Book reviews

The Ann Oakley Reader: Gender, Women, and Social Science

Ann Oakley, Policy Press, Bristol, 2005, £19.99, 306pp.

Hard Labour: The Sociology of Parenthood

Caroline Gatrell, Open University Press, Berkshire, 2005, £60.00, paper £19.99,
236pp.

Pairing the above two books for this review – my own bright idea – has proved
to be more unwieldy and perhaps more unfair than I had anticipated. Hard
Labour appears to be Caroline Gatrell’s first major piece of sociological
research. A clumsily written book, it examines transitions to parenthood
among twenty highly educated, primarily white, married or cohabiting British
heterosexual couples. The Ann Oakley Reader, in contrast, represents a cul-
mination, offering a thoughtfully self-edited retrospective of the author’s
thirty-year career building feminist sociology. It begins from the earliest dis-
tinction of social-construct ‘gender’ from biological ‘sex’, through discussions
of methodology, to a critique of postmodernism. Selections from each of
Oakley’s path-breaking empirical projects are included as well. The asymme-
try of these two works, if unfair, does allow for useful reflection on the lifespan
of feminist sociology.
Hard Labour is oddly subtitled with the gender-neutral parenthood. Gatrell
claims, in contrast to her title, that her primary focus is on mothers, noting that,
‘when writers and governments talk with authority about “parenting,” they are
by implication (especially in the case of very young children) talking about
mothers’ (p. 3). I could not help but think of Ann Oakley’s explicit titles:
Becoming a Mother, Women Confined, Subject Women, Social Support and
Motherhood; and of her ironic 1998 observation of the changing field, ‘This is
also the sense in which women’s studies became gender studies and “gender”
was substituted for “women” in research grant applications because it was

The Sociological Review, 54:3 (2006)

© The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2006. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.,
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Book reviews

more profitable to suggest the goal of understanding men’s ways of being . . .’

(Oakley, 2005: p. 43).
To be fair, Gatrell’s subtitle does highlight her interviews with eighteen of
the fathers in her sample of twenty couples (Oakley, in contrast, relied on
mothers’ accounts of the domestic division of labour). The subtitle may also
highlight Gatrell’s positive findings: fathers reported taking on greater care of
very young children and taking direct emotional responsibility for such rela-
tionships, whereas much prior research found fathers taking on such emotion-
work only after divorce. Gatrell offers an instrumental interpretation: that
fathers find this yields ‘a better return,’ with children a more durable invest-
ment than either 21st-century marital or career ties (p. 147). In her small,
nonrepresentative sample, five fathers were primary carers and five shared
equally as ‘co-parents;’ these ten reduced work-hours or ‘downshift[ed]’
careers; and only one father among the twenty couples failed to take time off
for a sick child (pp. 134–35).
In contrast to this involved caring, it is less surprising that male co-parents
take on little added responsibility for housework. Gatrell acknowledges that
this finding is ‘depressingly familiar’ (p. 120). In fact, it owes much to Oakley’s
doctoral dissertation, published as The Sociology of Housework in 1974, and
represented in five chapter-excerpts in The Ann Oakley Reader. It was Oakley
who originally insisted on distinguishing housework from childcare and treat-
ing housework as a legitimate topic for sociological investigation, paving the
way for thirty years of scholarship on the obduracy of the gendered division of
domestic labour. In brief introductory comments, Oakley reminds us how risky
it was at the time to take seriously women’s lives by applying models from the
male realm of industrial sociology. A new generation of radical sociologists
was busy throwing off the Parsonian strangle-hold on the discipline; it had
made women’s work invisible behind the functional necessity of their expres-
sive role. Yet unlike those engaged in the abstraction of Marxist domestic-
labour debates (debating whether housework was precapitalist, productive, or
merely reproductive), Oakley was passionate about valuing women’s words
and lived experiences. She wryly includes remarks from 1974 reviews: ‘Dr.
Oakley’ [one reviewer] said, ‘can hardly be called a disinterested observer. She
is unashamedly a feminist’ (cited on p. 59).
Two of Gatrell’s additional findings in Hard Labour reiterate Oakley’s
work. First, Gatrell contends – like Oakley in The Sociology of Housework –
that mothers’ commitments to paid work are ‘deep,’ as is their ‘fear of being
trapped by the ‘institution of motherhood’ (p. 150). Second – as Oakley dem-
onstrated in Becoming a Mother (1979) and Women Confined (1980), both well
represented in The Ann Oakley Reader – the medicalization of childbirth, with
the isolation of early motherhood, often lead to serious health problems. Even
among Gatrell’s privileged group, mothers took ill health for granted, as seven
of twenty reported significant depression, and eight, fairly serious physical
problems (pp. 103, 108). How sad that we need to keep recounting these same
old stories.

