’ is replaced by the wider term ‘culture’. The authors of Global Transformations are familiar with what Manuel Castells wrote in his pathbreaking The Information Age (Routledge, 1996–1998). However, while sharing his view of the importance of the idea of transnational networks and the process of accelerated globalization, their approach is more matter-of-fact
and less polemical. They also expand the scope of discussion by taking up more themes and by using better data (even if one still sometimes wonders whether better solutions might have been available). While Castells dated the current period of globalization from the oil crisis in 1973 and refused to discuss anything that happened before World War II, Global Transformations does not hesitate to cover a far longer period of history. While Castells was afraid to deal with Tsernysevski’s and Lenin’s question ‘What is to be done?’, Global Transformations opens with a chapter arguing that institutional structures for global governance by means of political regulation have been almost constantly expanding and developing since the 1870s at the latest (with the interruption of the two European world wars, of course) and closes with a chapter dealing with the issue of cosmopolitan democracy. Fortunately, the authors do not have a de nite solution to offer although here, as in all other chapters, they offer the reader the facts and raise issues which must be faced in one way or another in the very near future. All chapters provide abundant, well-documented information on the trends of globalization in general and in the SIACS or six ‘states in advanced capitalist societies’ (the USA, UK, Sweden, France, Germany and Japan) in particular. These countries were selected for closer comparative study because of differences and similarities between them in the process of globalization. As a detailed discussion is impossible here, I will refer instead to some general concepts and periodizations that the authors make use of. This will be followed by presentation of some critical comments that are not meant to belittle the value of the book but to indicate that there is still much to be done. The authors use four time–space dimensions in order to assess globalization. These are the extent, intensity, velocity and local impacts of global processes. This makes it possible to specify four forms of globalization. Thick globalization progresses powerfully in all four dimensions – extensity, intensity, velocity and local impacts – as happened at the turn of the 19th and 20th century based on the impact of the gold standard, the British empire and colonial-
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ism. Diffuse globalization is otherwise forceful but there are not many local effects involved. The authors do not believe that there are historical equivalents of this theoretical category but it is a state of affairs that many normative critics of contemporary globalization might nd desirable. Expansive globalization is not forceful in its intensity and velocity but it covers large areas of the globe and its impacts are deep. This happened in the process of European colonialism, for example. Finally, thin globalization is not strong in its intensity, velocity and local effects but it is able to cover large areas as happened in the case of early trade of silk and other luxury goods between Europe and China. In a more speci c analysis the authors differentiate chronologically between four periods of globalization. Premodern globalization took place by the Roman Empire and Catholic Church, for example. Early modern globalization occurred from approximately 1500 to 1850 in the form of the ‘discovery’ and colonialization of the so-called New World, for example. M odern globalization represented by the steam boat, the railway network and colonialization of the whole globe, for example, began around 1850 and lasted until the end of World War II in 1945. Finally, contemporary globalization period is dated from the end of World War II and is still going on. One of the distinctive features of the contemporary epoch is that it is ‘historically unique in so far as patterns of globalization, unlike earlier periods, are no longer associated with, or reliant on, the expansionary logic or coercive institutions of empire’ (p. 425). Instead, they obey the logic of decentralized and (at least potentially) global networks. This is the general scheme with which Global Transform ations approaches history in its thematically speci ed chapters. This turns out to be a powerful point of departure: every chapter supplies essential empirical data and the whole presentation enables the reader to conceptualize ongoing societal processes. This observed some puzzlement makes its way to the mind of a reader. To begin with, there is no doubt that the broad historical scope provides a good framework to help us understand current processes and will help us avoid obvious mistakes in future studies in this currently fashionable eld. At the same time, however, the four-period classi catory scheme causes many important aspects of the picture of current globalization to disappear or fade into the background. This is most obvious in the eld of economic globaliza-
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tion, where the periods from 1870 to 1914 and the oil crisis in 1973 onwards seem to be those of most accelerated globalization, while during the heroic period of European nation states in between, the states were able to control most international economic ows effectively. Secondly, although the book is supposed to be about transnational networks, most of its data takes the nation state as the unit of study just as comparative historical sociology used to do before Wallerstein, Mann and disciples of Foucault, among others, demonstrated the need to relativize that model. This is partly because most of the available statistical sources, of course, are gathered and supplied by individual nation-states. But Global Transformations is an ambitious book based on 10 years of research and in addition to work with secondary literature the authors have taken the trouble to conduct their own research on some themes (the SIACS, that is). This makes the reader wonder why their study is organized on the basis of a conception that the book itself would show is partly outdated in the current increasingly transnational world? Thirdly, similar questions arise when the reader tries to nd descriptions of processes in the book. It may be said that Mann’s use of the IEMP model sometimes runs the risk of forming four self-suf cient social spheres which seem to interact in external ways. Mann, however, is careful to state that there are other forms of power and that the four broad power sources are nothing but ideal types which should never prevent the researcher from following causal links that often cross the ideal typical distinctions between the sources of power. This is not always so in Global Transformations . The chapters seem to seal their subject matter within them so that interaction between different networks of power is hardly dealt with at all. When their interaction is mentioned, the causal links between economy, culture, politics and organized violence often seem to be external rather than internal. The book then, is a taxonomy of forms of globalization rather than a description of today’s dynamic processes and their historical roots. The adoption of concepts borrowed from actor network analysis and developed versions of the theory of what Foucault called dispositifs of power, for example, would have provided tools to make the picture less kaleidoscopic and more integrated. Finally, the book is far too ‘pedagogic’ with repetition and boxed summaries. Scholars and educated readers outside the academic commu-
Book Reviews 273
nity will nd this patronizing and I seriously doubt that students, whose life is supposedly made easier by this practice but who after all must have normal brain as they have made their way to the university, will disagree. Criticisms such as presented above give guidelines for future work in the eld of globalization studies but they should not make us lose from sight two facts. Firstly, Global Transformations is the best and most recommendable book on the theme of globalization published to date. Secondly, most people who are not working on the topic themselves will nd that it is the only one they need to read. Risto Heiskala Department of Sociology University of Helsinki Finland
Kate N ash:
Contemporary Political Sociology: Globalization, Politics, and Power. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.
