Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1177/00943061231181317t
Stephen Harold Riggins
novel. The book leaves too much to the imagination of the readers to draw their own conclusions. Some ending remarks to summarize the main points would have helped. Again, how do we connect the dots between artisanal ethos and sustainability, from the micro to the macro? That said, the book does offer insight for the future of Japan as well as a deeper understanding of Japanese society and culture. In the age of limits and shrinking population, the pursuit of further economic growth may not be a viable path for Japan. While I was not entirely convinced that the artisanal ethos and ordinary virtues in everyday life were the way forward for Japan, Lie’s inquiry into the ‘‘ordinariness’’ of everyday life is of tremendous value. I was reminded of one of the first teachings in sociology from graduate school—to question the obvious, because we often discover the extraordinary in our ordinary lives.
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Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1177/00943061231181317z
Michael E. Shepherd
sociology and moral systems,’’ which makes up almost two-thirds of the whole volume (pp. 151–432). Nandan points out that juridique should not be understood narrowly in the sense of law and jurisprudence alone, but also includes customs, habits, domestic organization, and political organization, along with an astonishing variety of penal, property, contract, and international laws across a wide range of historical and cultural contexts. As Durkheim and Mauss put it in an introductory note from 1910, ‘‘A juridic system is defined by the social structure it represents: it is this structure that best indicates the direction in which it is moving’’ (p. 152). Morals and laws thus give order to social relationships within such groupings as totemic clans, tribal societies, and national collectives even as they are subject to processes of development or decay over time. The writings of Joseph Kohler and Otto Stoll, for instance, who do not figure in Durkheim’s other publications, stand out in shaping his emerging concerns with nonwestern and premodern societies, the former for his focus on complex exogamous domestic arrangements (pp. 165–71, 234– 44, 267–71, 295–96, 341–42), the latter for his cross-cultural perspective on techniques of sexual ornamentation (pp. 354–60). These and other reviews in this section are important for tracing the evolution of Durkheim’s ideas from his lecture course in the 1890s, Professional Ethics and Civic Morals, to the book he outlined before he died, La Morale (Ethics/Morality). Besides showing us the breadth and diversity of empirical materials and theoretical ideas that Durkheim and his colleagues were grappling with apart from their most well-known essays and published books, this collection of reviews also gives us a glimpse into what ‘‘social anthropology’’ contributed to sociology before they went their separate ways. Durkheim and Mauss’s 1913 ‘‘Note on the Concept of Civilization’’ suggests an ambitious program in the ethnography and prehistory of the ‘‘complex and united systems’’ that make up the ‘‘various civilizations that dominate and wrap the collective life of every group of people’’ and that often cut across territorial borders and extend beyond national boundaries (pp. 96–99). Likewise, Durkheim’s 1901 remark on ‘‘Technology’’ proposes that the study of the everyday use of implements in familiar places like the household should be considered a branch of sociology, since ‘‘the instruments which men use (such as tools, weapons, clothes, utilities of all kinds, etc.) are products of collective activity’’ (p. 438). These ambitious statements point beneath the integration of sociology into the mechanisms of the nation-state and reach beyond the function of anthropology as a tool of colonial administration. They also recover a dimension of the critical mission of the social sciences that is independent of their institutionalization in the university and that serves as a provocation for imagining other ways of be
{"title":"Ethically Challenged: Private Equity Storms U.S. Health Care","authors":"Michael E. Shepherd","doi":"10.1177/00943061231181317z","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061231181317z","url":null,"abstract":"sociology and moral systems,’’ which makes up almost two-thirds of the whole volume (pp. 151–432). Nandan points out that juridique should not be understood narrowly in the sense of law and jurisprudence alone, but also includes customs, habits, domestic organization, and political organization, along with an astonishing variety of penal, property, contract, and international laws across a wide range of historical and cultural contexts. As Durkheim and Mauss put it in an introductory note from 1910, ‘‘A juridic system is defined by the social structure it represents: it is this structure that best indicates the direction in which it is moving’’ (p. 152). Morals and laws thus give order to social relationships within such groupings as totemic clans, tribal societies, and national collectives even as they are subject to processes of development or decay over time. The writings of Joseph Kohler and Otto Stoll, for instance, who do not figure in Durkheim’s other publications, stand out in shaping his emerging concerns with nonwestern and premodern societies, the former for his focus on complex exogamous domestic arrangements (pp. 165–71, 234– 44, 267–71, 295–96, 341–42), the latter for his cross-cultural perspective on techniques of sexual ornamentation (pp. 354–60). These and other reviews in this section are important for tracing the evolution of Durkheim’s ideas from his