Pub Date : 2023-08-24DOI: 10.1177/00943061231191421q
C. Hakim
invisible aspects of social and political life. I would also recommend reading the book and thinking about it as a study of a radical form of modern society that allows us to see the structural tensions present in all other societies. People everywhere decouple everyday practices from formal structures, yet they are more visible in authoritarian societies, while in western democracies it is not easy to look behind the taken-forgranted.
{"title":"What is Sexual Capital?","authors":"C. Hakim","doi":"10.1177/00943061231191421q","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061231191421q","url":null,"abstract":"invisible aspects of social and political life. I would also recommend reading the book and thinking about it as a study of a radical form of modern society that allows us to see the structural tensions present in all other societies. People everywhere decouple everyday practices from formal structures, yet they are more visible in authoritarian societies, while in western democracies it is not easy to look behind the taken-forgranted.","PeriodicalId":46889,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews","volume":"52 1","pages":"447 - 448"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45410791","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-24DOI: 10.1177/00943061231191421ll
Burak Gürel
cuse referred to as ‘‘repressive desublimation’’ or the proliferation of transgressive experiences that do not serve genuine transformational ends but merely end by shoring up the very systemic logics that they are supposed to be against. In the end, Thorpe succeeds in diagnosing the role of sociology as a handmaiden in the reproduction of our pathological social reality rather than a genuine means to undermine it. The hyper-subjectivism and social atomization created by neoliberalism has meant the dissolution of social solidarism and the decline of the possibility of a critical form of social knowledge with democratic, public aims. Sociology in Post-Normal Times is a book that should be read and discussed widely, for this reviewer fears that, if Thorpe is right, such books will be fewer and farther between.
{"title":"Governing and Ruling: The Political Logic of Taxation in China","authors":"Burak Gürel","doi":"10.1177/00943061231191421ll","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061231191421ll","url":null,"abstract":"cuse referred to as ‘‘repressive desublimation’’ or the proliferation of transgressive experiences that do not serve genuine transformational ends but merely end by shoring up the very systemic logics that they are supposed to be against. In the end, Thorpe succeeds in diagnosing the role of sociology as a handmaiden in the reproduction of our pathological social reality rather than a genuine means to undermine it. The hyper-subjectivism and social atomization created by neoliberalism has meant the dissolution of social solidarism and the decline of the possibility of a critical form of social knowledge with democratic, public aims. Sociology in Post-Normal Times is a book that should be read and discussed widely, for this reviewer fears that, if Thorpe is right, such books will be fewer and farther between.","PeriodicalId":46889,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews","volume":"52 1","pages":"486 - 490"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45648154","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-24DOI: 10.1177/00943061231191421d
J. Mortimer
a problem, suggest a solution, and to act— even when it is unpopular—toward prevention strategies that are known to work in less-resourced areas. This is a lesson that has implications far beyond infant mortality and has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the thing that struck me most about Babylost is that it is not an academic book per se. It can be easily read by the public, by someone with lived experiences, or by clinicians, and it is filled with data that are both accessible and contextualized. It would be completely irresponsible not to also mention that intersectionality is apparent in the book even though one might think that would be eliminated by the alphabetical nature of the organization of the content. In fact, the book is cross referenced, and personal stories, anecdotes, photos, and quotes are interspersed throughout so that it reads as a cogent narrative, despite the fact that it can be read by each letter of the alphabet and have the content stand on its own. Despite the complexity and multifactorial causes of infant mortality, I finished reading Casper’s work feeling activated and refreshed to continue the important work of safely propagating our species and supporting the people courageous enough to venture on the journey to parenthood regardless of pregnancy outcomes. Because inherently embedded in Casper’s work is the notion that regardless of race, ethnicity, religiosity, spiritualism, creed, sexual, gender or other orientation/identity, a society that is unable to shepherd its newest citizens to this plane and protect them in their first years of life should alarm us all and should require the attention of everyone. If ‘‘the arc of moral justice is long, but bends toward justice,’’ as Martin Luther King stated, then we need to decide where on that trajectory we can act and then do so. The calls to action as well as the summary of historical data in Babylost should motivate us all to act in the face of need.