T
his book attempts to rede ne political sociology in the terms of recent postmodern, global and feminist theory. The rationale for this exercise is that traditional forms of political sociology, in particular those which focus solely on the relation between society and the state, are now outdated, and need to be rethought in the light of contemporary theories of culture, identity, difference and otherness. Nash’s work analyses recent attempts at such a rethinking, and at the same time contributes to ‘the new political sociology’ by offering a postmodern reading of the following: power and politics, globalization, social movements, citizenship and democracy. The book itself is divided into ve long chapters. The rst of these analyses the ways in which ‘new’ political sociology has moved beyond traditional state and/or class-centred theories of power and politics to encompass the ‘formation, contestation, and transformation of identities and institutions across the social eld’ (p. 2). Nash here argues that ‘[t]here has been “a paradigm shift” in political sociology, away from state-centred, class-based models of political participation, or non-participation, toward an understanding of politics as potential in all social experiences. New political sociology is above all concerned with cultural politics, understood in the broadest possible sense as the contestation and transformation of social identities and structures’ (pp. 2–3). This shift towards cultural politics is tied to what Nash terms the ‘postmodern turn in sociology’, a turn characterized by af rmation of the following: anti-epistemology, the indeterminacy of meaning, the decentred nature of society, antiessentialism, and the absence of universal values of truth. Nash, following Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, divides postmodernism into two types: ludic (Lyotard and Baudrillard) and oppositional (Foucault, Laclau and Mouffe). The former, she argues, is not simply playful but ‘inherently anti-political’. The latter, by contrast, seeks the opportunity for greater pluralism and equality in the displacement of Western reason, and is seen by the author to be deeply political in nature. Indeed, it is this latter type of postmodern thinking which both informs and is the subject of Nash’s work. She states: ‘It is this
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form of oppositional postmodernism which has contributed to the new political sociology and the model of cultural politics with which we shall be concerned in this book’ (p. 41). The following chapters explore this model of cultural politics through analysis of a number of different substantive areas of sociological research. Chapter 2, for example, addresses the question of globalization. This question is particularly important, for Nash, as it problematizes ‘the founding sociological image of society as a bounded and coherent set of structures and practices governed by the sovereign nation-state’ (p. 47). Nash’s main argument is that globalization opens the possibility of a cultural politics that operates both beneath and beyond the control of the state. She does not argue, however, that the state is rendered obsolete by globalization, rather that it is one site rather than the site for cultural politics. Nash grounds this view through analysis and critique of two of the main positions on globalization: rst, that it is a consequence of capitalism (Wallerstein, Harvey), and second, that it is a consequence of modernity (Giddens, Beck). In opposition to these readings, she forwards a third position, what she terms ‘globalization as postmodernization’. She argues: ‘The globalization of culture is postmodern because it fragments and pluralizes the very engagement of the dominant Western de nitions of culture as universal and as national’ (p. 75). In the nal section of this chapter, Nash draws on the work of Arjun Appadurai to address the nature of this ‘fragmented’ and ‘pluralized’ culture, and analyses the disjunctures between ve global ‘scapes’: ethnoscapes (landscapes of ‘persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live’), technoscapes (mechanical and information technologies), nanscapes (the ow of global capital), mediascapes (‘the electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information’ and the ‘image-centred, narrative-based strips of reality from which imagined worlds are fashioned’ (p. 89)), and ideoscapes (the ideologies of states and counter-movements). Nash draws the following conclusion: ‘Global scapes both provide the terms within which cultural politics is conducted and are also the outcome of the agreement which results from the contestation of those terms. At the moment, contestation is very much to the fore’ (p. 93). Chapter 3 examines recent theories of social movements. This, Nash argues, is an important area of study, for social movements
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problematize traditional forms of sociological explanation which see politics as organized solely around the nation-state. She states: ‘Social movements see themselves, and they are analyzed in the new political sociology, as involved in struggles over the de nition of meanings and the construction of new identities and lifestyles as well as in more conventional politics. They therefore bring the consideration of cultural politics to the centre of sociological concerns with social change’ (pp. 100–101). This theory of social movements draws upon Resource Mobilization Theory (Olson, Oberschall) and New Social Movement Theory (Touraine, Melucci). Nash argues that a synthesis of these two traditions is possible, for both, at least in their recent forms, emphasize the importance of culture ‘in shaping participants’ perceptions of aims and strategies’ (p. 145). Nash argues, on the basis of this synthesis, that social movements, whether engaged in activity at the level of the state or within civil society, are always engaged in a ‘politics of cultural contestation’. She concludes: ‘It is the understanding of social movements as continually engaged in cultural politics which makes them so central to the new political sociology’ (p. 151). Chapter 4 turns to the question of citizenship. Nash opens this chapter by noting that whereas traditional sociological theories of citizenship took class as the principal axis of inequality, new forms of political sociology or ‘cultural politics’ are concerned with contesting the cultural basis of citizenship and rights. She argues that ‘new’ political sociology questions the normative basis of modern, ‘universal’ citizenship, for this form of citizenship is in practice particularistic rather than inclusive. Nash states: ‘Citizenship rights are actually the rights of a particular social group, white, heterosexual, male heads of households, and not simply of individuals as such. Those who do not t the characteristics of “individuals” are produced as “Other”, as inadequate or unsatisfactory citizens’ (p. 157). Nash grounds this argument through a lengthy analysis of the ways in which individuals are excluded from full citizenship rights on grounds of gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, and wealth. Following this, she examines the bearing of globalization and international law on citizenship and rights. Her argument here is that while global citizenship still remains a possibility for the future, ‘more genuinely universal, human rights’ are beginning to supersede ‘the narrow
Book Reviews 275