lecture course in the 1890s, Professional Ethics and Civic Morals, to the book he outlined before he died, La Morale (Ethics/Morality). Besides showing us the breadth and diversity of empirical materials and theoretical ideas that Durkheim and his colleagues were grappling with apart from their most well-known essays and published books, this collection of reviews also gives us a glimpse into what ‘‘social anthropology’’ contributed to sociology before they went their separate ways. Durkheim and Mauss’s 1913 ‘‘Note on the Concept of Civilization’’ suggests an ambitious program in the ethnography and prehistory of the ‘‘complex and united systems’’ that make up the ‘‘various civilizations that dominate and wrap the collective life of every group of people’’ and that often cut across territorial borders and extend beyond national boundaries (pp. 96–99). Likewise, Durkheim’s 1901 remark on ‘‘Technology’’ proposes that the study of the everyday use of implements in familiar places like the household should be considered a branch of sociology, since ‘‘the instruments which men use (such as tools, weapons, clothes, utilities of all kinds, etc.) are products of collective activity’’ (p. 438). These ambitious statements point beneath the integration of sociology into the mechanisms of the nation-state and reach beyond the function of anthropology as a tool of colonial administration. They also recover a dimension of the critical mission of the social sciences that is independent of their institutionalization in the university and that serves as a provocation for imagining other ways of be","PeriodicalId":46889,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews","volume":"52 1","pages":"364 - 367"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45035197","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 : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1177/00943061231181317w
Larry Liu
In this short and engaging book, Luke Munn challenges the view in the automation literature that the technological displacement of human labor is a universal, inevitable phenomenon. Recent improvements in artificial intelligence and robotics have induced labor economists to produce forecasts about future employment effects of automation and infer the power of new labor-displacing technologies from the logic of Moore’s law. Moore’s law states that the number of transistors on microchips would double every year. Presumably, the compounding effects of improving algorithms would allow for the ever-quicker replacement of workers, slowly at the beginning but much faster in later periods. Munn argues that these economists’ predictions of fast and universal automation are just as wrong as the prediction by left-wing thinkers about a ‘‘postcapitalist world without work’’ and ‘‘fully automated luxury communism’’ (p. 15). The argument of Automation Is a Myth is that automation is a limited, localized, and socially specific phenomenon, and it echoes Gray and Suri’s (2019) point that automation discourse neglects ‘‘ghost workers’’—that is, the many invisible workers who are needed to train the algorithm or to fix the kinks and flaws in technology deployment (p. 30). Quoting Tesla founder Elon Musk’s tweet ‘‘humans are underrated’’ (p. 17), he contends that the main problem plaguing the modern workplace is not too much automation, but insufficient automation, given its imperfections. Tesla was incapable of fixing the inconsistencies in assembly tasks that require human judgment, which resulted in less productivity. Amazon warehouses are filled with shelf-moving robots, which may have reduced the amount of walking among warehouse workers but has also increased physical injuries based on monotonous but fast-paced body movements (p. 94). Furthermore, the more robots Amazon is introducing, the more reliant they are on skilled workers who can fix and maintain the robots. For technological systems to function, workers must internalize the logic of the system and perform their activities such that the algorithms recognize them (p. 25). Rather than producing a world without work, the new work in algorithmically controlled environments could be low quality: social media content moderators must identify violent or pornographic content that the algorithms cannot detect on their own, resulting in psychological trauma (p. 38). Munn also argues that technologies are adopted in a cultural context, noting that East Asian cultures are more likely to trust automation than Middle Easterners (p. 56). However, the dark side in the Chinese context is the use of surveillance technology to control daily lives and forced labor in cotton picking among the Uyghur Muslims, a repressed minority group that the Chinese government forces to assimilate to Han majority culture. In line with the main thesis, the surveillance technology, focused on facial recognition algorithms and cameras, is n
