The British Journal of Sociology 2008 Volume 59 Issue 3

Book reviews

Archer, M. S. Making our Way through the World. Human Reflexivity and Social Mobility
Cambridge University Press 2007 344 pp. £60.00 (hardback) £18.99 (paperback)

As the title implies, the idea of this book is to explore the role of human reflexivity in relation
to how we ‘make our way through the world’. This book makes an important contribution to
what is already known about being and becoming in the social world (of the northern
hemisphere). Archer acknowledges that: ‘It will not have escaped any reader’s attention that
the adjective ‘reflexive’ is in vogue for describing currently high, late or second-wave moder-
nity’ (p. 29). In this book, she takes reflexivity as the capacity to dialogue internally with
oneself about one’s life. This approach does not represent an attempt to jettison objective
structural materiality, neither is it a desire to foreground unfettered agency. Rather, this book
attempts to show how people ‘mediate deliberatively’ (p. 61) drawing on their structural
settings in different ways in order to construct a life for themselves. Her point is that social
mobility is a process, not a once and forever one-way activity, and thus, reflexivity, the
capacity to deliberate, is itself differently articulated and rearticulated over time by different
social actors. One of the most refreshing and innovative findings is the demonstration of the
way in which reflexive identity work can sometimes take many years to result in any specific
outcomes or changes.
Although there are many books about social mobility and work, what makes this work
distinctive is its concern with the ways in which we hold ‘internal conversations’ with
ourselves. Archer has already made a distinguished contribution towards sociological analy-
sis in her earlier work on culture, agency and internal conversation and this book is a
synthesis of these critical concerns. This book draws on a study of a diverse group of 128
respondents who were asked questions about how they thought things over to themselves
‘silently, in (their) heads’ (p. 91). They were ‘assured that far from everyone engaged in all of
these inner activities and that people differed greatly in how much time, importance and
value they attached to engaging in any of them’ (p. 91). This book charts the various ways in
which these inner dialogues can be categorized, and provides illustrations of how different
groups of people talk to themselves about themselves and what this means in terms of
inhibiting or facilitating social mobility.
The book is divided into three parts. The first section contains a sociological analysis of
the construct of reflexivity. It also explains how the qualitative research project that lies at
the heart of this book was organized and conducted. An appendix is included in the book
that details the sample construction as well as the methods related to accessing and
categorizing different ‘types’ of internal thinking. While this is useful, I would have liked

© London School of Economics and Political Science 2008 ISSN 0007-1315 print/1468-4446 online.
Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden,
MA 02148, USA on behalf of the LSE. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-4446.2008.00209.x
586 Book reviews

more detail about the questions that were asked in the interviews, as these must have been
central in terms of the process of eliciting the narratives that are included in the second
section.
The second section draws on the data to explore and refine Archer’s four categories of
reflection; communicative reflexives who have to confirm their conversations with others;
autonomous reflexives who undertake self-contained internal dialogues; meta-reflexives
who are reflexive about themselves and their social worlds more widely; and fractured
reflexives who become distressed and anxious as a consequence of internal conversations.
Chapter four concentrates on those who ‘work to stay put’. These are people who have been
primarily driven by their friendships and relationships that have led to their ‘staying put’ in
what Archer calls ‘modest’ jobs (p. 191). She explains that this is not just social reproduction
at work; some of the group come from ‘higher’ social origins. Chapter five looks at those who
were ‘upwards and outward bound’. These are people who think for themselves and who
eschew fantasy wish-fulfilment and daydreaming. This group of respondents are from dif-
ferent backgrounds, ages and occupations. Nick is a self-employed builder, Billy is unem-
ployed and Oliver is a senior financial consultant. What makes them similar is their approach
to life. ‘Moving on’ characterizes the stories of those whose narratives appear in chapter six.
What unites this diverse group is their attempt to live up to their ideals in the work they do.
The three data chapters contain narratives that provoke questions about class and work in
a changing global economy. The third section pulls the discussions together and argues that
reflexivity itself contributes towards the reconstruction and ‘remaking of our social world’
(p. 314).
This engaging book will be compulsive reading for anyone interested in issues of identity,
work, transition and class. It will also be useful for research students in terms of its theo-
retical sophistication, methodological rigour as well as the scrupulous care that is extended
to the data set. One minor complaint; I would have welcomed a bibliography to augment the
index and the footnotes. Archer (p. 276) draws on her data set to argue that the ‘positional’
and the ‘dispositional’ are ‘not so tightly bound together’ as is sometimes suggested. The
power of the strong narratives that are included in this book, means that the reader is able
to set story alongside story, case against case, in coming to their own decisions about these
sorts of questions.
This book provides a succinct account of the various ways in which reflexivity is embedded
into the contemporary sociological lexicon and includes a provocative interrogation of the
work of Bauman, Beck, Giddens, Bourdieu and others. In this book, Archer attempts to
persuade us that, in terms of how she wants to work with reflexivity, her respondents are not
Bourdieu’s people as they make and remake themselves, but neither are they Beck’s subjects
for their identities are ‘not subject to capricious narrative revision or reducible to the
superficiality of self-presentational life-styles’ (p. 61). If reflexivity has been until now what
Archer calls, ‘the ‘unknown soldier’ of social science’ (p. 62), this book will ensure that this
is no longer the case.
Meg Maguire
Kings College London

Back, Les The Art of Listening: Berg 2007 210 pp. £55.00 (hardback)

On the front cover of The Art of Listening there is a striking picture of a woman called
Donna. A musical score from Stevie Wonder’s song ‘Isn’t She Lovely?’ is tattooed on the
inside of her raised arms. The tattoo is in memory of where Donna held her god-daughter,
who died of brain cancer. This inscription of love is one of many poignant moments