particularistic citizenship rights of nationstates’ (p. 203). The nal chapter of this book addresses the questions of democracy and democratization. This work opens with a lengthy analysis of deliberative (Habermas) and post-structuralist (Laclau and Mouffe) models of democracy. Nash appears to sympathize with the latter of these two models, arguing that Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of radical democracy is one of the few to deal explicitly with ‘cultural politics’. She argues that while Laclau and Mouffe do not themselves theorize postmodernity they see the ‘expansion of culture theorized by sociologists of postmodernity’ as offering possibilities for democratization, in particular the ‘opportunity for constructing more egalitarian and pluralist political associations’ (p. 244). This emphasis on equality and pluralism is important, for Nash argues that the ‘new’ political sociology is normative as well as analytical in nature. She states: ‘identifying potentially progressive alternatives in existing conditions and considering how they might be realized is an important aspect of the new political sociology. In this respect, it is both empirical and normative’ (p. 216). With this aim of identifying ‘progressive alternatives’, Nash turns nally to a critique both of Laclau and Mouffe and of Habermas, arguing that their models of democracy are culturally speci c, and that, in view of this, they show ‘insuf cient “responsibility toward Otherness”’ (p. 250). Nash argues that what is needed here is a theory of cosmopolitan or global democracy, one which recognizes the importance of cultural politics, and which works to enable ‘international and transnational political dialogue across cultural traditions’ (p. 250). This work is ambitious, wide-ranging and makes a valuable contribution to the eld. This said, I would question a number of the arguments forwarded here. My main point of contention is that Nash’s de nition of ‘the new political sociology’ is too narrow, for it only includes forms of thought that can be reconciled easily with liberal-democratic ideals. The root of this problem lies in Nash’s division of postmodern thought into ludic and oppositional forms, and her rejection of the former on the grounds that it is ‘inherently anti-political’. This dismissal of the more radical side of postmodern theory is tied to a rather traditional understanding of ‘the political’. In this regard, her reading of Lyotard is particularly revealing. Nash dismisses Lyotard out of hand as a thinker
who advocates ‘anything goes’ and who resigns us to the status quo (see p. 239), but in doing so she overlooks the radical conception of politics which emerges through his work on presentation/representation, justice, passivity and the differend . Equally, there are dif culties with Nash’s reading of what she terms ‘oppositional postmodernism’. It is not clear, for example, how the work of Foucault is actually ‘oppositional’ in nature, and how it can be incorporated into model of cultural politics which not only is to have a strong normative content but takes traditional concepts such as the state and civil society as given. The problem here is again that Nash is content to work with a neo-liberal reading of postmodern theory, but is less keen to explore arguments which question the Western ideology of democracy itself. In view of this, I would argue that her rethinking of political sociology, while important as an introduction, does not go far enough. N icholas Gane Department of Sociology and Applied Social Studies London Guildhall University UK
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L. Boltanski & E. Chiapello:
Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme. Paris: Gallimard, 1999. T. Frank:
The Conquest of Cool. Business Culture, Counterculture and the Rise of Hip Consum erism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
D
uring the last couple of years, business gurus have once again begun to make their voices heard – be it as consultants to Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour’ or as 25 year-old Internet millionaires. They emerge from the ongoing media buzz to lay down the laws of the ‘New Economy’, to stress the crucial role of ‘ exibility’, the ef ciency of ‘networks’ and the importance of creativity and self-development. To Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, this is more than just the usual empty talk. In their Le nouvel esprit du capitalism (The New Spirit of Capitalism) they describe how it rather takes part in the, very important and real, articulation of a ‘new capitalist spirit’. Developing Weber’s concept by adding insights from Boltanski & The´ venot’s ‘sociology of justi cation’ they de ne the spirit of capitalism as the particular set of symbolic resources that can be mobilized in order to judge the ‘common good’ of economic activity (Boltanski, L. & The´ venot, L., De la justi cation , Paris, Gallimard, 1991). Capitalism, they argue, is not an amoral system. Rather it relies on the endless accumulation of capital by ‘formally peaceful means’ ( des moyens form ellement paci ques , p. 37). In order to present the basic con ict on which it is built as ‘formally peaceful’ and therefore legitimate and in order to morally motivate its subjects, or even to give them a certain enthusiasm for what they do, capitalism requires a normative dimension. (But in a few cases, Boltanski & Chiapello argue, material gain and brute force are in themselves inadequate.) They proceed to de ne the ‘spirit of capitalism’ somewhat differently from Weber, not as a meaningless iron cage, but more like what he would call a meaningful ethic, as the ‘ideology that justi es the involvement with capitalism’ ( l’deologie qui justi e l’engagement dans le capitalism , p. 42). In order to study the transformations of the spirit of capitalism, Boltanski & Chiapello turn to management literature where, they argue,
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the normative dimension of capitalism is particularly present, indeed, where there is an obsession with ‘giving a sense to wage labour and a spirit to capitalism’ ( donner un sense au salariat, un esprit au capitalisme , p. 102). Consulting two corpuses of circa 60 management texts each, Boltanski & Chiapello have performed a comparative discourse analysis of the motivating and/or legitimizing arguments prevalent in the 1960s (1959–69) and those that gure in the 1990s (1989–94). Around this central analysis, they build their massive and impressive work. In their results they depart somewhat from the Weberian vein taken up in the introduction by identifying not one, but rather three ‘spirits of capitalism’. In the managerial literature of the 1960s, Boltanski & Chiapello nd a strong emphasis on formal rules and central planning as against arbitrariness and subjective judgements; transparent rules over personal initiative, ef ciency over delity, organization over spontaneous social relations. This particular spirit of capitalism, compatible with the large-scale, hierarchical ‘Fordist’ enterprise, had emerged, they argue, out of the critique of the arbitrariness and disorderly nature of a pre-existing, family capitalism, voiced in the 1920–30s by the rising managerial class. The management literature of the 1990s, on the other hand, is obsessed with notions of change, adaptation and exibility (p. 113). Through valuing the ‘network’ over the organization, ‘coaching’ over leadership and ‘projects’ or ‘self-organization’ over management by means of formalized goals, it prescribes a kind of economic activity that is not only overtly antihierarchical, but where personal creativity and ‘capacity to connect’ have become valuable resources. It has thus come to articulate a new notion of the ‘common good’ of economic activity, what Boltanski & Chiapello call la cite´ par projets . Like its predecessor, this ‘new spirit of capitalism’ results from an incorporation of critique, notably the ‘artistic critique’ of capitalism prevalent in the post-1968 New Social Movements. As its normative dimension, the spirit of capitalism offers an arena for making claims to the legitimacy and desirability of the system, as well as for voicing a legitimate critique. By the late 1960s, Boltanski & Chiapello claim, the ‘social critique’ voiced by the labour movement presented a series of demands (mainly as to wage-levels and shop oor discipline) that were, within the prevailing Fordist normative regime (or cite´ ), legitimate and, thus, had to be taken on directly by management. At the same time,
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however, the contemporary ‘artistic critique of capitalism’, voiced mainly by the student movement and the counterculture and framed in politically more diffuse terms such as authenticity and self-realization offered a possibility to side-step, or displace (de´ placer ) the potentially very powerful claims of the social critique. By adopting the language of the counterculture, management could claim that the real problem with capitalism was authoritarianism and conformity, rather than exploitation and wage levels, issues that related to the individual and his/her personal development rather than to the class and its struggle. Boltanski & Chiapello identify two ways in which the language of the counterculture came to form a new spirit of capitalism. Partly, the ‘advanced factions of the capitalist class’ ( les factions avance´ es du patronat ) – consultants, industrial sociologists and human relations experts – de ned the artistic critique of capitalism (as opposed to the social critique) as a progressive element worth listening to, as the result of higher general levels of education and a general advancement in terms of values. Partly, during the 1970s and early 1980s, there was a massive transfer of exstudent militants and former members of the counter-culture into elds like advertising, marketing and management. This incorporation of the artistic critique has not only managed to side-step the demands of the labour movement, but has also produced a capitalist spirit that is functional in relation to a new, post-Fordist mode of accumulation. By, in the name of individual self-development, sanctioning a transgression of the Fordist distinctions labour/leisure, professional/domestic or even public/private it has permitted a large scale incorporation of personal creativity or even subjectivity tout court into the capitalist valorization process, as a source of both new consumerist sign-values, and perpetual creative innovation. It has also come to promote the utilization of spontaneous sociality and or even ‘communicative action’ to continuously reconstruct the uid, ‘ exible’, project-style sociality that keeps the productive network together. (Habermas, Boltanski & Chiapello show remains an important reference for the literature of ‘neomanagement’.) Finally, it has replaced the more rigid, Fordist disciplinary management by directives with an internalized ‘self-control’. Equally important, by almost completely doing away with the concept of class and by offering no new vocabulary for an understanding of the basic con ictuality of work under capitalism,