{"title":"Automation Is a Myth","authors":"Larry Liu","doi":"10.1177/00943061231181317w","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061231181317w","url":null,"abstract":"In this short and engaging book, Luke Munn challenges the view in the automation literature that the technological displacement of human labor is a universal, inevitable phenomenon. Recent improvements in artificial intelligence and robotics have induced labor economists to produce forecasts about future employment effects of automation and infer the power of new labor-displacing technologies from the logic of Moore’s law. Moore’s law states that the number of transistors on microchips would double every year. Presumably, the compounding effects of improving algorithms would allow for the ever-quicker replacement of workers, slowly at the beginning but much faster in later periods. Munn argues that these economists’ predictions of fast and universal automation are just as wrong as the prediction by left-wing thinkers about a ‘‘postcapitalist world without work’’ and ‘‘fully automated luxury communism’’ (p. 15). The argument of Automation Is a Myth is that automation is a limited, localized, and socially specific phenomenon, and it echoes Gray and Suri’s (2019) point that automation discourse neglects ‘‘ghost workers’’—that is, the many invisible workers who are needed to train the algorithm or to fix the kinks and flaws in technology deployment (p. 30). Quoting Tesla founder Elon Musk’s tweet ‘‘humans are underrated’’ (p. 17), he contends that the main problem plaguing the modern workplace is not too much automation, but insufficient automation, given its imperfections. Tesla was incapable of fixing the inconsistencies in assembly tasks that require human judgment, which resulted in less productivity. Amazon warehouses are filled with shelf-moving robots, which may have reduced the amount of walking among warehouse workers but has also increased physical injuries based on monotonous but fast-paced body movements (p. 94). Furthermore, the more robots Amazon is introducing, the more reliant they are on skilled workers who can fix and maintain the robots. For technological systems to function, workers must internalize the logic of the system and perform their activities such that the algorithms recognize them (p. 25). Rather than producing a world without work, the new work in algorithmically controlled environments could be low quality: social media content moderators must identify violent or pornographic content that the algorithms cannot detect on their own, resulting in psychological trauma (p. 38). Munn also argues that technologies are adopted in a cultural context, noting that East Asian cultures are more likely to trust automation than Middle Easterners (p. 56). However, the dark side in the Chinese context is the use of surveillance technology to control daily lives and forced labor in cotton picking among the Uyghur Muslims, a repressed minority group that the Chinese government forces to assimilate to Han majority culture. In line with the main thesis, the surveillance technology, focused on facial recognition algorithms and cameras, is n","PeriodicalId":46889,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews","volume":"52 1","pages":"359 - 360"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"64926299","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 : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1177/00943061231181317kk
Ophra Leyser-Whalen
Weighing the Future: Race, Science, and Pregnancy Trials in the Postgenomic Era is the first book of its kind to examine the social, political, and health implications of prenatal trials in the United States and the United Kingdom that study associations between gestational weight gain and childhood weight gain. Most, if not all, evidence-based medicine is funded and designed in North America and Europe, with the aim of enabling the generalizability of data and results globally. This book is based on years of massive qualitative data collection from which Natali Valdez draws her analyses: archival research on health and related policies, participant observation of hundreds of prenatal clinical trial visits with patients, and attendance at national and webinar conferences on obesity and pregnancy trials. Valdez also conducted interviews with clinical trial staff members, PIs, and research collaborators in the United States and the United Kingdom. Lest you think this book is dry reporting, Valdez sprinkles each chapter with theoretically rich concepts of racial surveillance biocapitalism connected to scientific knowledge production. She outlines capitalism’s reliance on ideas of individual responsibility, which leads to a disinvestment in public health and investment in privatization of medical research. Topics such as medical surveillance and its propensity to translate human experiences into behavioral data, its ties to racism, and its consideration of environmental factors are also interwoven into each chapter analysis. Readers learn that medical recommendations about whether to monitor pregnant women’s weight and the amount of weight gain that is ideal has shifted historically and cross-culturally between the United States and the United Kingdom. Presently, monitoring weight gain is the idea du jour, and there are currently more clinical trials that target pregnant people for lifestyle interventions than ever before. These trials focus on speculation to predict and prevent future health problems, and Valdez aptly notes, ‘‘Those who are in the position to speculate . . . on future remedies are not the ones who suffer the consequences of failed predictions’’ (p. 14). What is problematic, Valdez argues, is that individual lifestyle interventions are symptomatic of systemic racism and ignore social-environmental factors that affect people’s lives and health, therefore making the interventions ineffective. The ideology behind the clinical trials and their interventions assume that certain people’s pregnant bodies are risky and that these people have the ability to modify their bodies and behaviors, which also feeds into the gendered assumption that mothers are solely responsible for their children’s health. These bodies then become subject to interventions. These prenatal trials are conducted in the current postgenomic era, which refers to the period following the completion of the human genome project at the turn of the twenty-first century. Throug