© London School of Economics and Political Science 2008 British Journal of Sociology 59(3)
 Book reviews 587

captured in this uniquely crafted book. There are few academic authors who can write a
text committed to Sociology, yet are able to profoundly transcend its disciplinary
confines. Social theory, empirical inquiry and the joys and sorrows of daily life are literally
rediscovered.
Early on in his book, Les Back declares: ‘I started out as an anthropologist, but I was more
interested in what was going on at the local bus stop than some distant shore’ (p. 9). The
reader quickly learns that such a stance however, does not generate a parochial perspective.
To the contrary, Back compels us towards ‘a global sociological imagination’ (p. 23),
grounded in the contested encounters of everyday multiculture. He insists that ‘[g]eopolitical
insecurity, political violence and deepening social and economic divisions provide the
context and the need for the development of a global sociology’ (p. 151).
The book consists of a series of inter-connected essays, critically weaving together
contemporary concerns that demand attention: migration and mobility; urban boun-
daries and exclusions; bodily inscriptions and expressive love; street portraiture and
dialogical research; multiculture after September 11th. Each chapter exemplifies an
approach for invigorating the craft of an ethical sociology. The book attempts to re-address
an accelerated global culture in which revelation and voyeurism increasingly invade and
overcome ‘the ordinary yet remarkable things found in everyday life’ (p. 1). At the heart
of this text is a deeply reflexive, ethico-political project committed to listening: paying
‘attention to the fragments, the voices and stories that are otherwise passed over or
ignored’ (p. 1). The act of listening is not confined to hearing more carefully. What remains
unsaid is as important as what has been said. The project involves crafting sociological
attention, ‘a mode of thought that works within and through a “democracy of the senses” ’
(p. 25).
Back advocates ‘a literary Sociology that aims to document and understand social life
without assassinating it’ (p. 164). Symbolic and epistemic violence are commonplace in
academe, and the author is troubled by the parasitic machinery of contemporary academia
in its unrelenting quest for knowledge. It would be too easy for Back to glibly declare some
kind of postmoderm refusal to document the world in order to avoid the risk of
objectification. But he is not interested in empty gestures, and confronts the aporia of
directly engaging social life thus: ‘When we listen to people, do they give us their stories or
do we steal them? At the heart of all social investigation is a dialectical tension between theft
and gift, appropriation and exchange’. (p. 96)
Back persistently questions the public relevance of sociology, especially when he movingly
recalls visiting his dying father in hospital, a working-class man who never read any of his
son’s books. But the author resists simply romanticizing or sublimating the voiceless and the
marginalized. For example, he openly explores his family’s residual working-class racism.
And when discussing the rise of religious radicalism in the context of the ‘War on Terror’, he
questions why there has been ‘a lack of willingness to ask searching questions about the
authoritarianism of the powerless’ (p. 140).
There are risks involved in writing a text which attempts to forge a new trajectory for
Sociology (a discipline forever anxious about its boundaries and relevance). The offer of a
new programme risks either celebrating relativist anarchistic play (where there are no
boundaries or rules for Sociology); or conversely, offering a normative account predicated on
a moralizing agenda (an imperious Sociology). Back is aware of such pretensions. His work
remains faithful to social inquiry – ‘interpretation without legislation’ (p. 1) – while acknowl-
edging the limits of such a project: ‘Ethnographic representation should aspire to better
kinds of failure . . . ’ (p. 94). Similarly, he objects to the institutionalization of academic
research when maintaining that a ‘regulatory approach to ethics adds little to our
understanding . . . of sociology in action’ (p. 114).

British Journal of Sociology 59(3) © London School of Economics and Political Science 2008
588 Book reviews

The Art of Listening is a rare book in its commitment to vitalize an ethical, global sociology
for the twenty-first century. Students are encouraging their parents to read it. Everyone
needs to read this book – especially jaded academics.
Sanjay Sharma
Brunel University

Cockerham, William C. Social Causes of Health and Disease Polity Press 2007 240 pp.
£55.00 (hardback) £17.99 (paperback)

William Cockerham’s new book is a timely contribution to an important development within

medical sociology; namely, its involvement in an area of research described variously as the
social determinants of health, social epidemiology or social medicine.
Sociology has long been involved in such work – think of Richard Titmuss and Peter
Townsend’s collaborations with Jerry Morris in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s. Indeed, as illustrated
by the research of Chadwick and Rowntree, a strong case can be made that the scientific
pioneers in this area were social scientists or, at least, not medical practitioners. Nevertheless,
for most of the twentieth century the practice of public health in Britain was restricted to
those with a medical qualification, using ideas derived largely from clinical medicine. Pro-
fessor Cockerham’s book is timely within the British context because this situation has
started to change.
A medical qualification is no longer required for membership of the UK Faculty of Public
Health. Research and innovation in the area are no longer dominated by the ideas of clinical
medicine, as shown by the largely non-medical membership of the recent panel that com-
missioned the UK Centres of Excellence in public health. And there is growing recognition
that the old ways undercut good science – as illustrated by the belated conversion of the
Medical Research Council to understanding that open academic access to research data is a
precondition for scientific efficiency, replication of results and protection against fraud.
How well does Cockerham’s book prepare sociologists for this new world? The answer of
the present reviewer is that the book raises many of the main issues but that, as is the habit
of reviewers, there are details I would have liked him to add. For example, Cockerham quite
rightly in my opinion identifies recent advances in social statistics, he mentions multi-level
modelling in particular, as offering great potential benefits for understanding the chain of
causation between social phenomena, such as social class, and the biological processes that
produce social class differences in life expectancy and cause of death. So, absolutely right:
social statisticians must be key collaborators with sociologists researching the social deter-
minants of health. To which I would add: (1) doctors have long understood the importance
of statistics, but sociologists have the advantage that they meet statisticians objectively as
equals, because neither is paid a clinical supplement to their salary; which may be part of the
reason why advanced social statistics flourishes outside, rather than inside, medical schools;
(2) multi-level modelling is just one, and perhaps not the most important, of the statistical
methods that can help unlock the social determinants of health; (3) methods of analysis can
never transcend data quality and form, so of equal importance to advanced statistics are
Britain’s fantastic longitudinal data sets funded mainly by UK Economic and Social
Research Council, who also ensure open academic access via UK Data Archive.
Social scientists need to collaborate also with biological scientists if they are to understand
the processes by which the social becomes biological. Cockerham discusses stress, income
inequality, culture, smoking and obesity when examining the factors that may be relevant, but
this list is not exhaustive of the social factors that are biologically plausible at the material,
behavioural and psycho-social levels. So, sociologists researching the social determinants of