{"title":"Dreams of a Lifetime: How Who We Are Shapes How We Imagine Our Future","authors":"J. Mortimer","doi":"10.1177/00943061231191421d","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061231191421d","url":null,"abstract":"a problem, suggest a solution, and to act— even when it is unpopular—toward prevention strategies that are known to work in less-resourced areas. This is a lesson that has implications far beyond infant mortality and has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the thing that struck me most about Babylost is that it is not an academic book per se. It can be easily read by the public, by someone with lived experiences, or by clinicians, and it is filled with data that are both accessible and contextualized. It would be completely irresponsible not to also mention that intersectionality is apparent in the book even though one might think that would be eliminated by the alphabetical nature of the organization of the content. In fact, the book is cross referenced, and personal stories, anecdotes, photos, and quotes are interspersed throughout so that it reads as a cogent narrative, despite the fact that it can be read by each letter of the alphabet and have the content stand on its own. Despite the complexity and multifactorial causes of infant mortality, I finished reading Casper’s work feeling activated and refreshed to continue the important work of safely propagating our species and supporting the people courageous enough to venture on the journey to parenthood regardless of pregnancy outcomes. Because inherently embedded in Casper’s work is the notion that regardless of race, ethnicity, religiosity, spiritualism, creed, sexual, gender or other orientation/identity, a society that is unable to shepherd its newest citizens to this plane and protect them in their first years of life should alarm us all and should require the attention of everyone. If ‘‘the arc of moral justice is long, but bends toward justice,’’ as Martin Luther King stated, then we need to decide where on that trajectory we can act and then do so. The calls to action as well as the summary of historical data in Babylost should motivate us all to act in the face of need.","PeriodicalId":46889,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews","volume":"52 1","pages":"421 - 423"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42500355","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-24DOI: 10.1177/00943061231191421z
Mike Owen Benediktsson
The launching point for this intriguing book is the claim that the global urban landscape is inherently and pervasively fragmented. The fragmentation in question is not geopolitical or territorial. It is immediate, material, cultural, and even sensory in nature. Much of the ‘‘urban world,’’ geographer Colin McFarlane argues in Fragments of the City: Making and Remaking the Urban World, consists of a haphazard agglomeration of discarded bits of larger things and ideas. And this is particularly true of the large and growing part of this world that is composed of informal settlements and/or inhabited by marginalized and disempowered urban dwellers. Fragments of the City builds on this foundational observation in several directions at once. The book is simultaneously a treatise on the need to understand urban fragmentation and an example of how to do so. It is an intentionally fragmented text about a fragmented landscape: a concerted attempt to describe and explain, but one that seeks assiduously to avoid imposing an artificial unity or coherence. It is also, of course, a work of urban geography, and a fascinating one. It builds clearly on the work of Nigel Thrift, Doreen Massey, Stephen Graham, and others, and makes a valuable contribution to the field. McFarlane argues that the basic needs of the people who live ‘‘among the fragments,’’ as well as many of their more profound challenges and aspirations, have been invisible to the integrating visions of planners and theorists alike. McFarlane is politely indirect in this critique. With several exceptions, he does not name names. The protagonists of the ‘‘creed of wholism’’ (p. 115) remain vaguely in the background. But he carves a space for his argument by claiming that modern urbanists have tended to rely on convenient but flawed totalities and have thus overlooked the inherent brokenness and incompleteness of much of the urban realm, doing a form of epistemological violence to the lived experiences of those forced to struggle with this fragmentation on a daily basis. The implications of this argument, which is clearly inspired by the work of Walter Benjamin, Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, and others, are simultaneously theoretical, empirical, and political. They impose a heavy burden. In this sense, the analogy to the flaneur’s avocation, strolling through the urban world without a strong sense of direction or purpose, is misleading. Walking through a city might be relatively easy (at least for a white, male, able-bodied urban geographer like McFarlane, who readily acknowledges his privilege). But making sense of what one finds, without relying on conceptual tools that impose a facile coherence and unity on a fractured world, is an ambitious and difficult undertaking. In order to appreciate an urban realm composed of fragments, McFarlane contends, we need to open our eyes to the partial, the reconstructed, or the recombined. This commitment to fragmentation as a sort of language of its own requ
