Showing papers in "Contemporary Sociology in 2016"

Varieties of Liberalization and the New Politics of Social Solidarity

Abstract: inization are not immediately intelligible as ‘disfigured’’’ (p. 82). I would challenge this framing, because while the Extreme Makeover candidates are viewed by the audience as having ordinary appearances before their surgeries, the women seeking FFS are often viewed as facially other by a transphobic society and subjected to discrimination and harassment. Talley’s conclusions about the way that surgeons market FFS to trans women are clear and credible: that the surgeons not only entrench sex binarism, but elaborate it, naming ever more facial features distinctively male or female and telling patients they will never be treated well by society unless they surgically alter all of them. While surgeons benefit financially and their patients express relief at their new, unremarkable features, the large majority of trans women who cannot afford these procedures suffer from the constantly rising bar for what doctors frame as a ‘‘successful’’ gender transition. Talley’s third case study is of Operation Smile, which organizes ‘‘medical missions’’ in which doctors from industrialized nations provide free facial surgery to impoverished children in the developing world. Generating funding through dramatic photographs of crying children with cleft lips, Operation Smile deploys a narrative of social death in which functional and aesthetic problems are conflated, disseminating the disfigurement imaginary to the public. Talley critiques the colonialist missionary language Operation Smile employs, in which (largely) ‘‘white saviors’’ redeem the lives of indigenous people and bask in the esteem they are granted. In her fourth case study, examining facial transplants, Talley notes that in order to make organ transplants possible in the twentieth century, medicine had to invent the concept of brain death, allowing the harvesting of viable organs from bodies with beating hearts. In order to justify the high risks of FT—without which the patients will live— advocates of FT reframe the patient as socially dead, and transplantation as therefore lifesaving. In Talley’s conclusion, she briefly addresses what changes she recommends: ‘‘we’’ can employ empathy rather than pity; ‘‘we’’ can own our facially-typical privileges; ‘‘we’’ can learn to recognize and protest ableist stereotypes in our culture industries (pp. 197–199). This call to individual reflection and action by the facially typical highlights my central disappointment in the book: how little we hear the voices of the facially different who suffer under the disfigurement imaginary. This relative silence is problematic, because if discrimination based upon a presumed obligation not to appear ‘‘ugly’’ to others is to end, it will most likely be due to a social movement of affected people protesting it. That said, I am sure this social movement will benefit from Talley’s analysis, and the ammunition it provides against the idea that the facially different are ‘‘dead.’’

Arresting Citizenship: The Democratic Consequences of American Crime Control

Abstract: teen and out-of-wedlock childbearing—that also are sometimes implicated in research on the retreat from marriage. And my reading of the literature is that America’s post1970 economic woes have been experienced rather unequally, yet the ‘‘retreat from marriage’’ has been observed across many different populations—rich and poor, black and white, urban and rural. Economics matter, of course, but other societal shifts must also be implicated in recent marriage trends. Lee nevertheless stays on message—an economic one. Lee is right to remind us that marrying (or not marrying) is not a matter of making good or bad choices but about the choices many of us don’t really have. His goal, in the end, is not to ‘‘promote marriage’’ or extoll its virtues. It is to promote greater opportunity—to expand the choice set—that will allow us to pursue our aspirations (or not) for a fulfilling marriage and satisfying family life. In this, Gary Lee succeeds with flying colors. The Limits of Marriage has my strongest recommendation.

Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship:

Abstract: Embrick and his colleagues (p. 250) also realize this problem exists: ‘‘Yet, our sociological understanding of people and virtual technologies often lag far behind. Part of the reason is because we are just beginning to develop the methodological and theoretical tools needed to engage as researchers in this still new terrain.’’ Despite these organizational issues, the editors did a great job in assembling a colorful mixture of innovative research and very interesting, well-written articles. Highlights are the semiotic analysis of Elizabeth Erkenbrack (pp. 38ff.) in ‘‘Discursive Engagements in World of Warcraft,’’ in which the author explores ‘‘interactive realities, the multiple orientations of players, and the inter-frame effects’’ of the game ‘‘World of Warcraft,’’ as well as the chapter of J. Talmadge Wright (pp. 81ff.) on the production of place and play in virtual spaces, in which he makes the novel argument that the new technology of representation ‘‘amplifies already existing social relationships.’’ In conclusion, Embrick, Wright, and Lukács’s book is a very innovative collection of essays on virtual culture and online games. They succeed in filling the sociological research gap by issuing broader questions on power, exclusion, and inequalities in a digital and mediatized society. The chapters and authors present the state of the art in this research field. The topics are carefully selected, the chapters are well written, and readers especially benefit from the concise introduction and conclusion.