© London School of Economics and Political Science 2008 British Journal of Sociology 59(3)
 Book reviews 589

health need to collaborate with biologists as well as social statisticians. It is also worth
reminding ourselves of the importance of medical epidemiologists as collaborators; from
this point of view, it is strange that Cockerham omits any mention of two major volumes in this
tradition; namely, Marmot and Wilkinson (Social Determinants of Health, 2006) and Kuh and
Ben-Shlomo (A Life Course Approach to Chronic Disease Epidemiology, 2006).
I end this review with a plea that sociologists are clear about one of the most important
contributions they can make to this area of research. Medical epidemiology is largely
a-theoretical, taking its ideas mainly from clinical medicine. Treating the social as important
is part of epidemiology’s raison d’etre, but its understanding of the social is untutored. This
flaw is well illustrated by its habitual use of the term socio-economic status, which fails to
distinguish between class and status; and confuses by using the same term to describe both
location within the social structure and social honour or prestige. Does this lack of elemen-
tary sociology matter? And does it hold back advances in understanding? The answer to
both questions is possibly, because the different dimensions of socio-economic position
(class, status, material circumstances) may relate with varying strength to the different
pathways (psycho-social, behavioural, material) by which the social becomes biological.
Social class, particularly as measured by the National Statistics Socio-Economic Classifica-
tion, which is based on employment relations and conditions, may relate most strongly to the
psycho-social pathway. Social status, particularly as measured by the Cambridge Scale, which
is based on the occupation of close friends, may relate most strongly to the behavioural
pathway. And material circumstances, as measured by income and wealth, which govern
access to advantaged standards of living, may relate most strongly to the material pathway.
These ideas have been tested in cross-sectional data, by for example Sacker, Bartley, Firth
and Fitzpatrick (1999, 2000), but remain to be explored longitudinally. Somewhat strangely,
Cockerham in his book ignores this opportunity to introduce a little basic sociology; and,
instead, perpetuates the use of the confusing socio-economic status.
Nevertheless, despite my quibbles, Cockerham’s book is timely and instructive for soci-
ologists who wish to research the social determinants of health.
David Blane
Imperial College London

Desmond, Matthew On the Fireline: Living and Dying with Wildland Firefighters
University of Chicago Press 2007 369 pp. £15.00 (hardback)

On the Fireline is a study of wildland firefighters, in which Matthew Desmond, a PhD

candidate in sociology, employs Chicago-school ethnography to analyze a season (and then
some) of wildland firefighting in Arizona, USA. In the first few chapters, Desmond contends
that the rural firefighters he studied embody a ‘country masculinity,’ and are drawn to
wildland firefighting because of it. He describes a persistent symbolic tension between these
men and their ‘city-boy’ counterparts – the people who represent the world of ‘middle-class
managerial masculinity’ (p. 29) and knee-jerk environmentalism. Borrowing from Bourdieu,
Desmond applies the concept of ‘habitus’ to illustrate how rural upbringings provide the
men with the predispositions necessary to understand the forest, nature, fire, and each other.
The next few chapters focus on power struggles: one intra-organizational look at how the
crew members jockey for status and respect, and one inter-organizational examination of
different classifications of firefighters. A later chapter contains a detailed narrative account
of a particular fire. For the most part, these chapters are empirically interesting and reveal
Desmond’s detailed knowledge of firefighting as well as the high level of trust his subjects
granted him. His methods are sound (although unnecessarily over-justified in the appendix).

British Journal of Sociology 59(3) © London School of Economics and Political Science 2008
590 Book reviews

There are, however, serious theoretical problems with this book. The first concerns Des-
mond’s mischaracterization of the risk literature, which delivers the fatal blow to the book’s
main thesis. Desmond spends most of his theoretical energy critiquing Goffman’s theory of
risk (from 1967) showing how the principles in his essay, ‘Where the Action Is,’ don’t ‘hold
up’ for the wildland firefighters Desmond studied. Although this may be true, it is
meaningless. Desmond creates a straw man argument by treating Goffman’s as the theory of
risk-taking behaviour while essentially ignoring any other sociological theories of risk devel-
oped in the last 40 years. This gross misrepresentation of an entire field of study will lead the
naïve reader to believe that Desmond’s work is as ground-breaking and cutting edge as he
claims it to be; scholars with the slightest knowledge of the risk literature – Stephen Lyng’s
seminal essay on ‘Edgework,’ (1990 American Journal of Sociology), for example, will marvel
at his systematic disregard for the scholarship that has come before him.
For example, one of Desmond’s main ‘findings’ is that wildland firefighters are able to
manage their perceptions of risk by maintaining an ‘illusio of self-determinacy’. Although he
regards Goffman’s 1967 term, the ‘illusion of self-determinacy,’ to be the best he has found
in the literature, he rejects it nevertheless because it implies that firefighters are in denial
about the risks – ‘illusion’ connotes that they are operating under a false consciousness.
Instead, Desmond gives the phrase a ‘Bourdieuian modification’ (p. 194) to show that
firefighters knowingly invest in the myth that they can control their fates – the ‘illusio’ is a
lens firefighters consciously don in order to view their activity as low risk. However, this
phenomenon had been identified earlier by Lyng in his 1990 article, and several researchers
(including myself) have expounded on it since. Lyng originally stated that risk-takers adopt
an ‘illusion of control,’ which ‘allows edgework [risk-taking behavior] to appear less threat-
ening than it actually is’ (1990, p. 872). Curiously, given these similarities, Desmond does not
refer to more recent analyses of this concept. An additional puzzle is that he claims to have
read Lyng’s theory of risk-taking behaviour, citing it briefly several times and even using
some of the same cultural examples as Lyng does, such as the astronauts’ attitude of control
in Tom Wolfe’s book, The Right Stuff. Yet he asserts that he could find nothing useable in
Lyng’s theory, rejecting it outright in several places in the book, but for reasons that are
neither appropriate nor clearly articulated. Since his work appears to mirror a portion of
Lyng’s theory, and since he offers no theoretical engagement before dismissing it, his argu-
ment is ultimately unconvincing.As the reader tries to situate Desmond’s findings and claims
within the extant risk literature – a task Desmond leaves woefully incomplete – one main
contribution of the book disintegrates.
A second thesis falls flat when Desmond traces the origins of the ‘illusio.’ Although he
does persuasively argue that wildland firefighters are socialized to this perspective through
the ‘organizational common sense’ inculcated in them by the US Forest Service, he also
claims that ‘current’ theories of risk (although he cites none) ‘are afflicted with [an] assump-
tion that causes those who come under its spell to . . . conceptualize risk taking in a vacuum,
divorced from the specific environment and circumstances where it takes place’ (pp. 8–9).
He concludes later that risk theorists have long been ‘baffled’ and ‘befuddled’ (p. 273)
because their ‘free-floating analyses . . . ignore the powerful influence of organizations’ as
well as the ways that power and inequality operate in risk-taking (p. 9). Again, his claims go
unsubstantiated. My own research on search-and-rescue groups (Lois, 2003 Heroic Efforts),
for example, clearly shows how the particular context of the risk – volunteer search-and-
rescue activity – allowed the organization to use the symbolic reward of heroism to elicit
team members’ conformity. In addition, I found that the organizational beliefs about emo-
tions interacted with beliefs about risk to create inequality: women’s perspectives and
experiences were consistently devalued. The claim that risk scholars – many of whom are
ethnographers (e.g., Gary Alan Fine, Lori Holyfield, Lilian Jonas, Jason Laurendeau) – are