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Hard Labour does not, however, exemplify the best we can do in this effort.
It contains errors about U.S. law, tedious literature reviews, and highly indi-
vidualistic concluding advice that women develop specialty niches within their
professions to better leverage their own work-life boundaries (p. 213). But
several problematic assumptions are more difficult to swallow. Gatrell pre-
sumes that, because of higher rates of maternal employment, highly educated
heterosexual couples such as those in her sample are ‘the vanguard’ of gender
transformation (p. 5). Yet she acknowledges later that same-sex families rep-
resent the greater challenge to ‘traditional gendered parenting stereotypes’
(p. 214, also 67). Moreover, Oakley’s research, and much subsequent, have
found little difference across socio-economic levels in the gendered domestic
division of labour, even in ‘supposed paradises of gender equality, such as
Sweden’ (Oakley, p. 56). Finally, Gatrell explicitly puts aside the thorny ques-
tion central to much feminist sociology of care: if (or under what conditions)
the use of primarily nonwhite and immigrant women as low-paid domestic
workers constitutes an exploitative or acceptable solution (p. 67).
In contrast,Ann Oakley seems not one to put much aside. Her retrospective
includes not just the path-breaking work on domestic labour, childbirth, and
motherhood, but somewhat cranky reflections on being assigned an iconic role
in feminist methodology. The role emerged after the 1981 essay ‘Interviewing
Women: a Contradiction in Terms?’ (reprinted in The Ann Oakley Reader)
questioned the detached, survey model in favor of a more supportive, dialogic
or reciprocal model of in-depth interviewing. Oakley complains of being cast
as ‘brainwashed’ after this article became well-known, when an institutional
relocation from a sociology department to a healthcare research unit pro-
voked a shift in methodological tools (p. 246).
In the project that became the 1992 Social Support and Motherhood, Oakley
embraced experimental design, with randomized controlled trials, the ‘gold
standard’ of traditional, positivist science. She used the method to ask if social
support might help prevent low-birthweight babies among the (primarily low-
income) women at highest risk. This was hardly, to Oakley, a sell-out of the ‘old
Oakley’ (p. 246) – but growth in her ability to produce reliable, practical
knowledge. In fact, the experimental treatment was itself the ‘old Oakley’s’
supportive feminist interviewing,in this instance,provided by specifically trained
midwives.This experiment subjected to rigorous evaluation an earlier suspicion
that not being listened to by healthcare providers might be a major stressor.
From my standpoint in the U.S., Oakley’s resentment is fascinating, with
parallels to my interdisciplinary life in women’s studies rather than my disci-
plinary life in sociology. U.S. sociology has long been more wedded to empiri-
cal research and less attached to theory than the British, and for many reasons,
it has been much less influenced by the postmodern and feminist critiques of
science that so irk Professor Oakley. Oakley might find common cause with
the many U.S. feminist social scientists who practice a strategic positivism out
of the same passion for social change (e.g., Spalter-Roth and Hartmann, 1996).
However, as a reviewer of Oakley’s 1992 book (for Contemporary Sociology

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23, 6, 1994), I cannot help thinking that her retrospective crankiness misrep-
resents a wise, complex book, one which goes far beyond strategic positivism
and the renamed ‘socially equitable comparison test’ (p. 248).The brief excerpt
found in The Ann Oakley Reader only hints that the project questioned ‘every
precept of the traditional scientific method’ (p. 242). In fact, Oakley treated
her ostensibly objective dependent variable to an almost-Foucaultian excava-
tion, of the historical ascendancy of birth weight as cultural symbol amid the
rise of statistics and medicine as forms of social control. She subjected her
independent variable, social support, to discursive analysis, worried by the
appeal to neo-liberal policymakers of cheap ‘pseudo-technical’ ‘quick fixes for
the ways in which poverty damages health’ (1992: 326). And in a reflexive
mode, she made explicit her frustration with the project’s nonsignificant quan-
titative results, with the grants denied and articles rejected. In short, Professor
Oakley may be loathe to admit it, yet Social Support and Motherhood was
invigorated and enlarged by postmodern feminist epistemological challenges.
In holding to the need for empirical research and for a critical realism, I
have shared at times Professor Oakley’s annoyance with postmodern influ-
ences (Blum and Press, 2002) – however, in the U.S., where such metatheory
only touches the periphery of sociology, it is perhaps easier to see how the
dominant positivist core could use some shaking up, and thus, to avoid the
caricature that Professor Oakley nearly succumbs to. But The Ann Oakley
Reader, despite this limitation, is a wonderful gift, and I’m sure will be used
widely for teaching and passing on our legacy. I wish I could say the same for
Hard Labour. Perhaps in future work its author will fully develop the intrigu-
ing issues of law, policy, and subtle discrimination in the U.K. against
co-parenting employees that are only touched on here.

References

Blum, Linda M. and Andrea L., Press, (2002), ‘What Can We Hear After Postmodernism?: Doing
Feminist Field Research in the Age of Cultural Studies’, in American Cultural Studies, Warren,
C. and Vavrus, M. (eds), Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Spalter-Roth, Roberta and Heidi, Hartmann, (1996), ‘Small Happinesses: The Feminist Struggle to
Integrate Social Research with Social Activism’, in Feminism and Social Change, Gottfried, H.
(ed.), Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

University of New Hampshire Linda M. Blum

Local Actions: Cultural Activism, Power, and Public Life in America

Melissa Checker and Maggie Fishman (eds), New York: Columbia University
Press, 2004, £40.50, 254pp.

At first glance the Local Actions contents page looks varied, if not disparate.
What underlying theme could possibly unite studies on community-based
environmental activism, the agonies of putting faith before homosexuality, and

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high school performances to name but three? For Checker and Fishman the
selection of papers presented in this volume are symptomatic of a turn within
social movements and campaigning organisations towards ‘cultural activism’.
Without overly elaborating the point this turn is partly situated in
the emergence of the ‘new social movements’ against oppressions anchored on
the group identities rather than a clash over economic interests. However the
politics of representation are often assumed to be fundamentally divisive.
Checker and Fishman cite Putnam’s (2000) observations of a tendency for
individuals to seek out others who share a commonality of interests. What he
terms ‘cyberbalkanisation’ entails the fragmenting of community and politics
along separate identity lines, and with it a decline in the capacity to act
collectively with other groups who do not share identity positions. This scep-
ticism toward identity politics is not new and arguments over the critique’s
merits continue both in and outside the academy. The contribution the editors
make goes beyond the terms of this debate, arguing for reconceptualising
identity politics in terms of cultural activism. This is where identity-based
groupings must reach out to a wider public by mobilising the cultural resources
at their disposal to achieve the objects of their activism.
By way of an illustrative example, Fishman’s own paper on New York artists
notes how the withdrawal of public arts provision in state schools in the
seventies encouraged arts groups to plug the gap with their own programmes.
The vocation of being an artist implies passionate commitment and often
financial difficulties; thus by teaching on short-term arts programmes that were
later supported by a limited reintroduction of public money the artists were
able to mobilise the specific cultural resources of their subject position to
promote ‘artistic thinking’. This comprises independence, observation, and
criticism: qualities that cut against the tests culture of New York education.
This case shows identity politics need not imply separatism: the effective uses
of cultural activism require a serious orientation toward coalition building.
Elaborating further they argue ‘cultural activism’ was coined by Ginsberg
(1997) for whom it was the use of music, art, and film to articulate a certain
political agenda. The editors extend and deepen this definition by embedding
it in an anthropological approach to culture: it now subsumes all those prac-
tices people utilise to conceive/constitute their lives. Giving this definition of
culture an activist bent means cultural activism is ‘the range of collective and
public practices and strategies that people use to alter dominant perceptions,
ideas, and understandings for the sake of social change’ (p. 5). Hence the
papers in this collection address questions around mobilisation, producing
agendas, the use of public avenues to disseminate a message, coalition-building
and constituency enlargement, group solidarity, when to compromise and
when to resist, and finally whether cultural activism is peculiarly ‘American’.
One particularly interesting paper addressing the above ‘traditional’ con-
cerns of social movement scholarship is Katherine Spilde’s contribution on the
relationship between Native American activism and the growth of gaming
establishments situated on reservation lands. Whereas one may typically