this displacement has made it increasingly dif cult to phrase a contemporary critique. This might contribute to an understanding as to why the tangible deprivation of the conditions of industrial labour under the regime of exible accumulation seem to be paralleled by a widespread political apathy. (Baude, S. & Pialoux, M. Cette casse de´libe´ re´ e del solidarite´ s militantes, Le M onde Diplomatique , January 2000.) There is simply no available language in which resistance can be successfully framed. To feed off its criticism, Boltanski & Chiapello argue, is an inherent feature of capitalism, intrinsic to its Schumpeterian, creative element. Capitalism needs an enemy to renew and adapt its moral foundations. It continuously constructs one in terms of the critical social movements and discourses that it constantly provokes. These in turn feed its exibility and continuous reorientation: as Boltanski & Chiapello conclude: ‘The main agent in the creation and transformation of the spirit of capitalism is its critique’ ( L’ope´ rateur principal de cre´ ation et de transformation de l’esprit du capitalism est la critique, p. 585). According to Boltanski & Chiapello, most of the artistic critique of capitalism that emanated from 1968 has by now been successfully incorporated; the libertarian subjectivity proposed by the counterculture has come to stand at the heart of the workings of the ‘New Economy’. Thomas Frank, in his The Conquest of Cool. Business Culture, Counterculture and the Rise of H ip Consumerism , reaches a similar conclusion. He comes there, however, through a different path, concentrating on the American case and on the marketing and advertising profession rather than on management literature. In eight chapters he surveys the ways in which the American advertising profession hooked on to the youthful counterculture of the 1960s and turned its expressions into marketable sign values (an additional two chapters deal with the men’s fashion industry). In part, this led to the emergence of a counter-cultural advertising rhetoric. (As in Bill Bernach’s famous ads for Volkswagen, mocking the planned obsolescence of the American automobile industry by showing the, virtually identical, ‘’52, ‘53, ‘54, ‘55, ‘56, ‘57, ‘58, ‘59, ‘60 and ‘61 Volkswagen’.) It also produced a certain reorientation of the organizational culture of the advertising industry itself: rigid and formal internal hierarchies were replaced by more exible notions of teamwork and short-term projects. The self-identity of advertising men (they were mostly men) also
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changed, from the scienti c experts on propaganda and manipulation that Vance Packard exposed in his 1957 The Hidden Persuaders , to ‘creatives’ for whom rule number one was that there were no rules. Most visibly, perhaps, the habitus of the profession was markedly transformed, from the conformism, grey annel suits and three martini lunches of 1950s ‘organization men’ to the ‘creatives’ hippie fashions, illicit soft drugs and general identi cation with the urban bohemia. (Even Ernst Dichter, whose Freudian, deep-pondering ‘motivation research’ had been the epitome of 1950s scienti c persuasion, recommended LSD as a productive experience for advertising professionals in 1967, p. 114.) During the 1970s, Frank argues, this ‘anticonformist approach’ became standard practice, and during the 1980s, as we know from an endless row of sneaker ads, ‘hip’ had become ‘an of cial capitalist style’, ‘ central to the way capitalism understands itself and explains itself to the public’ (p. 26). (See also Vanderbildt, T., The Sneaker Book , New York, The Free Press, 1998.) During the 1960s, the advertising industry lapsed on to the counterculture spurred by an increasing need for product differentiation and market segmentation. But, according to Frank, the existence of an admittedly vast, countercultural youth market does not in itself suf ce to explain the wholehearted embracement of anticonformism on the part of advertising. Quantitatively, the rebellious made up a small niche and most of the youth market consisted of wellheeled young men and women whose aspirations differed little from that of their grey-suited parents. Indeed, Frank argues, anti-conformism had become a dominant theme in advertising already by 1965, before the counter-culture had made its main mark on public culture. The genealogy of ‘hip’ should then be traced further back. Frank shows how the American management literature had begun to take the mounting critique of technocracy on the part of people like W. H. Whyte and C. Wright Mills seriously already by the late 1950s, leading to such works as Douglas McGregor’s The Humans Side of Enterprise (1960) that argued that ‘improvement in managerial competence’ should be linked to ‘ the satisfaction of higher-level ego development and self-actualization needs’ (as cited in Frank, p. 22). When the counter-culture began to make its public appearance the advertising profession was already there. They had rethought capitalism in such a way as to be open to its in uence. Boltanski & Chiapello and Frank might
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disagree about dating and chronology, but their conclusions are very similar: today capitalism presents itself differently from what is generally implied by notions like bureaucracy, corporations and organization. This ‘New Economy’ furthermore nds its discursive origins in an almost all-encompassing incorporation of the values and attachments proposed by the counterculture of the 1960s, whether in the form of new notions of anti-authoritarian management or in non-conformist consumable sign-values advertised to a segmented niche market. The counter-culture is no longer a counter-culture, but has rather turned into its opposite, the main ideology of what its proponents used to call ‘the system’. Thomas Frank writes as a historian and makes no claims to contribute to social theory. (Indeed he is generally quite vague about causes, and prefers to remain open to empirical complexity.) Nonetheless, his narrative is very similar to that proposed by Boltanski & Chiapello. In a manner similar to the French management cadres, the American advertising industry turned to the counterculture not only to respond to producers wanting to segment the market in fear of ‘consumer satiation’, but principally, it seems, to displace a legitimate critique already voiced within their own lines. This displacement produced what we, using Boltanski & Chiapello’s terminology, might call a new ‘regime of justi cation’ for consumerist needs, based on notions like hipness, selfrealization, anti-conformism and lifestyle choice. Like in the case of management discourse, this displacement has been so successful that resistance is virtually impossible: how can we argue that we are manipulated by advertising and consumer culture when all they urge us to do is to be ourselves? Be this as it may, both Boltanski & Chiapello and Thomas Frank offer solid, fascinating and empirically rich accounts of an important and, to date, very rarely investigated topic. They also remind us that capitalism is far too complex and dynamic to, as is sometimes the case in grander versions of sociological theory, be subsumed under monadic concepts like ‘iron-cage’ or ‘system’. Adam Arvidsson School of Economic and Social Studies University of East Anglia England
Book Reviews 279
Donatella della Porta & M ario Diani:
Social Movements: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999.