© London School of Economics and Political Science 2008 British Journal of Sociology 59(3)
 Book reviews 591

oblivious to context and organizational influence is absurd. Thus, the second contribution
Desmond claims collapses under the weight of the evidence.
Although there are many places in this book where Desmond’s claims should have been
tempered with more careful scholarship, the preceding are the places where the thesis, based
on theoretical inaccuracies, spins out of control. Lay people who are interested in firefighting
will find this book interesting, although they will probably want to read the endnotes only
selectively (there are 41 pages worth). Sociologists interested in reading or teaching about
risk-taking behaviour, however, should look elsewhere.
Jennifer Lois
Western Washington University

Downes, D., Rock, P., Chinkin, C. and Gearty, C. (eds) Crime, Social Control and Human
Rights: From Moral Panics to States of Denial Essays in Honour of Stanley Cohen Willan
Publishing 2007 472 pp. £55.00 (hardback) £26.00 (paperback)

It is in every sense a monumental challenge to create an adequate tribute to a life and work
as distinguished, ethically and intellectually, as that of Stanley Cohen. This book, collated by
an editorial group of very notable scholars at LSE in a quite evident spirit of intimate yet
astonished admiration, is itself on a somewhat monumental scale. It needs to be so in order
to do even partial justice to the places, engagements and contributions of Cohen’s career (a
term of more than commonplace significance to anyone as steeped as he in sociology’s
interactionist heritage). The book is for these reasons various and expansive in scope, topic,
style and tone.
The editors have rightly eschewed any temptation to populate the text exclusively with
those authors whom one might regard as most obviously Cohen’s immediate peers. The
Taylors, Youngs and Sculls et al. are here of course but the voices that join them are by no
means only those of his own generation (since his influence and collaborations are by no
means confined to that cohort), nor only those of criminologists (since Cohen is by no means
‘only’ a criminologist), nor, of course, only from Britain. The latter feature is both impressive
and poignant. It is fitting that a volume in honour of a figure of Cohen’s global stature should
command contributions from far and wide, and it is not just any old festschrift that includes
Noam Chomsky, Howard Becker, Harvey Molotch, Stephen Lukes, Nils Christie and Albie
Sachs, for example. Here though reminiscence is also drawn from those who have known
Stanley Cohen longest and most deeply of all – amongst them his own brother Robin, who
just happens to be a sociologist of great eminence too, and his oldest friend Adam Kuper,
who just happened to go on to become one of the most senior anthropologists in this country.
Interesting contributions are also drawn from colleagues who come from or who have
worked alongside Cohen in the other key locations of his life, namely South Africa and
Israel.
What may we take away from all this? I think I understand better now that all three of
those places – South Africa, Israel, London – have been formative and all have included their
measure of pain and ambivalence. Growing up, so to speak, as a young person studying
sociology and then criminology in England in the 1980s, it never so much as crossed my mind
that someone who was such a crucial creator of the very vocabulary and idiom I was learning
to speak could have felt himself not completely at home in the environment he had helped
to make (this is much as one rarely sees one’s parents as people with rich and complex
emotional lives, or at least not until it is too late). But then there is more to being in exile
than not fitting in, just as there are other ways of belonging than feeling at home. We learn,
I think, that Cohen has been an inspirational figure quite against his own sceptical and

British Journal of Sociology 59(3) © London School of Economics and Political Science 2008
592 Book reviews

self-deprecating inclinations and that many of these essays have been written in a spirit of
great thankfulness.
It is by now conventional to point out that in the course of the time that Stanley Cohen
has been writing in, against, beyond and despite the soi-disant discipline of criminology
there have been three (rather Himalayan) high points in the forms of Folk Devils and
Moral Panics, Visions of Social Control and States of Denial. This much seems pretty unde-
niable and the organization of the book in some degree reflects it. Apart from this the
contributions are very varied and address Cohen’s work with very differing degrees of
directness. Some are primarily personal recollections, albeit written by people with an
often very acute social scientific sensibility regarding the times and conditions in which the
events recollected took place. Some of those that I personally like best do Cohen the great
courtesy of dealing with a concept or work of his head on in a properly theoretical manner
as Jock Young does with respect to the notion of moral panic for example. Others use
aspects of the work as a launch-pad for a somewhat different but equally stimulating sort
of inquiry, as Niki Lacey does in posing questions about the implications of Cohen’s typol-
ogy of denials for concepts of responsibility in criminal law theory. Some, however inter-
esting in their own right, make little or no reference to Cohen or his work. In one case,
Richard Sennett’s elegant miniature on Alexander Herzen and the ‘art of exile’ one gets
the impression that the not mentioning might be more a matter of good taste than any
lack of relevance, as when he writes of Herzen’s experience of England as ‘a sunless land
of overly practical, if kindly, people’.
For my own part I value Stan Cohen as an exceptionally acute and fleet-footed essayist
just as much as a writer of big books. I would have preferred a bit more straight-up
exegesis of some of those essays and some more strenuous contemporary re-evaluation.
This will be the literal-minded and overly practical Brit in me, no doubt. I have a special
liking for some of the essays in the last part of the book (‘Ways Ahead’) which pose
questions about what we should be doing now with the conceptual materials we have
inherited. It is probably true to say that the essays in this book are sufficiently diverse in
subject matter and character that not too many people (unless of course it is Cohen
himself who is the object of their studious attention) will read them all, still less do so
sequentially. But then, as the editors point out in their introduction, the work has a
‘protean’ and ‘many-sided’ character. They have done us a service in seeking to reflect that
many-sidedness and for the best of reasons, because somebody truly remarkable has been
among us and alongside us.
Richard Sparks
University of Edinburgh

Hafez, K. The Myth of Media Globalization. Polity Press 2007, 232 pp. £50.00 (hardback)
£14.99 (paperback)

The ongoing process of media globalization transcends nation and state-based communica-
tion, culture, and politics. As a result of the availability of cross-border information tech-
nologies and the dismantling of protectionist policies, media globalization articulates post-
national identities, fosters a global civil society, and nurtures a cosmopolitan consciousness.
A globalized culture circulates through media networks crisscrossing the world. So goes the
myth of media globalization that Kai Hafez puts to test in his perceptive book. More than
one single myth, Hafez probes a variety of myths that share the view that media globalization
is the catalyst for a new world of post-national media companies, post-state media policies,
and hybrid media cultures.