Strangers No More: Immigration and the Challenges of Integration in North America and Western Europe

Abstract: Richard Alba and Nancy Foner have written what will undoubtedly become the ‘‘go-to’’ book for comparisons of immigration on both sides of the Atlantic. Clearly written, meticulously researched, and insightfully analyzed, Strangers No More: Immigration and the Challenges of Integration in North America and Western Europe helps readers easily capture the broad mechanisms driving migration and integration today. Alba and Foner compare the United States and Canada, two big, settler societies that have long thought of themselves as countries of immigration, with Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Germany, which have all experienced significant immigration since World War II. They focus on ‘‘low-status’’ groups (i.e., Mexicans in the United States, North Africans in France, and Turks in Germany). They want to know ‘‘the extent to which immigrants and their children are able to participate in mainstream institutions in ways that position them to advance socially and materially’’ (p. 8). Their analysis unfolds against the backdrop of ongoing debates about (1) the strength and impact of national models of integration, (2) the effect of political-economic factors, (3) the accepted wisdom that traditional settler societies do better at integrating immigrants, (4) the idea that the United States has been ‘‘exceptional’’ in its ability to integrate immigrants, and (5) the idea that ultimately national differences will wane because of policy convergence. How integration and social mobility play out, Alba and Foner argue, has highstakes consequences for the twenty-first century. The book opens with profiles of different immigrants who have traveled to these distinct shores and of the different policies and institutions meant to aid their integration. The next chapters examine economic integration and residential integration before the authors turn to untangling the different ways that race and religion influence immigrant trajectories. The rest of the book looks at political integration, particularly the extent to which politicians from immigrant backgrounds have infiltrated the halls of political power and the experiences of the children of immigrants, with a focus on their educational performance and feelings of belonging. It concludes with an even-handed summary of the findings and an analysis of their significance for policy moving forward. I found the comparison of race and religion as comparative crucibles particularly thought-provoking. The argument, put very simply, is that race is a higher and brighter social and symbolic boundary in the United States and religion matters more in Europe. The legacy of slavery in the United States produced enduring inequalities between blacks and whites, which have been partially offset by the civil rights movement, affirmative action, and voting-rights legislation (although the latter has been recently eviscerated). Because large numbers of blacks migrated to Canada and Europe a relatively short time ago, they did not share the ‘‘same sordid racial history.’’ People of immigration origin with African ancestry have been able to integrate more successfully, using measures of residential segregation and intermarriage. On the other hand, recently arrived racialized groups will not have recourse to the same institutions and policies that have aided blacks in the United States. In Europe, by comparison, coming to grips with large numbers of Muslim immigrants has taken center stage. According to Alba and Foner, ‘‘a combination of factors— religious similarity between natives and immigrants, Muslim immigrants’ socioeconomic status, the religiosity of the native majority, and historically rooted institutional structures—explain why religion is less of a barrier to inclusion of immigrant minorities in the United States than in Western Europe. The Canadian case also points to the role of state institutions and identities in creating difficulties for the incorporation of religious minorities’’ (p. 140). The authors are cautiously optimistic however, arguing that 712 Reviews

Becoming New Yorkers: Ethnographies of the New Second Generation

Abstract: ments society’s responses and adaptations to the stringency of the population policy, including the growing masculinization of society and the instrumentalization of the “reproductive woman” at the behest of the government’s overarching social project. The authors’ main conclusion is that changes in regime approach to population have been accompanied and made possible by a shift in public attitude. Regime policies on reproduction lowered fertility from six to below two children per couple not only through strict enforcement, but also through changing popular norms—a transformation that occurred in tandem with, and was aided by, social and economic change. These are points with which I am much in agreement, having noted the same in Merli and Smith (2002) and Merli, Qian and Smith (2004). The perspectives of the anthropologist and the political scientist merge in their effort to provide a fuller understanding of the connections between the state and the individual through the Foucauldian concept of governmentality. This concept, which was originally elaborated to explain the development of modern state power in the West, is used to interpret the Chinese transition from societal rule by state fiat to indirect regulation of society through a diffused, disciplining form of power by agency. It is especially useful in framing the recent state promotion of societal self-regulation through legal institutions, the professions, and the market. From the standpoint of the individual, this has translated into the cultivation of “good self-sacrificing mothers” and low quantity-high quality children—values that accord with the consumerism and global aspirations of the Hu era. What cannot be reconciled with the book’s theoretical approach is the contradiction between the government’s enduring Malthusian concerns and the self-regulation advocated by the state’s neoliberal approach of the 2000s. Birth planning remains high on the country’s economic agenda and provides the rationale for the continuing quantitative limits on the number of children allowed and the stipulation of long-term, effective contraception, “[T]he devolution in the locus of governance from state bureaucracy to the professions, to individuals” has not yet taken place, certainly not in the minds of the government officials who continue to set mechanistic demographic targets which forbid any change in the One-child policy until 2020. The authors strive to re-frame this contradiction by invoking the notion of “Chinese Leninist neoliberalism,” but this is just that— a notion—and one that sheds little light on the future of an extreme policy that continues to manage the population and govern the most intimate details of people’s lives.