{"title":"Weighing the Future: Race, Science, and Pregnancy Trials in the Postgenomic Era","authors":"Ophra Leyser-Whalen","doi":"10.1177/00943061231181317kk","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061231181317kk","url":null,"abstract":"Weighing the Future: Race, Science, and Pregnancy Trials in the Postgenomic Era is the first book of its kind to examine the social, political, and health implications of prenatal trials in the United States and the United Kingdom that study associations between gestational weight gain and childhood weight gain. Most, if not all, evidence-based medicine is funded and designed in North America and Europe, with the aim of enabling the generalizability of data and results globally. This book is based on years of massive qualitative data collection from which Natali Valdez draws her analyses: archival research on health and related policies, participant observation of hundreds of prenatal clinical trial visits with patients, and attendance at national and webinar conferences on obesity and pregnancy trials. Valdez also conducted interviews with clinical trial staff members, PIs, and research collaborators in the United States and the United Kingdom. Lest you think this book is dry reporting, Valdez sprinkles each chapter with theoretically rich concepts of racial surveillance biocapitalism connected to scientific knowledge production. She outlines capitalism’s reliance on ideas of individual responsibility, which leads to a disinvestment in public health and investment in privatization of medical research. Topics such as medical surveillance and its propensity to translate human experiences into behavioral data, its ties to racism, and its consideration of environmental factors are also interwoven into each chapter analysis. Readers learn that medical recommendations about whether to monitor pregnant women’s weight and the amount of weight gain that is ideal has shifted historically and cross-culturally between the United States and the United Kingdom. Presently, monitoring weight gain is the idea du jour, and there are currently more clinical trials that target pregnant people for lifestyle interventions than ever before. These trials focus on speculation to predict and prevent future health problems, and Valdez aptly notes, ‘‘Those who are in the position to speculate . . . on future remedies are not the ones who suffer the consequences of failed predictions’’ (p. 14). What is problematic, Valdez argues, is that individual lifestyle interventions are symptomatic of systemic racism and ignore social-environmental factors that affect people’s lives and health, therefore making the interventions ineffective. The ideology behind the clinical trials and their interventions assume that certain people’s pregnant bodies are risky and that these people have the ability to modify their bodies and behaviors, which also feeds into the gendered assumption that mothers are solely responsible for their children’s health. These bodies then become subject to interventions. These prenatal trials are conducted in the current postgenomic era, which refers to the period following the completion of the human genome project at the turn of the twenty-first century. Throug","PeriodicalId":46889,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews","volume":"52 1","pages":"385 - 386"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49519768","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 : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1177/00943061231181317ff
Jesse J. Norris
ed, there are almost no references to contemporary research or theory. The claims that are made are often poorly sourced, when they are sourced at all. The phrase ‘‘not a few’’ is used repeatedly throughout and is almost never accompanied by a reference to who those ‘‘not a few’’ claiming something might be. This ironically feels a bit like the academic version of the former president’s ‘‘many people are saying’’ trope. Further, the sections on contemporary issues, particularly the chapters on the Trump era, amount to little more than a blow-by-blow recounting of the indignities and inanities of Trump’s campaign and reign, pulled from newspaper headlines. In the end, there is (quite understandably) a lot of heat here, but also very little light to be gleaned from the analysis. Although I will resist the urge to create a laundry list of oversights and problems, as a multi-generational Appalachian I am compelled to note that calling J. D. Vance a ‘‘perceptive’’ analyst of the problems in the region (p. 86) is akin to cultural heresy among astute observers (see Harkins and McCarroll 2019). This is also rather ironic given that Vance is now a Trump toady and that Tropes of Intolerance largely operates as an anti-Trump argument from the perspective of both social science and liberal democracy. Vance’s (in)famous memoir is discussed as though it were an academic study, is called by the wrong title, and then is not even cited in the bibliography (nor is a block quote from Vance sourced on p. 87). In effect, this example is a telling microcosm of the broader problems plaguing the book. Ultimately, Tropes of Intolerance does not live up to its considerable promise. It is not entirely clear who the intended audience is supposed to be, although my guess would be students in an introductory race and ethnicity course. It will not be of much use for researchers, since contemporary theory and research is not incorporated. Given that fact, a clean, compelling introduction to ethnic prejudice would be expected, but there are too many problems, of both style and substance, to recommend the book for use in a college course. In the end, the book is a well-intentioned effort to use the tools of social science to dissect and combat contemporary bigotry, but the execution unfortunately leaves much to be desired.