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expect identity-founded social movements to go down the ‘conventional’ route

of ‘unconventional’ politics, Spilde explores how community-backed economic
strategies have secured some political objectives and spurred further activism
around sovereign rights and representational issues. For instance where tribal
elites involved in gaming operations have invested revenues back into their
communities, this has successfully legitimated their negotiations with state and
federal-level actors. Hence gaming revenues have impacted on native identi-
ties in two ways. Internally community investment sits well with tribal values
around generosity. But externally the growth in casinos has enabled Native
Americans’ opponents to push the image of the ‘rich indian’. This serves to
muddy the waters as regards sovereign rights and encourages the belief that all
nations regardless of involvement with gaming have got rich off the back of the
industry. Therefore Native American attempts to address economic iniquities
through gaming have helped cohere tribe-nation constituencies through iden-
tity effects, but have also seen a reactionary contention of their identity on the
part of opposing forces. It is a pity Spilde did not address this struggle in
greater depth – particularly how activists are reaching beyond the boundary of
their nations, but to do it full justice would require at least a separate paper.
Being a collection of ethnographies on activism, it would be disappointing
if the book were merely about disinterested academic contemplation. Thank-
fully this is not the case. Affiliating with the increasing trend toward public
sociology (or rather, given the subject matter, that subset Flacks (2004) and
Bevington and Dixon (2005) call ‘movement-relevant theory’), Checker and
Fishman argue the congenital sensitivity to interpretation and standpoint
issues on the part of postmodern ethnographies make it an ideal tool for
activist scholarship. To this end all the contributions perform a double move.
Each piece acts as ethnographic snapshots that make visible the playing out of
particular issues in lived experiences. An instance is David Valentine’s paper
on the constitutive role violence plays in the lives of those who self-identify
with the category of transgendered. Here Valentine reflects on the appropria-
tion of trans-narratives by formally progressive activists and scholars to
achieve political and careerist objectives without benefiting the trans commu-
nity at large.
The second move addresses the problematic standpoint of the ethnogra-
pher in this setting: how the desire of having an activist orientation impacts on
the power relations between the researcher and those s/he is studying. For
example in Checker’s paper, as an academic her objective was to study resi-
dents’ responses to the leaking of toxic substances from a local factory –
particularly how being southern African-Americans experientially impacts on
the framing of and mobilisation against the social causes of environmental
dangers; and as an activist Checker supported their struggle by offering prac-
tical assistance. This position may alleviate some oft-voiced anxieties pertain-
ing to the construction of ethnographic narratives and the exploitation of
people’s lives commonly associated with ‘pure’ research, but being activist/
scholar is no panacea for these ethical questions: where ‘traditional’ problems

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become more settled other issues arise hydra-like in their stead. In Checker’s
case the difference between the group’s definitions of environmental problems
(filtered through experiences of racism, poverty, and street violence) and how
the specificity of their cultural activism clashed with the cultures of main-
stream environmental movement organisations were played out in microcosm
through her activist relationship. As part of her commitment to the group
Checker offered free computer lessons after a number of activists expressed a
desire to learn and use them for political ends, but was only able to attract five
non-activist residents to the classes. It became clear to Checker that whereas
IT is indispensable for mainstream groups, for her interlocutors it carried
exclusionary connotations.
Further problems of this type of ethnography are encountered when the
activist/scholar is studying social movements they oppose. In these situations
Bevington and Dixon’s advice for the budding ethnographer is to produce
research that can actively assist progressive counter-mobilisations to such
movements. Two papers here broadly fall into this remit: Tanya Erzen’s study
of the ex-gay New Hope ministry and Omri Elisha’s research into two subur-
ban evangelical ‘megachurches’ brilliantly tease out the complexities of con-
servative cultural activism, implying the need for sensitive radical counter-
strategies as opposed to the black-and-white thinking that has occasionally
coloured leftwing politics in the past. However their value belies a complicated
activist/scholar position: is the means of exploiting conservative lived experi-
ences justified by the progressive ends? There is no easy answer, and this is
reflected in Erzen’s and Elisha’s solutions to the problem. In the latter paper
Elisha participated in the churches’ charitable outreach programmes while
avoiding those with a strict evangelist colouration, managing to successfully
navigate the deepest ethical pitfalls. Erzen’s experience was more problematic
– the New Hope ministry helpfully put her in touch with ‘reformed’ and
‘lapsed’ members of the congregation, making criticism of the movement
difficult on a personal level because of the web of indebtedness its members
skilfully weaved. In addition Erzen’s passage into the group was eased by her
voluntary work on their computer systems, leading to yet more ethical anxi-
eties around actively assisting a movement one opposes. On balance this is
outweighed by the value of the research, but once again the question of
exploitation rears its head.
In sum Checker and Fishman deserve our gratitude for bringing together
such a varied collection of ethnographies – for their quality and their contri-
bution to the politics and ethics of activist scholarship.

References

Bevington, D. and Dixon, C., (2005), ‘Movement-relevant Theory: Rethinking Social Movement
Scholarship and Activism’, Social Movement Studies, 4 (3): 185–208.

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Flacks, R., (2004), ‘Knowledge for What? Thoughts on the State of Social Movement Studies’, in
Goodwin, J. and Jasper, J. (eds), Rethinking Social Movements: Structure, Culture, and Emotion,
Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Ginsburg, F., (1997), ‘From Little Things Big Things Grow: Cultural Activism and Indigenous
Media’, in Fox, R. and Starn, O. (eds), Between Resistance and Revolution, New Brunswick, N.J.:
Rutgers University Press.
Putnam, R., (2000), Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York:
Simon and Schuster.