From Juvenile Delinquency to Adult Crime: Criminal Careers, Justice Policy, and Prevention

Abstract: cess of learning and competing for the sake of personal development. If children are learning that winning is the most important thing and that winning does not come easily or often, they may become so discouraged that they drop out, which may jeopardize the ability to bounce back from a loss and try again, a skill emphasized by parents. Children’s responses also indicate that while parents may be focused on inculcating skills that will help them become successful adults, children are focused on becoming successful children, namely by cultivating a sense of belonging among their peers. While the adults in their lives may be focused on ranking and sorting them and urging them to be the very best, young children’s responses reflect more relational values, ones that place greater emphasis on befriending children from other schools, supporting the talents of friends and teammates, and experiencing wins and losses as a group. Levey Friedman wonders if the impulse to avoid the pressures of individual competition works against the ability to learn to be comfortable with individualized evaluations, another key skill that parents emphasize. These moments of disconnect between parents’ intentions and children’s experiences contribute to an understanding of children as active participants and co-creators of the social world around them, rather than an understanding of children as passive recipients of adult decisions. Playing to Win provides a systematic examination of the motivations and parenting strategies of affluent parents, as well as the structure and content of three competitive, organized children’s activities. However, it is much more difficult to deliver as effective an analysis of the potential consequences of this type of pathway consumption for the children in the study. As Levey Friedman notes, it is difficult to know whether parents’ strategies will yield the intended long-term outcomes. Despite this understandable limitation, there are empirical claims that feel less robustly supported by the data than others and topics that are not directly addressed. For example, while generalist parents claimed that involving children in an array of activities helped children learn to balance multiple commitments, manage a schedule, and prepare their equipment at home in advance of competitions, there is scant evidence in the text to support the claim that this is what children are actually doing for themselves. Rather, the data suggest that parents do much of this work for their children. There is also a missed opportunity to address the link between these highly privatized investments in particular children and the large-scale public disinvestment in children as a whole. The historical overview of the evolution of children’s activities has the potential to speak to the way that ‘‘proper care’’ has shifted away from being perceived as a collective responsibility, but the message that children are increasingly perceived as a privatized good rather than a social one remains implied.

The Social Order of the Underworld: How Prison Gangs Govern the American Penal System

Abstract: From the first chapter of The Social Order of the Underworld: How Prison Gangs Govern the American Penal System, readers are drawn into David Skarbek’s exploration of the mystery-shrouded inner workings of prison gangs. Skarbek sheds light on the origins and functions of gangs in the U.S. prison system and illustrates the significant role that gangs play in the prison system, explaining that, far from being pale, less-potent shades of their non-incarcerated counterparts, gangs behind bars often have even greater influence. In Skarbek’s words, ‘‘the primary focus of this book is to understand how criminal institutions form, function, and evolve and to determine their effectiveness and robustness’’ (p. 8). Skarbek analyzes prison gang formation through a rational choice theoretical lens, with gangs as the pinnacle of extralegal governance organizations that criminals create, however unconsciously, in order to meet their needs. In his examination, he either critiques or avoids the two traditional theoretical perspectives underlying prison life, namely deprivation theory, in which it is the structural conditions of the prison itself as opposed to the specific characteristics of the inmates that determine prisoner misconduct, and importation theory, in which prison life may be organized through the pre-existing mechanisms of socialization that prisoners carry with themselves in their incarceration. There are two important ways in which Skarbek diverges from the usual theoretical underpinnings. The first is that he discusses norms as emergent in society, rather than pre-existing as eternal, immutable social laws. Norms are fluid and are created as a means to an end through the coordination of social actors. The second divergence is his position that prison gangs are created in order to foster a measure of extralegal governance, a demand that arises when prison institutions and administrators fail to provide adequately for the needs of inmates. A great number of scholastic examinations of gangs and their formation and functions exist, but most focus on street gangs rather than prison gangs. While many of these gangs share the same names and the same rules, leadership, and activities, the reasons for their inception and reproduction can be different. Prison gangs have been described as the final frontier of gang research (Fleisher and Decker 2001). Much excellent research studying prison social order exists (Trammell 2011, Kuttschnitt and Gartner 2008, Crewe 2009, Fleisher and Kreinert 2009, and Dolovich 2012), but no such work has yet addressed the role of extralegal governance in prison gang formation. Prison gang research may be the final frontier, but it’s not from lack of pioneer interest. The rise in popular media portrayals of prison life depicted in such programs as ‘‘Oz,’’ ‘‘Prison Break,’’ and, most recently, ‘‘Orange is the New Black’’ serves as a sign that interest in prisons is high but that the usual limiting factor is access. Prison gangs operate behind tall walls that cast long shadows. Researchers (Trulson, Marquert, and Kawucha 2006) lament that ‘‘data on gangaffiliated inmates remain some of the most elusive figures in corrections’’ (p. 10). Obstacles to qualitative data include the prison gangs’ codes of silence, potential loss of a prisoner’s privileges if gang affiliation becomes known, the fact that respondents’ claims may be exaggerated or false, and the fact that field studies are, by any measure of practicality, impossible. In an effort to clear these very high hurdles, Skarbek utilizes a dizzyingly wide range of data sources, the synthesis of which, he writes, ‘‘provides an accurate and convincing picture of the criminal underworld’’ (p. 12). He underpins his arguments with data drawn from academic research, over 150 years of California inmate population records, state prison histories, legal documents detailing California street and prison gangs, FBI declassified files, personal memoirs and biographies of former law enforcement officials who investigated prison gangs in California, 352 Reviews