{"title":"Surviving Solitary: Living and Working in Restricted Housing Units","authors":"Jesse J. Norris","doi":"10.1177/00943061231181317ff","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061231181317ff","url":null,"abstract":"ed, there are almost no references to contemporary research or theory. The claims that are made are often poorly sourced, when they are sourced at all. The phrase ‘‘not a few’’ is used repeatedly throughout and is almost never accompanied by a reference to who those ‘‘not a few’’ claiming something might be. This ironically feels a bit like the academic version of the former president’s ‘‘many people are saying’’ trope. Further, the sections on contemporary issues, particularly the chapters on the Trump era, amount to little more than a blow-by-blow recounting of the indignities and inanities of Trump’s campaign and reign, pulled from newspaper headlines. In the end, there is (quite understandably) a lot of heat here, but also very little light to be gleaned from the analysis. Although I will resist the urge to create a laundry list of oversights and problems, as a multi-generational Appalachian I am compelled to note that calling J. D. Vance a ‘‘perceptive’’ analyst of the problems in the region (p. 86) is akin to cultural heresy among astute observers (see Harkins and McCarroll 2019). This is also rather ironic given that Vance is now a Trump toady and that Tropes of Intolerance largely operates as an anti-Trump argument from the perspective of both social science and liberal democracy. Vance’s (in)famous memoir is discussed as though it were an academic study, is called by the wrong title, and then is not even cited in the bibliography (nor is a block quote from Vance sourced on p. 87). In effect, this example is a telling microcosm of the broader problems plaguing the book. Ultimately, Tropes of Intolerance does not live up to its considerable promise. It is not entirely clear who the intended audience is supposed to be, although my guess would be students in an introductory race and ethnicity course. It will not be of much use for researchers, since contemporary theory and research is not incorporated. Given that fact, a clean, compelling introduction to ethnic prejudice would be expected, but there are too many problems, of both style and substance, to recommend the book for use in a college course. In the end, the book is a well-intentioned effort to use the tools of social science to dissect and combat contemporary bigotry, but the execution unfortunately leaves much to be desired.","PeriodicalId":46889,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews","volume":"52 1","pages":"375 - 377"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48152598","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 : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1177/00943061231181316a
G. Longo
for men’s gendered feelings surrounding these transitions. Men also described women remaining with men in long-term relationships following erectile dysfunction or changes associated with aging that made sex less possible as affirming their gendered sense of themselves as masculine as well. Men confessing declines in their feelings of sexual desire, for instance, also discussed concerns that women might no longer be interested in them. Men in committed relationships discussed being worried about keeping their partners sexually satisfied. And many men in committed relationships discussed fears that the women in those relationships with them would leave if sexual intercourse was no longer a part of their lives—though Montemurro did find that in her sample, upper-middle-class men, white men, and men in long-term committed relationships were less likely to share these fears. Getting It, Having It, Keeping It Up is easily among the most extensive qualitative studies of cisgender straight men’s sexual lives over the life course with which I am familiar. Montemurro is a talented interviewer. I think it’s worth noting that the interviews were conducted primarily by a woman. I wonder whether I or another man would have elicited the same types of information from the men in this study or whether speaking with another man would have produced less information. Among the most difficult parts of this book to read were the quotes from men in their 50s and 60s still struggling with many of the same gendered concerns brought up by men in their 20s. The oldest men in the sample were not immune from the conflicts and concerns surrounding sex experienced by the youngest men in the sample. While the study does not follow men into their 70s, 80s, and beyond, it suggests many of these gendered sexual struggles go unresolved in cisgender straight men’s lives. Additionally, alongside the anxiety and shame that characterize a large portion of men’s confessions in this book are declarations of sexual entitlement and both casual and more overt forms of misogyny. We learn about the shifting landscape of gender and sexual inequality in new ways by better understanding cisgender straight men’s conflicted relationships with women and sex. I hope that this book is widely read and taught. Getting It, Having It, Keeping It Up should be read by students and scholars alike. It is at once deeply accessible and engaged with an enormous body of scholarship and theory to help us better understand cisgender straight men’s sexualities in public and private over the course of their lives. The data, discussion, and analysis here provide new starting points for diverse research projects on a host of contemporary issues related to cisgender straight men’s sexualities.