I
f I was asked to suggest a reading for an introductory course on social movements, I would hesitate between two books. One is Sidney Tarrow’s Power in M ovement (Cambridge University Press, 1994; second edition 1998). The other is Donatella della Porta and Mario Diani’s Social M ovements: An Introduction . Both in a way represent today what Charles Tilly’s From M obilization to Revolution was some 20 years ago: the most powerful and comprehensive overview of the scholarly literature on social movements. Della Porta and Diani’s volume offers us an open window over a wealth of studies of social movements which have contributed to make this eld a real ‘growth industry’. It is hard to nd blind spots in this book as it virtually covers all aspects of the study of social movements, from networks and organizational structures to collective identities, from political opportunities to cycles of protest, from action repertoires to cultural framings. The book is in nine chapters, each being devoted to a speci c aspect of movements. Except for the introduction, which was written jointly, each of the two authors has written four chapters. This, however, does not prevent the volume from being homogeneous and consistent both in form and content, certainly as a result of discussions and most likely compromises between the two authors. In the introductory chapter the authors present the four theoretical perspectives that emerged since the 1960s: the interactionist perspective which has recently reformulated the classical collective behavior approach, the rationalist paradigm with its focus on strategic action, the mostly European new social movements perspective, and the currently dominating political process approach. They then prepare the terrain for the discussion to follow by identifying four levels of analysis around which the book is structured: the underlying con icts and the structural bases of movements, shared beliefs and collective identities, organizational dynamics and social networks, and political opportunity structures which are the central concept in the political process approach. The rst level of analysis is tackled in Chapter 2. It is asked whether changes in social structure such as the shift towards a more
advanced service and administrative sector and the decentralization of industrial production are useful to account for the rise of collective action. Such large-scale transformations provide the potential for the political mobilization by social movements but, contrary to the prevailing view offered by the ‘classical’ approaches, are hardly suf cient to provoke collective action. The latter are determined by a number of other factors such as the availability and mobilization of organizational resources, the capacity of movement activists to ‘frame’ the issues at hand in a way that resonate with the larger environment, and favorable political opportunities, all aspects that are dealt with in the other chapters of the book. Chapter 3 deals with the second level of analysis. The cultural and symbolic dimensions of collective action have recently received increasing attention after years that witnessed a rationalist bias in the study of social movements. Such renewed interest is attested by a number of collective volumes speci cally devoted to these aspects (e.g., Frontiers in Social M ovement Theory, edited by Aldon Morris and Carol McClurg Mueller, Yale University Press, 1992; Social M ovements and Culture, edited by Hank Johnston and Bert Klandermans, University of Minnesota Press, 1995; only to cite perhaps the most popular ones) as well as by the work of William Gamson (Talking Politics , Cambridge University Press, 1992) and Alberto Melucci (e.g. Challenging Codes , Cambridge University Press, 1996), among others. Della Porta and Diani cogently present this growing literature which shows how cultural framings and the symbolic de nition of social problems facilitate the processes of political mobilization by identifying causes, responsibilities, and possible solutions. This is, so to speak, the external side of the symbolic production of movements, the internal side being represented by the creation and reinforcement of collective identities, which the authors address in Chapter 4. The third crucial level of analysis consists in the organizational structures and resources. If structural social changes and the symbolic dimension of mobilization were at center stage in the ‘classical’ model (in the USA) and in the new social movements approach (in Europe), this is the realm of resource mobilization theory, which has dominated the study of social movements at least since the path-breaking article by John McCarthy and Mayer Zald published in the 1977 issue of the Am erican Journal of Sociology
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(‘Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory’). Della Porta and Diani examine both the web of interpersonal and interorganizational ties in which individuals and organizations are rooted, on the one hand, and the internal characteristics and properties of movement organizations, on the other hand, devoting Chapter 5 to the former and Chapter 6 to the latter. The individuals’ embeddedness in social networks has been shown by numerous studies to be a strong facilitating condition – but sometime also a constraint – to political mobilization. The work of Doug McAdam comes immediately to mind in this respect (see e.g. his Freedom Summer, in addition to various journal articles). Other authors have investigated into the structure, composition and development of movement organizations. Della Porta and Diani summarize both research strands in quite an effective fashion. The interaction between social movements and the political system, upon which has focused the political process approach, is the fourth and nal level of analysis addressed in the book. Chapter 7 deals with the rise and fall of protest cycles, speci cally with the development of action repertoires. The strategies and forms of action of social movements represent a potential for innovation by movement activists and organizations. At the same time, they change over time. This depends on the movements’ internal dynamics, but also on the external political context, which is examined in Chapter 8 with special attention paid to political opportunity structures. This concept, which has proved useful to analyze the mobilization by social movements both longitudinally in case studies and comparatively to show variations across countries, is probably the most widespread among scholars today. Recently it has come under re as the inclusion of an increasing number of dimension endangers its explanatory power. However, it remains one of the most effective analytical tools for the study of social movements and their political mobilization, as the authors’ own work attests (see the recent mini-symposium on social movements in the 1999 issue of Sociological Forum for a debate about the use of the concept of political opportunity structures). Social M ovements: An Introduction , as the title suggests, overviews past and current literature on the politics of protest and contention. As such, and notwithstanding the authors’ warning that it is rather ‘an attempt to present certain central problems of recent debates’
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(p. 23), it shows the state of the art in the eld. It would therefore be both dif cult and illegitimate to criticize its content. In this kind of book, weaknesses might be found in the choice of themes to be addressed and in the way of presenting them. As I said at the outset, however, the authors have done an excellent job in selecting the most relevant themes and in laying them out in a clear and reader-friendly fashion. This makes the volume an extremely helpful read for all those who are interested (and perhaps involved) in social movements, both long-time specialists and newcomers. The former will have a reference guide to previous work in the eld. The latter will nd many points of access to this growing research area. Both will certainly appreciate the enormous effort that Donatella della Porta and Mario Diani have done in pulling together and synthesizing more than 30 years of theoretical and empirical work on social movements. A soft criticism that may be addressed lies in the book’s relative lack of temporal perspective, both in the past and the future. Unlike Tarrow’s Power in M ovement, for example, the present features and developments of social movements are not put in historical perspective. Little is said of the historical roots of social movement and the conditions that gave rise to contemporary forms of collective action. This may be a result, on one side, of the narrow focus on social movements strictly de ned rather than on more general categories of contentious politics or collective action – in spite of their successful attempt to single out the speci city of movements in relation to other forms of collective action – and, on the other side, of the structure of the presentation of the material around themes and levels of analysis rather than some other classifying criteria such as the developmental stages of a movement. To be sure, that is a reasonable and effective option. Yet it is one that risks making us neglect the history of formation of social movements and their relation to other forms of contentious politics. On the other hand, we may also regret that della Porta and Diani do not put as much energy into putting past and present work into future perspective as they do for synthesizing and interpreting it. Again, little is said of the possible theoretical developments and research avenues for the coming years. They do so to some extent in Chapter 9, where they deal with the outcomes and consequences of social movements. This, indeed, I see as one of the most urgent
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topics for research in the years to come. In spite of a glorious early attempt by William Gamson (The Strategy of Social Protest , Wadsworth, 1975; second edition 1990), still little work systematically studies the consequences of social movements. In particular, most existing work focuses on their short-term political effects, while little has been done on their long-term impact in the social and cultural spheres. This is in part due to the theoretical and methodological dif culties inherent in the analysis of movement outcomes. Yet the recent increase in the number of studies addressing this aspect shows that social scientists are willing to overcome these dif culties and explore such a crucial dimension of social movements. In spite of one chapter being devoted to movement outcomes, however, the book does not really open new research avenues, at least not as much and explicitly as one might have wished. In sum, and notwithstanding the caveats I have indicated, one can easily share the characterization that Charles Tilly gives in the volume’s back cover as ‘a luminous overview of current knowledge concerning politics that over ows the boundaries of elections, lobbies, polls and interest groups.’ Finally, Italian-speaking readers will notice that this book was translated from its original Italian edition ( I movimenti sociali , Roma, La Nuova Italia Scienti ca, 1997). M arco Giugni Department of Political Science University of Geneva