Keele University Phil Burton-Cartledge

The Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Culture

Mark D. Jacobs and Nancy Weiss Hanrahan (eds) Blackwell Publishing,
Oxford, 2005, £90.00, xvi + 503pp.

The celebrated cultural turn of the 1980s has had two related consequences for
sociology: (i) culture is no longer merely a minority pursuit for sociologists of
the arts and (ii) the cultural dimensions of institutions have come to be seen as
significant and irreducible aspects of social life. Whereas mid-twentieth-
century sociologists had directed culture in the bit part of servant-to-the-
system, the discursive, textual and symbolic aspects of social life have now
moved to the heart of sociological investigation. Thus, it is not so much that
sociology has admitted new topics to the textbooks (though it has done that)
but that the old staples such as, for example, class and stratification, require a
new sensitivity to the generative role of culture. The cultural turn was part of
a wider reconfiguration of disciplinary fields which was characterized by two
developments: (i) the emergence of inter-disciplines such as cultural studies,
the new art history, museum studies and Victorian studies and (ii) a conver-
gence between social science and the humanities which arose from common
interests in theorizing human creativity. These changes in the division of
labour of the academy have provoked arguments, certainly not confined to
sociology, about disciplinary identity and culture in a world where the very
nature of cultural authority has been radically transformed.
In recent years there has, of course, been a rush of publications in which
sociologists, whilst recognizing the pitfalls of determinist perspectives (and
with an anxious eye to cultural studies) have tried to claim or reclaim the study
of culture for sociology. For some sociologists the shelves of contemporary
university bookshops are found to be straining under the weight of books
about culture whose sociological credentials are matters of doubt. For others,
including some of the contributors to this volume, structural considerations
continue to distort the agenda and the study of culture has still to be liberated
from the thrall of system. What is at stake for the editors of this Companion is
sociology’s capacity to move beyond the competing claims of culturalism and
structuralism and to realize the analytical promise of the cultural turn. Such a
perspective will be one, they argue, which promises evaluation even in ‘the

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absence of prescriptive cultural authority’ and which can ground ‘solidarity in

the very recognition of difference’ (p. 2). Moreover, ‘[t]his newly emerging
conception of culture is an aesthetic one, which offers possibilities for inten-
sifying and re-imagining the experience of civic life’ (p. 2). There is need for a
volume that surveys the landscape of cultural analysis from a sociological
perspective and which transcends the dualism of culture and society. There is
also need for an audit of what has been achieved by cultural sociology and
what it promises for the future. On the whole I think the editors succeed in
demonstrating ‘both the promise of the cultural turn and the outlines of a path
for moving beyond it’ (p. 1).
The editors entertain the company of twenty-six authors, the majority of
whom are based in university departments in the United States. However,
many of the contributors will be familiar to British cultural sociologists as
major scholars who have made original contributions to their special field of
cultural analysis. On the whole these authors are exemplars of some of
the diverse theoretical and empirical work that is now conducted under the
banner of cultural sociology and whose common concern is to demonstrate the
importance of cultural analysis. And amongst them are some particularly
significant contributions: for example, those of Hanrahan, Knorr Cetina,
Hennion, Cook, Dillon and Fraser (whose chapter ‘Toward a Nonculturalist
Sociology of Culture’ is a particularly persuasive illustration of the editors’
claims) should be noted.
Cultural sociology has been, as the editors argue, a response to several key
developments in sociology and its social context. First, changes in the nature of
cultural authority, which have been associated with the commercialization of
culture and globalization, have dissolved the certainties of the canon and
challenged the authority of agencies such as art institutions and museums (see
for example Zolberg and Marontate’s contributions). Secondly, the sociology
of consumption has directed attention towards the ways in which culture,
rather than servicing social systems, is constitutive of identity and agency (see
Knorr-Centina and Cook). Thirdly, as Denora, Tota and other contributors
show, new directions in social thought have led a growing number of writers to
challenge the overly cognitive emphases of established sociological theory
with an aesthetic emphasis on the texture and feeling of social life – on what
one might call, pace Raymond Williams, ‘the structure of feeling’. Thus sociol-
ogy of art has migrated from the periphery to the centre whilst a more
radically social perspective has colonized the study of art. On the one hand the
mainstream topics such as class and the professions are revealed to have
cultural and aesthetic dimensions (see Halle and Weyher, Larson and others).
And on the other, artistic competences, such as the musical sensitivity of the
amateur CD collector who is studied by Hennion, is not a matter of acquiring
fixed tastes which are then condemned to the theoretical labour of explaining
social domination. Rather, taste is seen to be continuously constituted out of
the social activity of situated listening and musical reflection which is, in turn,
generative of the music to which the amateur listens. Finally, it is an aesthetic

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dimension that forms the corner stone of the editors’ commitment to moving
sociology beyond the turf wars of social theorists and towards an emancipa-
tory concern with structure versus agency, difference versus system, and social
constructionism versus essentialism.
The editorial introduction works quite well as an overview of the central
theoretical issues and as a description of some of the sociological writing that
has attended to those issues. Broadly speaking the Companion establishes
itself as just that – as a trusted friend who provides good advice and a sense of
direction (though I thought that one chapter was weak). The editorial sum-
maries of the chapters are excellent for their clarity of exposition. Moreover,
anyone who has had the remotest connection with the production of a Com-
panion will appreciate the organizational and editorial achievements that are
involved in bringing one to market. It is in the spirit of that observation that I
would like to identify one or two lacunae. First, it would have been useful to
have a chapter which traced the socio-genesis of cultural sociology in its
various national contexts. Such a chapter might have alerted readers to the
patterns of convergence and divergence between national traditions of soci-
ology as they make the turn. It might also have enhanced our appreciation of
the contributions (particularly those by Knorr Cetina, Crane and Fraser)
which take account of transnational processes associated with globalization.
Secondly, I found Bergeson’s chapter on evolution and on the determined
indeterminism of human creativity to be of considerable interest. However, I
felt the collection failed to signal the range of relevant work on nature and
culture. For example, Shilling’s work on the body as an unfinished biological
and social entity represents a significant contribution to cultural sociology as
does the small but vibrant literature on the place of non-human animals in
society. At this point, of course, we may imagine ourselves pushing at the door
to anthropology, reflecting on the boundaries of our own discipline and won-
dering if we dare to peek. Perhaps we should.