© London School of Economics and Political Science 2008 British Journal of Sociology 59(3)
 Book reviews 593

Hafez examines the reality of media industries and media consumption worldwide to
prove that the myth doesn’t hold under close inspection. The myth ignores the persistence
of old dynamics that have characterized media systems, media politics, and media cultures.
Neither nations nor states become irrelevant just because information technologies are the
backbone of today’s globalized world. National governments can still pull levers to control
media content and policies. Migrant communities use transnational media to maintain
links with home cultures. Satellite television programmes are mostly watched by elites
rather mass audiences. Much of international news reporting is domesticated to fit the
interests of local audiences or does not resonate with local publics. Language remains a
formidable barrier for media content exports. National and regional media moguls, who
benefit from close connections to governments, pose more threats to media democracy
than Western media behemoths. Media audiences are overwhelmingly loyal to local and
national content.
Based on this evidence, Hafez concludes that claims about the impact of media global-
ization are exaggerated and rushed. They are supported on thin and questionable evidence
more than persuasive cases. They are often bright or dystopian projections into the future,
either from the left or the right, more than nuanced analyses. They are largely based on
anecdotical impressions by globe-trotting observers who, carried away by the ubiquitousness
of global media brands and technologies, ignore the complexities of media traffic, policies
and uses. Curiously, while many recognized social scientists with limited, if any, expertise in
media research have confidently embraced the myth of media globalization, media scholars
have lately viewed such position with skepticism.
Certainly, Hafez’s point isn’t that nothing has changed. Rather, he offers a strong caution-
ary note about assuming that old media dynamics have vanished in a globalized world. He
questions the idea that ‘Americanization’, or the homogenization of media content under US
influence, accurately reflects the complexity of media flows and preferences. We are not part
of a global public sphere or global media culture just because we live in a multi-channel,
internet environment shaped by both commercial interests and transnational civic
mobilization. In fact, Hafez suggests that globalization may actually reinforce centripetal
dynamics around local and national culture and politics. Ethnocentrism and xenophobia, two
forms of reaction against globalization, continue to inform media discourses and news
coverage. Satellite television offers new avenues to reaffirm national culture and debate
national and regional politics.
Although the core of his argument is not entirely new, Hafez offers a comprehensive
analysis that nicely summarizes and integrates existing research. He successfully builds a
case drawing from studies that question various myths of media globalization, and deftly
brings together evidence from across media industries and regions around the world. The
book invites discussion and outlines interesting questions for further research. Given its
scope and clarity, I would not hesitate to assign the book in upper-level undergraduate and
graduate courses. In conclusion, Hafez’s delivers an airtight argument to respond to decla-
rations about the new role of the ‘global media’ in a post-everything era.
One is left thinking, however, about why the myth of media globalization continues to
exert such irresistible, albeit misguided, attraction in the popular press and a host of schol-
arly books. Given that it stands on weak scholarship in the field of media studies, one
wonders about the appeal of grand statements announcing the dawn of a new media era that
supersedes ‘the national’ and other modern political and cultural formations. Perhaps the
myth is the product of asking a limited set of questions. Instead of determining ex ante the
consolidation of a mediated global civil society and global media audiences, we should
examine the interaction between globalization and nation-based media politics and media
cultures.What if media globalization, actually, has changed little about the workings of media

British Journal of Sociology 59(3) © London School of Economics and Political Science 2008
594 Book reviews

systems, media preferences, and the content of news reporting? What if media provincialism,
patriotism, and politics remain stronger than media globalization? These are intriguing
questions that Hafez’s thoughtful book leaves us to explore further.
Silvio Waisbord
George Washington University

Lacy, K.R. Blue-Chip Black: Race, Class, and Status in the New Black Middle Class
University of California Press 2007 279 pp. £13.95 (paperback)

Blue-Chip Black: Race, Class, and Status in the New Black Middle Class, by Karen R. Lacy,
is an important and exceptionally well-crafted study of black identity among middle-class
African Americans. Lacy describes how middle-class black families make strategic choices
about how and when to assert any one of the identities housed in the black middle class
‘tool kit’. Race, while certainly not unimportant, is not the only dimension of their identity
that middle-class blacks care about. This conclusion contrasts with other scholarship that
holds that racial stigmatization is by far the dominant force shaping the identity of middle-
class blacks, where, essentially, race always trumps class. The book carefully describes the
important role that context plays in identity formation and maintenance, and highlights
how black identity has become a more fluid, less constricting force in America than in the
past.
The book is guided by a specific set of research questions. What distinct identities are
constructed and maintained by the black middle class? How do different groups of middle-
class blacks vary in their use of these identities? In terms of their access to cultural and
economic resources, are middle and upper-class blacks more like their white counterparts
than they are like lower-class blacks? The book goes about answering these questions by
conducting in-depth interviews with thirty black middle-class couples, complemented with
participant observation in three different middle-class suburban communities. One of these
communities is a predominately white one in Fairfax County, Virginia, while the other two
are predominately black communities in Prince George’s County, Maryland. The two black
communities are differentiated by their median incomes. One is a solidly middle-class area
while the other is a more exclusive upper middle-class community.
Much of the book focuses on differences by residential location in how middle-class blacks
think about and make use of their social identities. The book makes a few significant
contributions to the existing literature on black identity by: 1) looking at black middle-class
identity in a more varied set of contexts than previous studies, including communities that
are not plagued by crime and disorganization; 2) examining black identity in a more southern
community in the USA, rather than previous studies that tend to focus on black communities
in declining cities in the Northeast and Midwest; 3) investigating how parents in different
communities socialize their children.
The book finds that being black and middle-class is a distinct and flexible identity that
overlaps in some ways with the white middle class and in others with the black lower class.
Race is not the only dimension of their identity that middle-class black care about. At times,
middle-class blacks define themselves by erecting distinctions against the black poor. The
black middle-class tool kit is composed of public identities, status-based identities, racial and
class-based identities, and suburban identities, and middle-class uses employ these identities
instrumentally. For example, in interactions with white strangers blacks may amplify their
differences from the lower class either through their dress or speech. Essentially, the identity
tool kit relies on the possession of cultural capital that allows middle-class blacks to interact
appropriately with different kinds of groups depending on the setting. However, Lacy also