J. M . Barbalet:
Emotion, Social Theory and Social Structure – A Macrosociological Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
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ocial con icts and happenings are often understood in terms of emotions. The riot was activated because one part became angry, we say. Or we say that the nurses went on strike because they felt that their wage was no longer fair compared to the wages of other public sector jobs. Such a common sense way of explaining things has not been part of sociological theory, not even in much of the sociology of emotion eld. This is a mistake according to the Australian sociologist Barbalet who has recently become a professor at Leicester University. He therefore seeks to explain how emotion can be conceptualized as an explanatory factor and treated as more than extraordinary, episodic or pathological phenomena. A more thorough understanding of how speci c emotions are central in the workings of macro social processes is required. Emotion, Social Theory and Social Structure – A M acrosociological Approach contributes to such deeper understanding by exploring how certain emotions are implicated in social processes of class, rationality, order, change, inequality and human rights. Barbalet examines key aspects of social structure by applying and developing emotion categories – e.g. understanding structural and organizational change as stimulated by ‘fear’. Secondly, he uses his developed emotions categories in order to elaborate sociological theory on issues such as agency and temporality. His interest is to show how unrecognized emotions are dynamic parts of certain broader social processes and to draw some theoretical implications of such insights. He is not seeking to construct a general theory of emotions. This review is primarily devoted to a presenting of the book, as I believe it can contribute to a development of sociological theory. Chapter 1 on ‘emotion in social life and social theory’ presents the historical context of the conceptual pair emotion and sociology that has not always been conceptualized as an odd couple. Drawing on Theodore Kemper’s sociostructural model that posits that emotional experiences are determined primarily by structural properties of social interaction, Barbalet argues in favour of a social structural approach to emotion. Such an approach can explain why
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and how certain emotional experiences come about by seeing them as tricked by changes in status and power relations. It can go further than merely describing various forms of emotional experiences which cultural and constructivist approaches are dedicated to. Chapter 2 deals with the conceptual pair of emotion and rationality in a sophisticated manner. Barbalet explores the character and consequences of ‘the conventional approach: opposition between rationality and emotion’ (Descartes, Kant, Weber, Freud), ‘the critical approach: emotion as a solution to problems rationality cannot solve’ (Hume, Frank, Damasio) and ‘the radical approach: emotion and rationality as continuous’ (William James). Barbalet concludes by emphasizing how ‘background emotions’ such as trust and feelings of blase´ play an integral but often denied part in the social dynamics of instrumental rationality. Chapter 3 explores how resentment is crucial for understanding class formation and action since class resentment provoked by changes in trade cycles is active in forming class con ict. Moreover, Barbalet extends his claims suggesting mutual resentment as a crucial feature of various sorts of social con ict (p. 72). Chapter 4 explores the emotional basis of con dence. Through creating a possible future state (an image or projection) in the present, con dence forms a kind feeling of security/comfort in relation to the essentially unknowable future. We cannot act in terms of calculations based on information about the future and therefore calculative reason gives way to emotion as the basis of action. The time perspective is integral to con dence and this makes it the affective basis of action (p. 88). Linking the notion of temporality to con dence can be part of a solution to the problem of a lack of understanding of temporality in conventional action theory, Barbalet underlines. Chapter 5 explores the role of shame in promoting conformity and suggests that as a result of changing experiences of self – today’s self as a conscious re exive project – a self-referential form of shame emerges. This feeling of shame one experiences when failing to experience oneself as good enough, and its relation to social conformity is an ambivalent one. Chapter 6 explores how not just sympathy but resentment and vengefulness are implicated in claims to basic rights. Resentment can often be constitutive of establishing of rights, as it is not negative to resent for example injustice. Chapter 7 explores how fear can function as a constructive driver of organizational chance
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instead of sticking to the conventional ideas that links fear to either ght or ight reactions. Barbalet conceptualizes fear as a social emotion that if contained can stimulate social and organizational change. As one example of how climates of elite fear lead to change, the British elite’s fear of the labour movement is discussed. In his epilogue Barbalet considers the present cultural narrowing and self-centredness of emotional life today, and explicates the theoretical implications of his study for ‘temporality’ and the reconsidering of the intellectual sources of sociology. Taking emotions serious as explanatory factors in macro-sociological settings requires a rewriting of the sociological classical canon – giving e.g. Adam Smith and William James a more prominent place. Moreover, he presents an alternative presentation of emotional processes than the dominant notion of ‘emotional labour’ formed by Arlie Hochschild. Throughout the book one can nd useful general points on how to conceptualize a (macro) sociological perspective on the social inherence of emotions and their social effects. Some of these will be summarized in the following. Emotion has a fundamental dual character that explains why we have two almost opposite perspectives concerning emotion: one perspective treating emotion as biologically grounded movers of human action and another perspective treating emotions as cultural artifacts relative to particular societies. Barbalet’s point is not that one perspective is wrong and another is correct but that the two theories emphasize different aspects of emotions. Consequently, if one views emotion merely as social and cultural construction one misrepresents the complicated, ambivalent reality of emotions and the explanatory value of an emotion perspective is lost. It is the explanatory value of an emotion perspective that Barbalet explores by treating speci c emotions such as resentment, vengefulness, con dence and fear as factors that can explain speci c macro-social processes. Emotion can be understood as somehow explanatory force/factors as emotions are not merely about evaluation of situations from the perspective of relevance for the experiencing self. Emotion involves not merely a cognitive and evaluating dimension but also a dispositional dimension. This means that emotion leads to preparation of the actions responding to the situation in which the subject is located. The cognitive dimension involves images of the future and projecting of self-images. The dispositional dimension is
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about an inclination to act on these images and this self-projecting. Stressing the dispositional aspect of emotion Barbalet seeks to redress a balance of perspectives in a sociology of emotions that has put much emphasis on the (cognitive) evaluative aspect of emotions. For sociology, emotion is crucial because emotion is a necessary link between social structure and social actor. Generally, emotions do not compel but incline our behaviour. The emotional link between social structure and social actor is therefore never mechanical. Our emotions are provoked by socio-structural circumstances and we experience them as transformations of our dispositions to act. As we engage with others emotional experience is both stimulated in ourselves and orienting of our further conduct. Emotion is directly implicated when we transform our circumstances as well as circumstances transform our dispositions to act (p. 27). Consequently, not taking emotion into account will make our sociological analysis of situated actions incomplete and fragmented. Barbalet emphasizes the social context of emotion provoking experience, claiming that emotions stem from structural and relational social contexts and that they can cause changes in such contexts. Emotions reside both in experiencing individuals and in their social relations. This social character of emotions has been neglected. It is the abstraction of emotion on the level of individual experience that has been most developed in the literature (p. 79). But both experiential and contextual elements of emotion are necessary for conceptualizing emotion as a social phenomenon. Emotion cannot be reduced to its personbound indicators when we realize that social context is a constitutive part of emotions. Consequently, context must be thought of as part of the de nition or conceptualization of emotion. Acknowledging this implies that one cannot in advance determine anything about the durance of emotions. Whether or not an emotional experience is long- or short-lived depends on the social and structural context that engenders that experience. The book ‘reasserts the place of emotionality in classical theory and makes the classical formations answer to the speci cs of the current historical moment’, Norman Denzin concludes his review in American Journal of Sociology (1999, 104:1530–1532). It does more than this. Denzin seems to overlook Barbalet’s call for a rewriting of the sociological classics and his