Keele University Gordon Fyfe

Reflections on America. Tocqueville, Weber and Adorno

Claus Offe, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005, £12.99, 115 + viipp.

This is a short book that addresses a large and important problem with con-
siderable intellectual success and sophistication. Reflections on America is the
product of the Adorno Lectures in the Institute for Social Research at the
University of Frankfurt in November 2003 which were originally published in
2004 under the title Selbstbetrachtung aus der Ferne. The German title of ‘self
observation from a distance’ perhaps better captures the dialectical nature of
Clauss Offe’s intent which is how European intellectuals have understood
America from the perspective of Europe, and vice versa. These three social
theorists undertook their reflections on America under very different circum-
stances, motivations and consequences. Tocqueville (and his companion

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Gustave de Beaumont) arrived in New York on 10th May 1831 and stayed until
20th February 1832, on the pretext of an official visit to study the penitentiary
system in the United States (Mayer, 1959). They travelled extensively, produc-
ing an official study of American penitentiaries in 1833 which has been largely
forgotten (Tocqueville and Beaumont, 1964), and the two volume Democracy
in America in 1835 and 1840 which is widely regarded as the most influential
study of democracy in the nineteenth century (Tocqueville, 2003). While Toc-
queville’s work is frequently neglected in sociology – apart for example in
Gianfranco Poggi’s Images of Society (1972) – the sojourn of Max Weber (and
his companion Ernst Troeltsch) to the States by contrast has been a topic of
considerable sociological interest, partly because of his reflections on the
Protestant sects and the emergence of a fledgling democracy (Rollmann,
1993). Faithfully recorded by Marianne Weber (1988) in her biography of 1926,
Weber, who gave a paper at the Congress of Arts and Sciences at the St Louis
Universal Exposition commemorating the Louisiana Purchase, travelled as far
afield as Oklahoma and Indian Territory (Scaff, 2005). Theodor Adorno
arrived in the States via Merton College Oxford as an émigré from Nazi
Germany in February 1938 and stayed eleven years until November 1949.
Unlike Tocqueville and Weber, he saw little of American society, making one
brief stop at Chicago on his way to Los Angeles. His principal locations were
New York (1938–1941) and Los Angeles (1942–1949).
The nature of their encounters with the new industrial giant was very
different. Tocqueville sought to understand the French Revolution and its
descent into Terror by a comparison with the successful revolution in the
American War of Independence, a comparison that resulted in 1856 in The Old
Regime and the French Revolution (Tocqueville, 1964). Weber, emerging from
years of psychological depression, saw a comparison between the ascetic sects
of the American frontier society and the European Reformation, a compari-
son that resulted in 1905 in the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
(Weber, 2002). Adorno, who struggled to come to terms with his escape from
German fascism, produced a series of brilliant, if highly controversial analyses,
of modernity, culminating in his Aesthetic Theory of modern art (Adorno,
1984) and in the criticism of The Culture Industry (1991). Despite these
obvious differences, Offe discovers a common theme in their work – ‘the
precarious fate of liberty in modern capitalist societies’ (p. 2) – which was
expressed in terms of the ‘tyranny of the majority’, ‘the iron cage’ of depen-
dence, and ‘the administered world’.
In more detail, Offe outlines four possible answers to the question: how do
Europe and America relate to each other. (A) America presents Europe with a
vision of its own future or (B) America, as a latecomer, is an immature version
of Europe. Each of these versions can assume either a negative (i) or a positive
(ii) interpretation.Thus (Ai) claims that America as a technologically advanced
civilization has an origin that Europeans can reproduce, and (Bi) says that
American dynamism which is already exhausted in Europe can nevertheless
have a salutary effect. In negative terms, (Aii) asserts that in America the fateful

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trends of modernity have gone so far that America represents not so much a
window in the future but a dark abyss.Finally (Bii) says thatAmerica is a raw and
destructive society which we Europeans have already managed to transcend
and overcome. Offe then applies this ideal typical scheme to the three authors.
Tocqueville belongs unambiguously to (Ai) in which America is a vanguard
society and a direct contrast with the failures of the old regime in aristocratic
Europe. Because of its lack of roots and the absence of a rigid status hierarchy,
American post-revolutionary history has laid the foundations of a successful
democracy in which voluntary associations can offset the problem of majori-
tarian politics.Weber, despite his pessimism about rational capitalism, is in type
(Bi) in which he is full of admiration for the energy of the Protestant sects, their
celebration of individual freedom. ‘Yankydom’ stands for a culture enjoying a
youthful exuberance, confidence and originality. Finally Adorno is the most
negative and pessimistic of our sociological travellers, occupying type (Aii) in
which America is an advanced outpost, from which we can contemplate the
destructive quality of progress.The future terminal of the culture industry awaits
us all.Although all three authors made critical observations onAmerican society,
they (including Adorno) registered positive evaluations of the warm, trustwor-
thy, open, and egalitarian aspects of American culture and everyday life. These
virtues were described by Tocqueville as ‘the habits of the heart’ (Bellah et al.,
1985).
Have these three ‘theories’ of American civilizations withstood the test of
time? Tocqueville’s analysis of the positive role of voluntary associations in
containing possessive individualism and the tyranny of the majority has been
challenged by writers such as Robert Putnam (2000) in Bowling Alone, claim-
ing that television among other modern social inventions has eroded the
propensity for collective communal involvement. Weber’s predictions that
American capitalism would be europeanised through the emergence of class-
based politics, state bureaucracies and other rationalised institutions has not
been borne out. Adorno’s pessimistic analysis of jazz, the culture industry, and
authoritarianism has received little substantial support from sociologists. Offe
himself criticizes Adorno for failing to appreciate the truly creative and origi-
nal talent of a jazz man like Thelonious Monk in such numbers as ‘Blue Monk’.
One general problem with this tradition of European analysis has been a
tendency to assume that the forces shaping Europe also apply equally to
America. To make assumptions about a common entity called ‘the West’ is to
ignore the enormous geographical size of America, the relationship between
America, the Pacific and Latin America, the history of white-settler colonial-
ism, the legacy of slavery, the fragmentation of its federal political system, the
absence of political parties in the European sense, and its history of migration
and the multicultural melting pot. The other major difference is the separation
of church and state, denominationalism, and the absence of any significant
period of secularization.
Reflections on America is simultaneously an excellent contribution to
sociological theory and to historical-comparative research. Offe’s commen-