© London School of Economics and Political Science 2008 British Journal of Sociology 59(3)
 Book reviews 595

emphasizes that race continues to be quite salient for middle-class blacks, either due to
encounters with discrimination or the desire to socialize with co-ethnics.
Lacy is careful to describe the heterogeneity of the black middle class. For example,
upper-middle class blacks, who are freer from financial constraints than ‘core’ middle-class
blacks, make a point of investing more in their children, such as by ensuring they receive a
high-quality education. Middle-class blacks who live in predominately white neighbor-hoods
seek to socialize their children in racially mixed environments to prepare them for the ‘real’
world, but may also join black social organizations to retain ties to their ethnic community.
Conversely, blacks in predominately black neighborhoods often want to buffer their children
from racism, but also still seek to differentiate themselves from the black poor (and perhaps
from lower-middle class blacks as well).
Overall, the book is well-organized and theoretically grounded. It carefully sifts through
the evidence and provides many interesting quotations from respondents throughout the
book. It draws upon previous studies on the black middle class but ends up offering unique
insights on black identity.
Most notably, Lacy describes how in a context of shifting attitudes about race among
whites and accompanying declines in discrimination, middle-class blacks are now able to
strategically assimilate. To Lacy, this means that middle-class blacks can employ their cultural
capital to navigate through interactions with whites and other groups in the workplace and
other public spaces. Again, it is not that race is unimportant, as racism at times still emerges
in interactions, but nor does race wholly determine the lives of middle-class blacks. Lacy
concludes that this strategic assimilation could even potentially lead to a more symbolic
racial identity. That is, over time ethnic identity may no longer dictate who blacks marry,
where they live, or what occupations are available to them. They will have joined the
American mainstream.
John Iceland
University of Maryland

Massey, Doreen World City Polity 2007 272 pp. £50.00 (hardback) £14.99 (paperback)

Two events in 1986 frame Doreen Massey’s arguments in World City. These are the abolition
of the Greater London Council on 31 March, and the Big Bang in London’s financial
markets on 27 October: a whimper and a Bang, you might say. The first marked the end of
unitary government in the city, and on one view the start of an urban stasis ended only by the
Blair Government’s institution of a new Greater London Authority in 2000 – as it turned out,
under the leadership of the same man who had gone down with the GLC. The second,
introducing electronic trading to the City of London, marked the take-off of London’s
current phase as the centre of global finance, and a key moment in the wider financialization
of the world economy. As London’s economy went global, its governance – mainly devolved
to its thirty-three boroughs – went very local. It is these two issues, of city government and
unbridled finance, which provide Massey’s focus.
The title is meant to mislead. The book considers London’s relation to a world economy
but has more to say about the city’s relation to its regional and national contexts, and its
relation to itself. Massey is concerned with the relationship of the City to the city, the role
played by London’s financial district for or against the everyday city in which people live and
work without ever knowingly taking an option or getting bundled into a structured invest-
ment vehicle. These two cities were well-captured in pictures from late 2007 of the queues of
depositors (many of them pensioners) waiting to withdraw their savings from the City of
London’s Moorgate and Houndsditch branches of the ailing Northern Rock, a former

British Journal of Sociology 59(3) © London School of Economics and Political Science 2008
596 Book reviews

provincial building society stung by the global liquidity crisis that followed the meltdown of
US sub-prime mortgage markets. Here were real people waiting in real time (more a creep
than a run on the bank) to take out real money from an institution, more than two-thirds of
whose capital came not from its savers’ deposits or borrowers’ interest payments but from
the electronic merry-go-round of the money markets and inter-bank lending. As if to under-
score the fragility of this ‘virtual’ economy, even the bank’s web-site went down.
This idea of a dual city – divided between the notionally global and the empirically local; the
have-a-lots and the have-a-bits; ‘high-grade’ service workers in finance, consultancy and
corporate law, and those ‘low-grade’ service workers who clean their offices, mind their
children and wait on their tables – has been part of the global city thesis since it was developed
in the 1980s.‘Cities’, Massey writes,‘are central to neoliberal globalisation’ (p. 9).What passes
for a ‘global’ economy is of course chronically uneven, highly regionalized, and exclusive of
significant sections of the globe.As a geographer, Massey takes the category of the ‘global’ as
the casually aspatial notion it often is. London may be the world’s financial centre, but this
segment of the urban economy does not float freely of its metropolitan or national context.
London still exports its goods and services primarily to domestic markets; even in the field of
financial services, where its global specialisation distinguishes the City of London from other
‘world cities’, more business is done with the rest of the UK than is traded overseas.
While its global functions haven’t disembedded London’s economy from the national,
they have helped produce divisions within both city and nation. London – in its world city
guise – played a key part in Britain’s economic growth after the middle 1990s (as well as what
growth occurred in the 1980s), but also in the country’s widening income inequality over the
same period. This played out in both regional disparities and stark inequalities inside the
capital: especially between Londoners whose income derives from City-related activities
(and much of their wealth from the house-price inflation such income has fuelled), and those
whose incomes come from wages and/or benefits that do not always offer a toe-hold into
whatever ‘affordable’ housing comes – and it comes only slowly – onto the market. Massey
is good on the paradox of a London labour market in which those at the bottom are
especially vulnerable to market forces – and there is evidence, for example, that inward
migration is exerting downward pressure on wages at the lower end – while those at the top,
for all the cant of international competitiveness, take home salaries, bonuses, pensions and
kiss-offs apparently undented by market discipline. Indeed, following the boom of the
late-1990s, London’s economic growth slowed in the early 2000s, and in the key sector of
banking and finance its relative performance has fallen behind that of other UK regions.
Whatever the growth figures, Massey asks how far ‘a city of such inequality can be
characterized as healthy’ (p. 212). The question of who a city is for, of what a good (or
healthy) city might be, brings her back to the issue of government. Massey takes the
twin-track development of London as an effect of ‘neoliberalism in its specific, British,
Blairite manifestation’ (pp. 214–15). (She goes easy on Ken Livingstone: they were comrades
in the GLC days and, after its fall, members of a group that mobilized for the city’s leftist
future from a North London living-room.) For any political leader, the problem of governing
London is that of holding together the different cities Massey’s book lays out. London sells
largely to the rest of the country, despite the rhetoric of its global outlook; it transfers public
revenues outside the city’s boundaries even as it concentrates private wealth in pockets
inside them. And it transfers population: London’s current and projected population growth
is due to foreign in-migration; more internal migrants are moving away from London than
are moving in. World City captures this ambivalence, contesting the notion of the goose that
lays the golden egg for the nation, while recognizing many ordinary Londoners do rather
poorly out of the whole deal. Massey cites the slogan adopted by the Mayor’s office following
the terrorist attacks of July 2005: 7 million Londoners, it read, 1 London.There are more than