critical engagement with also contemporary sociologists. Denzin suggests that Barbalet’s approach dismiss the role of individual consciousness by treating emotions as reaction to factors that are external to the person. Such a reading seems unjusti ed. It is right that Barbalet asserts that emotions operate at an unacknowledged level when they are centrally implicated in social action (p. 72). But, as I understand Barbalet’s approach, it is conducive to integrating the role of a mediating individual consciousness in determining the quality and social signi cance of emotions. Barbalet’s point is just that it is not always the case that we consciously mediate and manage our emotions. Sometimes our emotions work in unacknowledged ways provoked by the structural circumstances we are thrown into. But given the fundamental dual character of emotional life it is an empirical query to determine when which kind of process is the case. Another authority in the eld of the sociology of emotions also seems to make an ungenerous reading. John P. Hewitt concludes that Barbalet’s book does not give us a great deal that is new. It is valuable as it reminds us how much we already knew – or would have known had we thought as clearly about these matters as Barbalet has (cf. review in Contemporary Sociology (1999, 28:64–65). This conclusion seems to neglect that the book originally develops an explanatory emotion perspective to be applied to macro -social settings such as class con ict. Moreover, arguing that con dence is basically emotional and that an emotion perspective can better the sociological understanding of agency and temporality also seems to be unconventional propositions. Barbalet’s theoretical development goes beyond what is more or less known in sociology of emotion and social theory. I am not convinced that Hochschild’s theory assumes that emotion management does produce an object that is a nal emotion as Barbalet claims (p. 180). Hochschild’s theory seems more complex than this. His point that it is ‘primarily in language that emotional objection occurs; in naming particular experiences as emotions they become things. Emotions themselves are never nished objects but always in process’ (p. 180) is an important general point, though. It can explain why it can be so dif cult and slippery theoretically to de ne emotions. Barbalet’s asserts that the constructivist approach in the sociology of emotion implies a certain voluntarism (p. 23). He might have a
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point here. But emphasizing that emotions are (also) de ned through historical and social constructions does not necessarily imply that people can change these easily at will. Much social constructivist work is precisely about showing how we are powerfully constrained by constructions. Furthermore, I agree with Hewitt’s point that Barbalet seems to create an unnecessary opposition between cultural and symbolic interactionist approaches that show how understandings of emotions are formed and a structural approach that conceives social relations of status and power as a principal activating context of emotional responses. This book will have realized its possible success if it prepares to investigation, Barbalet states in his introduction. Clearly written, cogently argued it will have good chances to do so. Sociologists of varied specialization now have no excuse not to consider at least applying an emotion perspective to their subject of study. Poul Poder Pedersen Department of Sociology University of Copenhagen Denmark
Deborah Lupton:
Risk. London and New York: Routledge, 1999.
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ompared to the past, we live quite safely and comfortably. However, we are in fact in the middle of danger. We will not probably be hijacked during travelling, but high-speed traf c, energy production, general pollution and even nutrition creates new risks to harm our lives. We live in a permanent state of lowlevel fear. We have experts who calculate and estimate the objective and hence ‘real’ risks. From that viewpoint we have ‘wrong’ attitudes in our everyday life. We might drive carelessly and be afraid of ying. However, Deborah Lupton argues in her book Risk , that in contemporary usage ‘risk’ is a socially constructed concept. She asks how certain kinds of knowledge about risk are constructed at a particular historical moment and in a particular socio-cultural setting. How are certain ways of talking about risk prescribed and others excluded? What types of subjects are constructed through risk discourses? Our lives are, in a way, a matter of playing with risks. It is a game that constructs our identity and our attitudes towards other people and groups. In her introduction, Lupton goes through changes in the meanings of risk (and danger). Generally speaking we have been delivered from the medieval dangers to the modern plethora of risks. In the Middle Ages, the concept of risk excluded the idea of human fault and responsibility in the face of natural force majeure . All human beings could do was roughly to estimate the likelihood of a storm, epidemic or ood. In the early modern era, statistical calculations of risk and the expansion of the insurance industry determined that the consequences were systematically caused, statistically describable and thus ‘predictable’ types of events, which could therefore also be subjected to supra-individual and political rules of recognition, compensation and avoidance. From the 19th century onwards, the risk was not located exclusively in nature but also among human beings, their conduct, in the relations between them, and thus, in society. Here, on page 6, Lupton also leaves nature aside and continues with people only. In modernity, risk has replaced genuine indeterminacy or uncertainty with the myth of calculability. However, the Modernist notions of risk also included the division into the calculable and the non-calculable – mere
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‘uncertainty’. John Maynard Keynes, for example, argued that investors’ behaviour is ‘driven by animal spirits’ (p. 7) rather than by probabilistic calculation that could be analysed. The calculable risk, then, could be both ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Until the beginning of the 19th century this meaning of risk dominated. Risk in itself was a neutral concept, denoting the probability of something happening, combined with huge losses or gains. At the end of the 20th century these ne distinctions tended more or less to be lost. Lupton concludes the concise but informative historical description with Mary Douglas’ notion that, excluding some esoteric professional discourses, the word ‘risk’ now means merely ‘danger’, and in everyday parlance merely something negative rather than disastrous. A more interesting sociological question is this: why have the concept and language of risk proliferated in expert discourses to the extent that they have over the past few decades? Lupton notices the huge development of probabilistic technologies and the establishment of institutions and regulatory agencies to deal with highly risky issues such as nuclear power. But without handling, say, any high-technology case she moves more within the zeitgeist paradigm, saying that societies have transformed. Late modernity is characterized by a growing sense of the failed promises of early or ‘simple’ modernity. Thus, the growing notions of risks are consequences of ‘a more modest modernity’ (p. 11), where science and medicine are no longer the unquestioned vanguards of progress. Lupton identi es six major categories that are held to be a risk from the viewpoint of Western individuals or institutions: environmental, lifestyle, medical, interpersonal, economic and criminal risks. However, in a different societal and historical moment, the list or its content would be different. This frees Lupton to scrutinize any particular issue. She is more interested in the Douglasian idea that selected risks ‘have an important ontological status in our understandings of selfhood and the social and material worlds.’ (p. 14). Indeed, this seems to provide the main motive of the whole book. Lupton’s book really is a reader. It is based on secondary source material, pitting wellestablished sociological positions against each other. Lupton’s own critical voice can be heard only at the meta-level where she constructs her implicit overall argument. She is at her loudest
in Chapter 2, ‘Theorizing risk’. Here she constructs a continuum of some epistemological approaches to risk in the social sciences. The main dimension, or tension, is between the ‘realist’ position, usually occupied by technicoscienti c or cognitive science theories, and a strong constructivist position, for example poststructuralist, especially Foucauldian ‘Governmentality’, perspectives. From the ‘realistic’ viewpoint, risk is an objective hazard, threat or danger that can be measured independently of social and cultural processes. Actually, cultural or social frameworks of interpretation only bias the observations. From the strongly constructionist point of view, nothing is a risk in itself but rather a historically, socially and politically contingent way of seeing. In between the realist and strong constructionist positions, Lupton locates ‘weak constructionist’ views. According to these, risk is an objective hazard, etc., that is inevitably mediated and known through social and cultural processes. The examples of the weak constructionist views are ‘Risk society’ perspectives, critical structuralism and some psychological approaches. The nal perspective-cluster, then, lies between strong and weak constructionism. There is functional structuralism, psychoanalysis and phenomenology, and then an umbrella concept that Lupton calls, following Mary Douglas, the ‘cultural/symbolic’ perspective. The basic tension and rhetorical premise of the whole book seems to be that of cultural perspectives’ (and somewhat Foucauldian) criticism pitched against technico-scienti c and cognitive ones. With modern scientism (to my mind easily) defeated, Lupton moves on to review three main academic conversations that use risk as a keyword. Mary Douglas and her followers dealing with culture, purity, danger and body, Beck and Giddens as a writers of re exive modernization, and then Foucault’s Governmentality are handled in three chapters, taking up almost half of the whole volume. While the technical and cognitive sciences asked what risks exist, how should we manage them, and how do people respond cognitively to risks, the cultural approach studies ask, why are just certain dangers selected as risks. And how does risk operate as a means to draw up symbolic boundaries? Mary Douglas in particular has provided a trenchant critique of the dominant realist, individualist-focused, approaches.