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tary could be criticised for neglecting or understating two crucial issues,

namely the treatment of Native Americans during the process of colonisa-
tion and the long-term legacy of slavery on the American consciousness.
Both of these issues were important to Tocqueville and Weber, and certainly
slavery gave American liberalism a peculiar quality which Judith Shklar
(1998: 116) famously dubbed ‘the liberalism of fear’. While Offe may have
neglected these issues, he is very clear about a third issue, namely militarism
and foreign policy.
Although Offe’s book is overtly about three classical historical commen-
taries on American society, its covert sub-text is the tensions between Europe
and America after 9/11, the extent of American military power, and the nature
of the American empire. The dominant liberal view is probably contained in
John Rawls’s The Law of Peoples (1999) in which he argues that decent liberal
democracies do not wage war on each other and that wars are undertaken only
in self defence. This is controversial in the light of American foreign policy in
respect of the Philippines, Guam, Guatemala, Iran under Dr. Mossadegh, and
Puerto Rico (Cabranes, 1979). More controversially, American involvement in
Iraq was undertaken without UN approval, creating diplomatic splits between
‘old’ and ‘new Europe’. At various points in his analysis, Offe touches upon the
issue of the bellicosity or otherwise of American society. Tocqueville noted
that since America had no significant, aggressive neighbours, it had no fear of
either invasion or conquest, and it was not threatened by the political power of
its own military caste. Because the American political system is constrained by
federalism, the power of the Supreme Court and the process of review from
the Senate, Offe claims that American state power has always been exercised
through foreign not domestic policy, and this governing capacity on the outside
has been enhanced by the security following 9/11. Tocqueville’s assessment of
the relative unimportance of the military in social and political life is also
unfounded. Offe returns to this military theme in his conclusion by noting that
America, especially under President George W. Bush, has embraced with
confidence the ‘strangely unilateral universalist project of bringing order and
freedom to the world and thereby securing American society from outside
attack’ (p. 101). The two preconditions of this global mission is that America is
safe from attack, and at the same time it is surrounded by rogue states and evil
axes of power, which must be opposed.
If the frailty of liberal freedom in a capitalist society was a dominant theme
of nineteenth-century social and political thought from Tocqueville to Mill and
Weber, then the problem of ‘new wars’, civil conflict and terrorism may turn
out to be the principal preoccupation of the twenty-first century. Marxist
theories of imperialism and colonialism condemned the expansion of western
capitalism, regarding the notion of ‘liberal democracy’ as merely an ideological
smokescreen to disguise the underlying economic forces. In an influential
response to such arguments Moore (1972) in Reflections on the Causes of
Human Misery sought to show that there was no factual evidence to support
the proposition that the economic success of American democracy depended

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on massive military expenditure and an imperialist agenda. In defending

American politics, Moore coined the expression ‘predatory democracy’ and
argued that America had no predatory ambitions. This debate is still unre-
solved, but Reflections on America offers a crisp and critical overview of the
narrative structure of America as either the future or the past of European
civilization, as both dream and nightmare.

National University of Singapore

Bryan S. Turner

References

Adorno, T.W., (1984), Aesthetic Theory, London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Adorno, T.W., (1991), The Culture Industry, London and New York: Routledge.
Bellah, R.N., Madson, R., Sullivan, W.L., Swidler, A. and Tipton, S.M., (1985), Habits of the Heart.
Individualism and Commitment in American Life, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Cabranes, J.A., (1979), Citizenship and the American Empire, New Haven and London: Yale
University Press.
Mayer, J.P., (ed.), (1959), Journey to America, New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Moore, B., (1972), in Reflections on the Causes of Human Misery and upon Certain Proposals to
Eliminate Them, London: Allen Lane.
Poggi, G., (1972), Images of Society. Essays on the Sociological Theories of Tocqueville, Marx and
Durkheim, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Putnam, R., (2000), Bowling Alone. The Collapse and Revival of American Community, New York:
Simon & Schuster.
Rawls, J., (1999), The Law of Peoples, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Rollmann, H., (1993), ‘ “Meet Me in St. Louis”: Troeltsch and Weber in America’, in H. Lehmann
and G. Roth (eds), Weber’s Protestant Ethic, Origins, Evidence, Contexts, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press: 357–383.
Scaff, L.A., (2005), ‘Remnants of Romanticism: Max Weber in Oklahoma and Indian Territory’,
Journal of Classical Sociology 5 (1): 53–72.
Shklar, J.N., (1998), Redeeming American Political Thought, Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press.
Tocqueville, A. de, (1955), The Old Regime and the French Revolution, New York: Doubleday.
Tocqueville, A. de, (2003), Democracy in America, London: Penguin Books.
Tocqueville, A. de and Beaumont, G. de, (1964), On the Penitentiary System in the United States and
its Application to France, Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press.
Weber, M., (1926; 1988), Max Weber: A Biography, New Brunswick: Transaction.
Weber, M., (2002), The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, New York: Penguin Putnam
Ltd.

Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage
Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, (2005), Berkeley, CA: University of Califor-
nia Press 2005, £15.95, 312pp.

Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas (2005) examine the meanings of marriage,
childbearing, and parenting in their new book Promises I Can Keep. Research
has popularized the notion that poor women are delaying marriage or fore-

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going it altogether, while not delaying childbirth. Edin and Kefalas debunk the
social myth that the reason for the lower marriage rates is a result of a lack of
holding marriage in the same regard that members of higher social classes do.
In fact, Edin and Kefalas find that lower class women cherish marriage at least
as much as everyone else. Indeed, in some respects they hold it in higher
esteem than many.
The project of this book was to ask why marriage and childbearing have
become so drastically decoupled among the American poor. The research
questions to which they seek answers are the following: Why do poor women
‘choose’ to have children that they cannot afford? Why and how do these
women view marriage as an institution that cannot assist them in family
formation? What do motherhood and marriage mean in lower class contexts to
the women defining them?
Edin and Kefalas do not find the stereotypes that abound in our culture (ie,
the presumed moral deficiency central to the culture of poverty thesis, inhib-
iting marriage, etc.) in their research. In fact, they find women eager to be
married, with extreme faith in, and reverence for, the institution of marriage.
They delay getting married because they understand marriage as only plau-
sible when they can reasonably expect permanence. Edin and Kefalas explain
that the shortage of marriageable men helps to explain the lack of interest in
marriage. Marriage for these women is not about obtaining a safe economi-
cally supported household for their children. Indeed, most of these women
are financially independent and see other women tied down by economic
dependency.
Quantitative research has previously shown that poor women are less likely
to marry, more likely to have premarital sex, less likely to use contraceptives,
and more likely to be raising the children on their own. However, quantitative
research was unable to answer some other interesting and potentially decisive
sociological questions as well. For instance, why is it that poor women are
making different choices? Also, possibly more importantly, how do they under-
stand the choices that they are making? How do they rationalize behavior
that is not-so-quietly condemned? This book answers all of these questions
as well as offering a more general commentary on the state of contemporary
American families.
Historically, marriage, sex, and childbirth have all been understood to take
place in the order listed. Contemporary society has seen drastic shifts in the
order and necessity of each of these steps, all of which have had drastic
consequences for family life and the family unit. For instance, we no longer
need marriage to have children, and more strikingly, we no longer need sex to
reproduce. Edin and Kefalas are primarily concerned with the decoupling of
marriage from reproduction among lower-class women. They take an ethno-
graphic approach in Philadelphia’s intercity interviewing 165 single white,
black, and Puerto Rican women to understand how and why women put
motherhood before marriage. They find a complete separation between mar-
riage and motherhood.

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Book reviews

In chapter 1, they deal with the courtship rituals and processes through
which relationships in this community proceed. Most alarming is the speed
with which the relationships escalate. Men seem almost infamous in these
stories for articulating a desire to father children with their significant others.
However, they are less often cared for by these same men. The prospect of
single motherhood is potentially less threatening in this environment, because
it is such a stable element of the geography. Parenting is also not as daunting
due the abundance of children in the neighborhood creating ‘the illusion of a
near Dr. Spock-like competence in childrearing’ (33).
Edin and Kefalas illustrate the complex relationship between courtship and
parenthood in chapter 2. Relationships proceed extremely quickly by many
standards, from kissing to pregnancy and cohabitation in relatively short
amounts of time. However, they also note the sizable disjuncture between
women and men’s perceptions of parenthood.They explain women as predomi-
nantly understanding childrearing and parenting as life-altering and enhancing
experiences. For their male counterparts, fathering a child is more commonly
understood as a method through which they can declare strong feelings for
women. Behavior for men and women often changes when having children, but
women’s behavior is constrained in ways that men’s is not because of the realities
of pregnancy. ‘The woman hopes the pregnancy will spur her boyfriend to
become a responsible adult’ (56). However, these hopes are often in vain.
Chapter 3 is an illustration of how pregnancy and childbirth can produce
too much strain on young relationships. Mothers seem inclined to think of
pregnancy as a test of the strength and durability of the relationship. Con-
versely, the behavior of fathers seems to range between enthusiastic recogni-
tion and acceptance of the new role to rejection and desertion. Many times, the
birth itself causes a re-affirmation of the relationship and talk of marriage and
a family. However, this enthusiasm is short-lived. ‘Lack of money is certainly a
contributing cause . . . but rarely the only factor. It is usually the young father’s
criminal behavior, the spells of incarceration that so often follow, a pattern of
intimate violence, his chronic infidelity, and an inability to leave drugs and
alcohol alone that cause relationships to falter and die’ (75). As a result, these
women desire steady employment of their own prior to a relationship, hesitant
to rely on something as unstable as the wages of a lower class man in these
communities.
Chapter 4 is an attempt to comprehend the meanings of marriage for the
women in their study. The stories of these women are tragically similar in their
lonely endings. Aspirations of marriage are not uncommon. However, unem-
ployment, violence, drug problems, incarceration, and unfaithfulness abound
in this community. ‘These women believe that getting married to a man and
living off of his earnings practically ensures an imbalance of power they’ll find
intolerable’ (113). As a result, they seem to believe that a woman should be
independent prior to marriage to protect against desertion.
Finally, both chapters 5 and 6 discuss the foremost method through which
these women define relationships and marriages and attempts to explain why

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it is that they understand raising children to be the most important job that
they will ever have. Marriage fits into a different place in the life course goals
than much of the rest of society. Marriage is more of an end goal for them.
They first desire a job, to finish school, to get a house, to have children, and get
their lives in order. Finally, if all these goals are accomplished, they look for
men with similar dreams. This is where they often come up short. What is
significant here is that marriage and childbearing take years of careful plan-
ning and consideration, but they are seen as two completely separate prospects
involving separate strategies and understandings.
The structural limitations in the paths of these women are vastly different
from those in the path of middle and upper class women. In light of
the discrepancy between the dream and the structural realities that prevent
the realization of this dream, lower class women value motherhood primarily.
This is not to say that young women are not often discouraged, scared, and
sad when they first find out about a pregnancy. However, they understand
this as a life stage and do not view abortion or adoption as realistic
opportunities.
The crucial drawback of this book is the blaming of the fathers. Morally
speaking, there is no argument about whether these fathers are deadbeat
partners. They do not maintain steady work to help provide for their children,
they are often not around, they abuse the mothers of their children, they are
often on drugs of some kind, wasting money, in prison, etc. However, when
Edin and Kefalas explain the situations of these women, they situate their
argument structurally. When speaking about the men, their analysis is much
less sociological. ‘Poor young women who put motherhood before marriage do
not generally do so because they reject the institution of marriage itself, but
because good, decent, trustworthy men are in short supply’ (130). While these
men provide a structural rationalization for the low marriage rates of women,
the authors did not provide a structural rationalization for the behavior
of these young men as well. Sociologically speaking, I think that it would be
more complete to argue that both poor women and men are structurally
disadvantaged.
This book would be a great use to scholars interested in the family, social
policy, sociology of gender and work, and social stratification. It would be
especially valuable to those interested in an ethnographic approach to these
subject areas. Edin and Kefalas’ research is a model for anyone interested in
qualitative study. They have successfully analyzed and presented an enormous
amount of qualitative data in a very comprehensible way. It is a text accessible
for both graduate and undergraduate courses as it can be read on a variety of
levels. Both authors are to be commended for such a staggeringly large and
necessary project.