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Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1177/00943061231181317bb
Austin H. Johnson
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Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1177/00943061231181317l
Maria Abascal
patients. Ecks asks: why would Pfizer go through the trouble of making a publicfacing diagnostic tool and then recommend not sharing it with the public? He turns to a concept he terms ‘‘near-liberalism’’ to make sense of the contradictions in neoliberalism as they get deployed in local contexts. Such contradictions include corporate practices that tend toward empowering patients and emancipation, like the democratization and availability of public-facing depression diagnostic checklists, but also include contradictory elements that suspend patient empowerment practices as soon as they interfere with profits. Some of the highlights of Living Worth include how Ecks incorporates ethnographic evidence into his theoretical arguments. These moments effectively serve to highlight the real-world stakes of sometimes abstract arguments. For example, he takes the reader to a pharmacy in Kolkata in Chapter Nine (‘‘Generic: Distinguishing Good Similarity from Bad Similarity’’) to examine how similarly valued objects are differentiated through a case study of generic medications in India. India is one of the world’s major exporters of generic medications, which means there are many versions of the same drug to choose from when a physician writes a prescription. The large number of choices available presents a problem for pharmacists in Kolkata, who in turn must stock many offerings of the same kind of medication. In other chapters, Ecks’s argument would be enhanced by including more empirical context. For example, in Chapter Seven (‘‘Acting through Other [Prescribing] Habits’’) he questions the claim that patients are causing global rates of depression and anxiety to rise by turning the focus to physicians’ prescribing habits. He introduces an argument for ‘‘habitology,’’ or the study of how individuals engage in nonreflexive, embodied, and routine valuing practices, as an alternative to ethnography. He provides this interesting framework for the theoretical history of related concepts, like Mol’s praxiography, Latour’s theories of nonhuman agency, Weber’s habit, and Mauss’s and Bourdieu’s conceptions of habitus. This is an interesting discussion that evaluates norms, practices, and habits, but it is missing an empirical assessment of his own claims about habitology. Overall, the lack of empirical description, ethnographic illustrations, and reflections about the field research process detract from the arguments in the book. Living Worth is an excellent resource for students and scholars investigating interdisciplinary theories of value. Ecks’s theoretical framework and case studies provide substance that both advanced undergraduate students and scholars in sociology and anthropology will find interesting and useful.