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The key question of ‘risk society’ literature is the relationship of risk to the structures and processes of late modernity, and the way risk is understood in different socio-cultural contexts. Beck and Giddens both see the concept of risk as a central concern in the contemporary era and they are both interested in the political aspects of risk, stressing re exivity as a primary response to late modern uncertainties. Although they are both weak constructionists, Beck implies that a heightened degree of risk re exivity is the outcome of a greater number of risks being created in the late modern era. According to Giddens, risks are merely thought to be greater, because of contemporary society’s extended sensitivity to risks. Furthermore, for Giddens, lay people trust in expertise. For Beck, re exivity is a critique of expertise. Lupton lists the re exive modernization thesis’ weaknesses: the uniqueness of the late modern era as a critique of expert systems, simplicity, speculativity and insuf cient emphasis on the communal, aesthetic and shared symbolic aspects of risk in their focus on individualization. However, Giddens’ ‘pure relationship’ and other, almost family-therapeutic thoughts about love, sexual intimacy and trust, not to mention Giddens’ focus on the body and self-directed self-re exivity, a dif cult idea for academic sociology, get only hidden critique from Lupton. In particular, Giddens’ individualistic usage of the concept of trust could have been more criticized in a book dealing with risk. For Giddens, trust seems to be merely a safe cocoon that shelters lay people’s emotions against an unknown technological environment where one would need expert knowledge. Lupton does not require any system-related concept or meaning of trust from Giddens. However, Adam B. Seligman (1997), for example, argues that, in thinking of society, the sphere of personal trust is very small compared to con dence in the functions of legitimate systems, the proper observance of the traf c rules, for example. Before the general framework of the fth chapter begins to work, Lupton’s description of Poststructuralist and Governmentality literature makes the reader feel a little uncomfortable. Is this section written only because of the general prominence of Foucault in sociology? Perhaps this impression only comes from the heavily theoretical (compared to Beck and Giddens), or at least discursive and strategic emphasis that is then criticized also by Lupton herself.
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‘Governmentality’ asks how the discourses (one of Lupton’s keyword) and practices surrounding risk operate in the construction of subjectivity and social life. Risk strategies and discourses are means of ordering the social and material worlds through rationalization and calculation, trying to make uncertainty more controllable. These strategies and discourses select certain phenomena as ‘risky’ requiring subsequent individual or institutional management. With the obligatory big names judiciously reviewed, Lupton’s own framework can be seen slightly better. The sixth chapter begins: ‘The theoretical perspectives on risk that have been reviewed thus far provide various approaches to understanding how concepts of risk in uence subjectivity’(p. 104). However, Lupton implies, these abstract theories about risk do not explore in detail the diverse and dynamic ways in which lay people respond to risk. This is the task of the last three chapters of the book. If the technical and cognitive scienti c approaches served up in the beginning of the book were rather too easy a target, another rhetorical opponent is the risk society approach. With the help of Scott Lash, among others, Lupton argues that although the late modern re exivity in lay people’s relation to risk is a strong phenomenon, as Beck and Giddens show, it is not based simply on cognitive judgements but is also founded in aesthetic or hermeneutic judgements that are developed through acculturation. People probably do not calculate risks and bene ts, but avoid risks habitually in their everyday lives, as in buckling up seatbelts routinely. Everyday lives are, of course, different in having access to material resources, not to mention membership – single or multiple – of social groups and networks. Although the voice is now more and more Lupton’s own, the chorus is again rather Douglasian, especially in Chapter 7, ‘Risk and otherness’. As with the change from the medieval ‘open’ body to the modern, civilized, ‘closed’ body, so too changing notions of the body have been more or less aligned with the ways in which risk has been conceptualized and dealt with. Central to our feeling of disgust is our sense of boundaries having been transgressed. Ideas and strategies around risk often operate at the symbolic level, organized around notions of self and other. More than merely controlling particular hazards, risk beliefs and practices go beyond, conceptualizing one’s own body being ‘at risk’ when its autonomy and integrity seem
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to be threatened. Respectively, the bodies of others who are considered incapable of regulating their bodily boundaries are routinely thought to be ‘risky’ to themselves or the others. For some reason, Erving Goffman’s study of asylums (1961) does not gain a mention even in this connection. For some reason too, an explicitly concluding chapter is missing. Perhaps its content would have become repetitive given that each individual chapter has a conclusion of its own. Instead, the last chapter constitutes a shift, and depicts, or rather creates, a counter-discourse in which risk-taking is presented far more positively than in the dominant contemporary view where risk is always something that needs to be avoided. The message is that risk is also closely connected to pleasure. Of course, the disembodied, rational actor is denied in this discourse as well. ‘In some social contexts, risk taking is actively encouraged as a means of escaping from the bounds of everyday life, achieving selfactualization, demonstrating the ability to go beyond expectations or performing gender’ (p. 171). Transgression is a potent source of pleasure as well as fear, as in the horror lm genre, for example. Transgression, liminality and hybridity are ‘risky’ because they challenge accepted conceptual boundaries. Today, the province of carnivalesque thrills has shifted from the religious festival to the seaside resort, the adventure holiday and the ‘extreme sport’. This book may not turn out to be a classic. However, for students (and beginner researchers) of risk as a symbolic crossing of culturally accepted borders, this book gives a ne and still accessible literary review of the most prominent sociological conversations to use risk as a keyword. A mention of this ‘cultural/symbolic’ emphasis could have been located also in the (now missing) sub-title of the book. To bluntly name the book ‘Risk’, is of course a practical way to avoid risks. But now there is the risk that this reader will attract some haphazardous readers. But is this dangerous? Kalle Toiskallio Department of Sociology University of Helsinki Finland