© London School of Economics and Political Science 2008 British Journal of Sociology 59(3)
 Book reviews 597

seven million Londoners now, and more to come. Massey’s work suggests that there is also
more than one London.
Fran Tonkiss
London School of Economics and Political Science

Thrift, N. Non-representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect Routledge 2008 336 pp.
£ 75.00 (hardback) £25.99 (paperback)

This interdisciplinary work assembles eight previously published papers reiterating Nigel
Thrift’s proposals for ‘non-representational theory’. The papers are framed by a new intro-
ductory chapter, which outlines the theory’s seven basic tenets, and a new closing piece
revisiting the author’s potent configuration of ‘politics’ and ‘affect’. The book pursues theo-
retical and political aims. Substantively, the study brackets cognition, consciousness, and
action, illuminating the significance of ‘bare life’ – of the ‘non-cognitive’ and ‘pre-conscious’,
of ‘affects’ and ‘practices’ – instead.
The book’s diagnostic first Part conveys haunting images of Western capitalism’s cul-
tural, political, and socio-economic status quo. Amongst these is Thrift’s portrayal of capi-
talism’s ongoing search for ‘sources of profit’ following novel strategies for ‘tapping’ the
energies of human intelligence (pp. 29–55). Commodification is examined as mobilization
of the production of never fully conscious ideas (‘forethought’) for industrial ends and as
activation of consumer ingenuity and space for commercial innovation, with implications
for the producer-consumer distinction and the concept of ‘value’. Another piece discusses
‘body practices’ which, by drawing on the ‘non-cognitive’, ‘intensify’ the ‘moment’
(pp. 56–74). Thrift challenges equations of modernity with a ‘disenchanted go-faster world’
and carefully negotiates the view of ‘bare life’ as ‘immured’ by the state and mass con-
sumerism. ‘Body practices’ such as Alexander Technique, Thrift argues, are not just
another site of capitalism’s apprehension of ‘bare life’, but also a locus for ‘emancipatory
politics’.
The question of what might constitute such a politics suffuses Part Two of the book. It
revolves around the ideas of ‘intensifying everyday life’, ‘enlivening occasions’, and going
‘beyond’ the moment. Dissatisfied with actor-network theory, Thrift foregrounds his concern
with events and everyday practices as they occur. The politics of non-representational theory
hinges on a vision of the event as ‘exceeded’ by an embodied ‘signalling beyond the present’,
on ‘refiguring’ space-time and knowledge-practice, and, crucially, on ‘performance’. Perfor-
mance is discussed with critical reference to several intellectual sources, specified as ‘the art
of the now’ (as unactualized possibility) in relation to the performing arts, and illustrated in
terms of dance (pp. 138–47).
In Part Three, the geography and politics of ‘bare life’ cross-fertilize. Thrift sets out by
tracing the contours of emergent networks of ‘intelligencings’, highlights their importance
for ‘bare life’ as a ‘new layer of intelligence’, and introduces corresponding ethical demands
such as ‘relentless pluralism’ and ‘messiness’ (pp. 153–170). The driving issue for the remain-
der of the book, however, is ‘affect’. ‘Affect’ involves forms of ‘non-reflective thinking’ –
‘pre-cognitive’, ‘semi-conscious flows’ – with ‘a sense of push in the world’. Affects are
subject to political ‘engineering’, which has a transformative effect on politics, but the
affective realm also nurtures opportunities for progressive practices (pp. 171–197). Thrift
underlines the non-negligibility of these opportunities with reference to video artist Bill
Viola’s intense conveying of affects ‘at work’.
The penultimate chapter – similarly ‘veering’ between ‘pessimism and hope’ – confronts
affects in their manifestation as ‘urban misanthropy’, but not without simultaneously

British Journal of Sociology 59(3) © London School of Economics and Political Science 2008
598 Book reviews

allowing them to inspire a critical ‘micro-politics’ of ‘feeling’ and ‘kindness’ in ‘everyday

interaction’ (pp. 198–219). The closing essay thematises the ‘politics of affect’ from yet
another angle (pp. 220–254). After retracing his key references in this context, which include
Tarde, Italian ‘workerist’ Marxism, and Sloterdijk, Thrift turns to the ‘imitative-mimetic’
sphere of ‘affective contagion’. Capitalist corporations are beginning to ‘work on’ the
imitative-affective domain, notably mood, to foster consumer identification with the
commodity. As this strategy is ‘spilling over’ into politics, it solidifies Thrift’s claims about the
necessity for a counter-politics which, ‘tak[ing] affect in to its workings’ (p. 253), responds on
this very level.
Sociologists will be intrigued by Thrift’s diagnosis of capitalist living conditions because
his analytical focus on ‘bare life’ and ‘affects’ yields highly original perspectives. Yet it is the
book’s ensuing political aspiration that quakes with a sense of heightened urgency. In the
practices mentioned, Thrift illuminates ‘interstices in everyday life’ where ‘contrary motion’
(cf. p. vii, 15 & 92) could become possible. These indications make of Non-representational
Theory – a ‘summary’ (p. vii) of Thrift’s work since the early 1990s – a guide for further
inquiries into the possibilities of setting off ‘fireworks’ in the everyday.
Thrift conceives of being as inherently productive: ‘intelligencings’ are ‘sets of making
worlds’ (p. 161); ‘the world is a making’ (p. 113). Simultaneously, production provides the
foundation for his political project, which consists of ‘productive concatenations’ (p. 8) and
follows an ‘ethics’ of ‘adding to’ the world (p. 170), of ‘craftsmanship’, of ‘bringing out
potential’ under the motto ‘more life’ (p. 14f). Performance, for instance, constitutes the
use of ‘available resources’ for the creative ‘production of the moment’ (p. 124); Thrift’s
urban politics of kindness means an ‘affirmative micro-politics of productivity’, ‘emphasiz-
ing what Bloch calls “productivity”, the construction of a new horizon out of the subcon-
scious’ (p. 215). Thrift’s politics involves ‘non-representational styles of work’ (p. 147f
emphasis added), geared towards ‘tapping the vital force’ of ‘bare life’ (p. 22). For all its
‘hard questions to the given’ (p. 3), ‘routinized, “unrememberable” but unforgettable
natures’ concealing the world’s questionability (p. 19), non-representational theory, it
seems, unquestioningly accepts ‘production’ as the principle of life and the engine of its
politics.
But if Thrift’s notion, that commodifying capitalism renders life down to human pre-
cognition effective as a resource, is accepted: would non-representational theory’s treatment
and political conduct of productivity and disclosure as though they were existentially basic
not appear all too reconcilable with commodifying capitalism? This would at least suggest
that the principle of production itself must undergo ‘hard questioning’ as a contingency,
perhaps even face scrutiny as one of those ‘behavioural codes . . . [of] normalcy and conven-
tion’ to be ‘sidestepped’ (p. 4). What if scrutinising the category and practices of production,
too, is only prevented by the ‘crushing weight of economic circumstance’ limiting what
people ‘are allowed to think’ (p. 20)? A ‘conceptuality . . . attuned to the moment’ that truly
wants to go ‘beyond’ the moment (p. 19) cannot evade these questions.
While emphasizing the productive in pursuit of ‘anti-cognitive’, ‘anti-elitist’ (p. 112) strat-
egies, non-representational theory does not formulate those problems. Correspondingly, the
objective is ‘genuinely modest’: a ‘supplement to the ordinary labour of everyday life’ (p. 19).
A critical sociology hesitant to affirm production, by contrast, may still find reflection –
probably even ‘elitism’ – inescapable. And yet, no such critique of production could, in turn,
guarantee that ‘Escape, no. Work with and on, yes.’ (p. 88) is too modest a call. This is how
pressing non-representational theory’s analytical and political endeavour could still turn out
to be.
Matthias Benzer
London School of Economics and Political Science