{"title":"Fragments of the City: Making and Remaking Urban Worlds","authors":"Mike Owen Benediktsson","doi":"10.1177/00943061231191421z","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061231191421z","url":null,"abstract":"The launching point for this intriguing book is the claim that the global urban landscape is inherently and pervasively fragmented. The fragmentation in question is not geopolitical or territorial. It is immediate, material, cultural, and even sensory in nature. Much of the ‘‘urban world,’’ geographer Colin McFarlane argues in Fragments of the City: Making and Remaking the Urban World, consists of a haphazard agglomeration of discarded bits of larger things and ideas. And this is particularly true of the large and growing part of this world that is composed of informal settlements and/or inhabited by marginalized and disempowered urban dwellers. Fragments of the City builds on this foundational observation in several directions at once. The book is simultaneously a treatise on the need to understand urban fragmentation and an example of how to do so. It is an intentionally fragmented text about a fragmented landscape: a concerted attempt to describe and explain, but one that seeks assiduously to avoid imposing an artificial unity or coherence. It is also, of course, a work of urban geography, and a fascinating one. It builds clearly on the work of Nigel Thrift, Doreen Massey, Stephen Graham, and others, and makes a valuable contribution to the field. McFarlane argues that the basic needs of the people who live ‘‘among the fragments,’’ as well as many of their more profound challenges and aspirations, have been invisible to the integrating visions of planners and theorists alike. McFarlane is politely indirect in this critique. With several exceptions, he does not name names. The protagonists of the ‘‘creed of wholism’’ (p. 115) remain vaguely in the background. But he carves a space for his argument by claiming that modern urbanists have tended to rely on convenient but flawed totalities and have thus overlooked the inherent brokenness and incompleteness of much of the urban realm, doing a form of epistemological violence to the lived experiences of those forced to struggle with this fragmentation on a daily basis. The implications of this argument, which is clearly inspired by the work of Walter Benjamin, Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, and others, are simultaneously theoretical, empirical, and political. They impose a heavy burden. In this sense, the analogy to the flaneur’s avocation, strolling through the urban world without a strong sense of direction or purpose, is misleading. Walking through a city might be relatively easy (at least for a white, male, able-bodied urban geographer like McFarlane, who readily acknowledges his privilege). But making sense of what one finds, without relying on conceptual tools that impose a facile coherence and unity on a fractured world, is an ambitious and difficult undertaking. In order to appreciate an urban realm composed of fragments, McFarlane contends, we need to open our eyes to the partial, the reconstructed, or the recombined. This commitment to fragmentation as a sort of language of its own requ","PeriodicalId":46889,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews","volume":"52 1","pages":"463 - 465"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44454448","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-24DOI: 10.1177/00943061231191420c
Enrico Campo
Cumming, Elaine, and John Cumming. 1957. Closed Ranks: An Experiment in Mental Health Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hochschild, Arlie Russell, and Anne Machung. 1989. The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home. New York: Viking. Lamont, Ellen. 2020. The Mating Game: How Gender Still Shapes How We Date. Oakland: University of California Press. Link, B. G., J. C. Phelan, M. Bresnahan, A. Stueve, and B. A. Pescosolido. 1999. ‘‘Public Conceptions of Mental Illness: Labels, Causes, Dangerousness, and Social Distance.’’ American Journal of Public Health 89(9):1328–33.
卡明，伊莱恩和约翰·卡明，1957。封闭队伍:心理健康教育的实验。剑桥，马萨诸塞州:哈佛大学出版社。Hochschild, Arlie Russell和Anne Machung, 1989。第二次转变:工作父母和家庭革命。纽约:维京人。艾伦·拉蒙特，2020。《交配游戏:性别如何影响我们的约会》奥克兰:加州大学出版社。林克，b.g.， J. C.费兰，M.布雷斯纳汉，A.史蒂夫和B. A.佩斯科索里多，1999。公众对精神疾病的概念:标签、原因、危险性和社会距离。《美国公共卫生杂志》89(9):1328-33。
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Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1177/00943061231181317b
Brendan Lantz
between environmental policy and financial policy in the Anthropocene. Accounting for global environmental governance in an encompassing manner is a challenge. The benefit of this book is that it is wide in both scope and detail. It acknowledges a wide set of actors and illustrates with examples how current institutions can change to strengthen the democratic norms of global environmental governance. Climate change poses insurmountable challenges for political, social, economic, and administrative systems from local to global levels. In other words, for humans, climate change is not foremost an environmental problem that can be solved by technical and managerial solutions. Baber and Bartlett argue that climate change rather constitutes a political space in which a large set of actors—public, private, and NGOs—engages in contestation and collaboration over evolving regimes of climate governance. It is this political space that the authors sketch throughout this book. In that respect, the book is like a patchwork quilt of observations (to use Baber and Barlett’s expression), a pattern that may serve as a guide for identifying new and important questions to address.
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Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1177/00943061231181317dd
A. Barnard
so nebulous as to be objectively meaningless; but subjectively, it was helping these men reshape their lives. At the end of the book, Randles reveals that DADS lost its funding and shut down shortly after she finished her work there. On reading this, I felt for the clients and staffers who couldn’t believe that this one lifeline was being taken away from them. Above all else, Essential Dads is an example of the importance of qualitative work in policy research. The most important outcomes of the DADS program weren’t in concrete outcomes, the cost-benefit analysis that dominates discussions of whether to cut or renew a program; they were in the dignity and hope and reframing that it provided the men involved in it. A survey might be able to measure some of that; but in the absence of the sort of qualitative work Randles carries out, a researcher wouldn’t even know to ask about it.