University of Virginia
Tristan S. Bridges

© The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2006 611

Book reviews

Half Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds
Jesper Juul, MIT Press, 2005, £22.95, 240pp.

As was highlighted in the release of Sage’s new videogames journal Games

and Culture, there remains a binary split in approaches to videogame thought.
European – and especially Scandinavian scholars – favour ludology, a term
first used by Csikszentmihalyi and popularised by Gonzalo Frasca.1 Eventually
this resulted in the radical ludology of Espen Aarseth who argues that
videogaming should exist as a discipline separate from the ‘colonisation’
(Raessens, 2006: 55) of the US approach to games that views them as a
subdivision of cinema and literature, known as narratology. The fact that Juul
declares Aarseth to be a bridge-builder between theoretically diametric
schools of thought demonstrates how callow communication is amongst an
object of study that prides itself on immersion in a High-Definition, always
connected, world.
In one sense, Juul’s Half Real may provide the answer, for this is not only a
book that patiently attempts to construct an inclusive theoretical methodology
but also represents the best applied use yet of Aarseth’s seminal Cybertext ie
a text that is as much about input from the reader as about output from the
author.2 Dotted with interactive examples, puzzles and an accompanying
website, it floats somewhere between the game and narrative; at once a game-
book, reminiscent of the Choose Your Own Adventure series, and then an
easily accessible text, targeting a wider demographic than academia and game
designers. After decades of videogames existing as the black border around
entertainment, Juul is forthright in his endeavour to transfer serious discus-
sions about play to the masses.
The concept of transmedia is not only key to the form but also to the
function of Half-Real. Juul’s thesis is that all games are elastic. Firstly, the very
best games can be can be transferred from one medium to the next, chess is an
excellent illustration: it can be played on computer, by post, on paper or even
in the mind (Juul, 2005: 49). Secondly, a game must have rules in order to
provide structure, ‘a specific sort of immaterial support . . . the determination
of what moves and actions are permissible and what they will lead to’ (Juul,
2005: 48), the open-endedness of a game is not necessarily dependent on
complexity. Pong is a game played with a bat and a ball on one screen that
famously instructs players to ‘avoid missing ball to score’ and Juul correctly
identifies that it contains a ‘large possibility space’ (Juul, 2005: 69) inasmuch as
each game is unique, whereas The Hobbit ‘contains a wider range of possible
actions . . . but the solution fits on a piece of paper.’ This leads to Juul provid-
ing a delineation between games of emergence, which are akin to a linear
narrative, for example Amazon Adventure; and games of progression, which
avail themselves to the player as time passes, for example Tetris. There are also
hybrids which include games such as Half-Life and EverQuest. Thirdly, in
competition but conjunction with rules for players attention is fiction. Juul
contends that ‘Though rules can function independent of fiction, fiction

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 Book reviews

depends on rules’. (Juul, 2005: 121). At first glance this appears to be accurate.
Juul’s observation on time in the videogame is simple yet incisive. Grand Theft
Auto III sees one second equate to one minute, meaning that night falls in 40
seconds. In FIFA 2002 ‘it takes the normally agile David Beckham twelve
seconds to run [a] few meters’ (Juul, 2005: 152). Yet although this time is
fictional, it is still directly related to, and governed by game-world rules.
Following the literary theory of Marie-Laure Ryan,Juul says that‘all fictional
worlds are incomplete . . . it is not possible to determine the number of children
Lady Macbeth has’ and that the gamer fills in the gaps while playing.A fictional
world is defined by Juul as ‘any imagined world’ (Juul, 2005: 122). The example
of Macbeth is from traditional print media,which sits uneasily with the hardcore
gamer on World of Warcraft who spends 16 hours a day playing and gleans their
livelihood from the game,having rejected what is‘real’ for the associated benefits
and detriments of the synthetic videogame world.Are there any gaps here? Juul’s
presumption of the real as superior is under-developed,it is evident that a player
on GoldenEye 007 has some exterior concept of the culture of James Bond, and
transposes this onto the game: much of the appeal comes from being inside the
fictional, filmic world of the spy, the gaps are filled by pre-existing cultural
knowledge. On the opposite axis, it’s not possible to know how many children
Pierce Brosnan has by looking at him, but the reality of his existence is
incontestable, albeit separate from the fictional (filmic and ludic) world he
inhabits,yet by Juul’s assertion,the world that constitutes his off-screen existence
is incomplete and therefore fictional, thus blurring further the distinctions of
what is considered real and not-real.
It is possible to argue that this is the central thematic of Juul’s work. After
all the final sentence of Half-Real reads ‘The player navigates these two levels,
playing video games in the half-real zone between the fiction and the rules’.
(Juul, 2005: 202). But it is impossible not to feel that the most important
transmedia in the videogame are the gamers themselves, those who make the
link between the videogame and the cultural world they live in. However, the
videogame player is treated as an abstract concept throughout Juul’s work.
The result is the suspension in a peculiar state, with the reader desiring that
one day all forms of text will be as cybernetic and playful, but with the gamer
hoping that videogames don’t become as formal and functional as the rules
that half-reality dictates.

Loughborough University
Alex Wade

Notes

1 See www.ludology.org for approaches to ludology and narratology.

2 See http://www.half-real.net for interactive exercises.

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Book reviews

References

Aarseth, E. Cybertext, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore: 1997.

Juul, J. Half Real, MIT Press, Massachusetts: 2005.
Raessens, J. ‘The Ludification of Culture’ Game and Culture Vol 1 Number 1, Sage Publications:
California 2006, 52–56.

614 © The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2006