© London School of Economics and Political Science 2008 British Journal of Sociology 59(3)
 Book reviews 599

Woodward, R. and Winter, T. Sexing the Soldier: The Politics of Gender and the
Contemporary British Army Routledge 2007 144 pp. $160.00 (hardback) $51.95
(paperback)

Sexing the Soldier is a stimulating book. It takes a critical view of gender practices, politics
and identities in the British Army at the beginning of the twenty first century and the way in
which gendered organizational and cultural patterns interact with more general social
understandings of gender and the military. The authors start with two questions: ‘how does
gender work as an axis of organization within the contemporary British Army and what
understandings of gender follow from this?’ and ‘how does this . . . relate to civilian under-
standings of and responses to the British Army, the armed forces more widely, and military
activities and militarism in general?’ (p. 1). The authors resort to a theoretical approach
rooted in critical and feminist post-structuralist theory and the answers rendered reveal
some of the major strengths of this perspective but, at the same time, cannot avoid displaying
some of its shortcomings.
In the first chapter the authors set out the theoretical, methodological and normative
foundations of the book. They argue that gender is a military issue in so far as it shapes
a whole range of practices and ideas within the armed forces, influencing material and
organizational features as much as social interactions or cultural and cognitive frame-
works. On the other hand, they sustain that military gender issues are also civilian issues,
since they are (and ought to be) subject to public scrutiny because the armed forces are
a ‘focus, target or repository for wider concerns and anxieties around social issues within
civilian society’ (p. 8).
After reviewing patterns of male and female military participation and setting the histori-
cal context of the British Army in the second chapter, the book proceeds in chapter three
with a rich analysis of selected policy initiatives regarding female military participation. The
focus here is not on the evaluation of policies but on the mechanisms and language of policy
through which female difference is constructed and, according to the authors, female par-
ticipation is contained.
Chapter four turns to the construction of masculine identities and the way they are lived,
embodied and performed in Army training, work and culture. Based on somewhat limited
sources – public recruitment documents, one ethnographic study and a few soldiers’ pub-
lished autobiographies – the authors nevertheless draw an interesting portrait of one central
kind of military masculinity.
Chapter five examines the way in which the gendered figure of the soldier is constructed
in civilian culture. Through an analysis of print media and popular television drama the
authors highlight the parallels between discourses about female difference articulated in
policy debate on women’s military participation and representations of that difference
within popular cultural forms. The final chapter of the book concludes with an emphasis on
the significance of discourses on the Army’s structure, ethos or activities to an understanding
of military institutions.
From a formal point of view the book is well organized. The authors carefully integrate
their findings with more theoretical reflections and establish links between the various
chapters. It makes an informative read. From a more substantial standpoint the book
provides a coherent critical argument on the mechanisms through which gender operates in
both civilian and military discourses to frame the image of the soldier and the armed forces
as an institution.The value of the book is (at least) twofold: the argument is developed on the
basis of a) a non-essentialist and relational understanding of gender and b) a conceptual-
ization of organizational structures and gender cultures of military forces as contingent
rather than transcendent or absolute.

British Journal of Sociology 59(3) © London School of Economics and Political Science 2008
600 Book reviews

Drawing on the epistemological assumptions of post-structuralist theories, Woodward and

Winter emphasize and document convincingly the significance of culture and discourse to
the construction of reality. However, whilst this is one of the strengths of the book it is also
one of its weaknesses since the argument overemphasizes the power of discourse. I would
like to underline two aspects. First, even when the existence of a material reality somewhere
outside the discursive realm is not questioned by the authors, their interpretation of such
materiality is very literal (‘cold metal of weapons’, ‘warm bodies of soldiers’). Their claim is
that discourses make things ‘real’: ‘the rationale for, the structure of and the ethos of the
Army are not entities that have an independent existence outside and beyond the ideas that
bring them into being . . . it is that constant repetition of discursive practices that constitutes
what we call “The Army” ’ (p. 100). This assertion implies a clear devaluation of the power
of structural arrangements, leading to a reductionist conceptualization of gender as mainly
a system of signs and meanings. Second, although the authors often point out the diversity of
discourses and practices of gender as well as the complexity of their articulation within the
British Army, the general emphasis – particularly clear in the final chapter – is on the power
of one dominant discourse: a discourse that helps contain women’s presence and equates
soldering with masculinity. A more comparative standpoint (regarding both time and space)
would probably have helped overcome this rather monolithic image, even if such compara-
tive focus has (consciously and legitimately) not been among the objectives of the book.
Finally, a note on the sources and data used in Sexing the Soldier. The book draws
extensively on documentary and secondary data sources but also on primary research data,
such as semi-structured interviews. It would have been helpful to know more about the
number and scope of the interviews as this information is not provided in detail.
Despite my caveats, this book makes an important contribution to the field of gender and
the military. It provides interesting explorations of the British case, has a clear potential to
inspire further work on the topic, and last but not least, the authors convince us that military
gender issues should be a legitimate concern for wider civil society for reasons of democratic
accountability and cultural understanding.
Helena Carreiras
Lisbon University Institute

© London School of Economics and Political Science 2008 British Journal of Sociology 59(3)