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Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1177/00943061231181317v
S. Luhr
In Walking Mannequins: How Race and Gender Inequalities Shape Retail Clothing Work, Joya Misra and Kyla Walters offer novel insight into the experience of retail work at a time when schedules are precarious and workers are closely monitored by surveillance technologies. Walking Mannequins is a timely book. Retail jobs remain one of the most common occupations in the United States. This is also an industry dominated by women—including many women of color—who are paid poorly and receive few benefits. The book draws on interviews with 55 current and former employees working primarily in teen-oriented clothing stores, paired with 35 store observations. The book begins with an overview of retail clothing work. Fast-fashion stores do not expect clothing to last more than a few seasons, and companies take a similar approach to their employees. Turnover in these jobs is high, and managers invest little time in training to build workers’ skills. Instead, they focus on whether workers fit the look of the store. As in many service-sector jobs, employers have found ways to successfully transfer risk onto employees. New technologies allow managers to match staffing to demand, meaning that workers often have shifts changed with little notice. In an environment where few employees are scheduled for enough hours to pay their bills, managers reward workers not through better pay but through the opportunity to work more. The next section documents workers’ relationships with managers, customers, and each other. Here, Misra and Walters differentiate between frontline managers, who work in stores, and corporate managers, who monitor employees from afar. These different actors operate within what Misra and Walters call the ‘‘service panopticon.’’ Frontline managers constantly surveil workers, monitoring their appearance and interactions with customers and checking their bags at the end of each shift. Outside of stores, corporate managers keep watch using a barrage of metrics collected from cameras, computer software, sensors, customer surveys, and secret shoppers. Although frontline workers question the utility of these metrics, this data effectively transfers organizational decision-making power to corporate managers and strips both frontline managers and workers of agency. This section also sheds light on the unexpected challenges retail workers navigate. Just as managers keep watch over workers, workers monitor customers as part of the service panopticon. Managers often task Black workers with the job of trailing Black customers whom they suspect of shoplifting, as if racial profiling is less harmful if outsourced to a Black employee. Workers are similarly bothered by expectations to push branded credit cards onto customers, which they find exploitative. Indeed, a surprisingly large percentage of store revenues come not through selling clothes but through credit cards with exorbitant interest rates. The final chapters delve into the concept of aesthetic labor. Des
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Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1177/00943061231181316d
Peter Ikeler
Jack Metzgar is on a mission. His first book, Striking Steel (2000), aimed to repopularize unionism through an auto-ethnographic retelling of a postwar strike. His second, Bridging the Divide: Working-Class Culture in a Middle-Class Society (2021), shoots a little higher. Again deploying self-analysis coupled with decades of classroom ‘‘focus groups,’’ it presents a simple argument: ‘‘There is a genuine working-class culture that . . . needs to be recognized and appreciated in a much less imperial middle-class culture’’ (p. 14). To bolster this, he synthesizes a growing body of research on the cultural dimensions of class, from Lamont (2000) and Lareau (2003) to Bettie (2003), Streib (2015), and Silva (2013, 2019), among others (Jensen 2012; Leondar-Wright 2014). What emerges is a nostalgic yet piercing interrogation of the subterranean differences between the two largest economic groups in U.S. society. Though not a sociologist by trade, Metzgar speaks to issues at the heart of our discipline. And while ‘‘rigorously nonintersectional,’’ Bridging the Divide is by no means reductionist (p. 128). Instead, it aims to uncover the elements of workingclass culture and inter-class friction that apply beyond the white, male, cis-hetero stereotype, offering these as potential components for more multidimensional analysis. Arriving after the transformations of neoliberalism and amid growing political, social, and environmental turmoil, Metzgar’s book helps return focus—perhaps unintentionally—to the structural question of working-class agency. For to acknowledge categorical differences in class perspectives, as Bridging the Divide does, rather than individual ones along a spectrum, is to imply the problem of resistance—whether the subordinate group will challenge or accept the status quo. Bridging the Divide doesn’t really grapple with the latter, concluding instead with a bet-hedging ‘‘Two Good Class Cultures’’ (p. 187). But in its summary holism, pushing beyond careful empiricism, Metzgar’s monograph poses a Kantian antinomy that transcends the dominant perspectives on class since the 1980s. Before that, working-class life preoccupied sociologists. It animated disciplinedefining works by Mills (1948), Bell (1960), Marcuse (1964), and Burawoy (1979), among others. Most of these authors concluded that workers were unlikely to lead large-scale social upheavals that would level hierarchies and restructure economies. Yet their collective ability to shape social and economic policy within the confines of capitalism was presumed, both practically and scientifically. Deregulation, deindustrialization, and deunionization—as well as the collapse of the Soviet Union—changed this. Starting in the late 1980s, mainstream sociology turned away from questions of class. It was not alone. Led by Fukuyama (1992), mainstream social science bent toward postindustrial, post-Cold War triumphalism with a postmodernist flavor (Wood 1999). The work of Giddens (1990) and Beck (199
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