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Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1177/00943061231181320
Rachel Tolbert
{"title":"Index of Reviews by Category","authors":"Rachel Tolbert","doi":"10.1177/00943061231181320","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061231181320","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46889,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews","volume":"52 1","pages":"393 - 393"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47835600","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 : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1177/00943061231181317e
Nazreen S. Bacchus
pose of the place in which one is located. The next couple of chapters explore the inherent circumstances of the offender serving time with limited control contrasted with an individual’s intrinsic need to control their time in alignment with their goals. The authors illustrate inmates’ obsessive need to regain temporal autonomy through modifying their perception of time. This section moved beyond the often expressed and sensationalized media misconception of an offender being in control of their time (e.g., they have all day to do something) to the realization of what the system does to affect an inmate’s time and ultimately their perception of it. The physical nature of time for some in society is marked by pivotal events, but this becomes difficult if an individual is within a prison. Carceral and Flaherty, in Chapters Five and Six, outline distinctive ways prisoners mark the passage of time and their lack of forward momentum. The authors also unlock how tactics to mark the passage of time may not work for the inmate, resulting in the inability to classify time into past, present, and future. The last chapter comes back full circle to explain how inmates navigate time and suggests that the penal system is really an experiment exploring the relationship between involuntary confinement and temporal experiences. This book is well written and methodically organized with the imperative of providing an empirically grounded analysis of time and temporal experiences of offenders. This structure creates two distinctive contributions. The first is that the book challenges the reader to interpret their construction of time and how time can affect a person differently when the individual is confined behind prison walls. This insight within the classroom can be invaluable. Faculty members often look for a book such as this that hits the mark on making the material real for the students. The second contribution is that the reader will gain insight concerning the prison experience from both someone inside and someone outside the correctional system, due to the book’s dual authorship. The perceived mutual respect between the two authors creates a platform in which the reader is cognizant of both views even when they challenge each other. These contributions make the book an imperative to include within a corrections course, introductory sociology course, or an introductory criminal justice class. It would be appropriate for both undergraduate and graduate students. Flaherty is one of the leading scholars in the area of temporal experiences, so it is not surprising that the book provides new insight into a population often forgotten. Interested readers may also benefit from other works by both authors. Works by K. C. Carceral include the following: Prison Inc.: A Convict Exposes Life Inside a Private Prison and Beyond a Convict’s Eyes: Doing Time in a Modern Prison. Works by Michael G. Flaherty include the following: The Textures of Time: Agency and Temporal E
{"title":"Islam, Justice, and Democracy","authors":"Nazreen S. Bacchus","doi":"10.1177/00943061231181317e","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061231181317e","url":null,"abstract":"pose of the place in which one is located. The next couple of chapters explore the inherent circumstances of the offender serving time with limited control contrasted with an individual’s intrinsic need to control their time in alignment with their goals. The authors illustrate inmates’ obsessive need to regain temporal autonomy through modifying their perception of time. This section moved beyond the often expressed and sensationalized media misconception of an offender being in control of their time (e.g., they have all day to do something) to the realization of what the system does to affect an inmate’s time and ultimately their perception of it. The physical nature of time for some in society is marked by pivotal events, but this becomes difficult if an individual is within a prison. Carceral and Flaherty, in Chapters Five and Six, outline distinctive ways prisoners mark the passage of time and their lack of forward momentum. The authors also unlock how tactics to mark the passage of time may not work for the inmate, resulting in the inability to classify time into past, present, and future. The last chapter comes back full circle to explain how inmates navigate time and suggests that the penal system is really an experiment exploring the relationship between involuntary confinement and temporal experiences. This book is well written and methodically organized with the imperative of providing an empirically grounded analysis of time and temporal experiences of offenders. This structure creates two distinctive contributions. The first is that the book challenges the reader to interpret their construction of time and how time can affect a person differently when the individual is confined behind prison walls. This insight within the classroom can be invaluable. Faculty members often look for a book such as this that hits the mark on making the material real for the students. The second contribution is that the reader will gain insight concerning the prison experience from both someone inside and someone outside the correctional system, due to the book’s dual authorship. The perceived mutual respect between the two authors creates a platform in which the reader is cognizant of both views even when they challenge each other. These contributions make the book an imperative to include within a corrections course, introductory sociology course, or an introductory criminal justice class. It would be appropriate for both undergraduate and graduate students. Flaherty is one of the leading scholars in the area of temporal experiences, so it is not surprising that the book provides new insight into a population often forgotten. Interested readers may also benefit from other works by both authors. Works by K. C. Carceral include the following: Prison Inc.: A Convict Exposes Life Inside a Private Prison and Beyond a Convict’s Eyes: Doing Time in a Modern Prison. Works by Michael G. Flaherty include the following: The Textures of Time: Agency and Temporal E","PeriodicalId":46889,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews","volume":"52 1","pages":"324 - 326"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48211738","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}
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