Parental Incarceration and the Family: Psychological and Social Effects of Imprisonment on Children, Parents, and Caregivers

Abstract: The United States is in the middle of a mass incarceration era, prompting a strong multidisciplinary body of literature that explores its collateral consequences for individuals, families, communities, and society (see, for example, Clear and Frost 2013; Travis and Waul 2003). Contributing to this literature, psychologist Joyce Arditti has explored families’ visiting practices, incarcerated individuals’ parenting, and parents’ reintegration into family life (Arditti 2005; Arditti and Few 2008; Arditti, Lambert-Shute, and Joest 2003). In her new book, Parental Incarceration and the Family: Psychological and Social Effects of Imprisonment on Children, Parents, and Caregivers, she engages in a theory-driven review of the literature on parental incarceration, untangling its complexities and impacts on parents, children, and caregivers. In doing so, Arditti produces a piece of great utility, from introducing the novice scholar to this area of research to directing evidence-based policies and future research. I will briefly review this book, including a summary of Arditti’s argument, a synthesis of her calls for research, and an exploration of this book’s meaning in light of emerging correctional patterns. Grounded in the parental incarceration literature, Arditti argues for research and evidence-based reforms that take into account the cyclical relationships among contexts, processes, and outcomes for families and children. Parental incarceration occurs in a correctional context characterized by an unequal distribution of punishment, an overt focus on individuals experiencing cumulative disadvantage, and a spectrum of social and institutional practices that hinder family processes. In this multifaceted context, incarceration interrupts parenthood and shapes the lives of mothers, fathers, caregivers, and children. The war on drugs and mandatory minimum sentencing laws has led to the rapid growth of the female prison population. Arditti argues that incarcerated mothers are ‘‘the most vulnerable women’’ in the United States, with lives that tend to be shadowed by intergenerational and cumulative disadvantage even before prison (p. 55). They experience intense maternal stress and are extremely vulnerable to the social and legal loss of their parental rights. While incarcerated motherhood is perceived as an individual’s failure to achieve womanhood, incarcerated fatherhood is constructed as an optional element of manhood. Although over half of incarcerated fathers did not reside with their children prior to incarceration, over half were the primary financial providers for their children. However, being sent to prison strips men of their ‘‘fathering identity,’’ producing ‘‘distress, helplessness, and a profound lack of control’’ and an internalization of the inmate identity over fatherhood (p. 76). Varying in their fathering identities, incarcerated men navigate institutional practices and negotiate with caregivers for opportunities to practice fatherhood during incarceration. The children of incarcerated mothers and fathers are under the care of the children’s other parent, grandparents, other relatives, or foster parents. Childhood outcomes for children of incarcerated parents are still unclear, but they include boys’ externalizing behavioral problems and children’s lower educational performances. These problems occur in the context of children and caregivers navigating a loss that society neglects to acknowledge and of the deeply rooted stigma against incarcerated individuals and their families. Under such tremendous pressure, caregivers struggle with the loss of parental resources, a reduction of their own resources due to childcare and offenders’ needs, and the lack of financial and social support, all putting their ability to provide quality parenting at risk. In response, Arditti makes a strong argument for evidence-based correctional reform that ‘‘focuses on social justice, risk reduction, and enhancing opportunity’’ (p. 143). Specifically, the correctional reform needs to restrain institutional and social practices that hinder self-development and individual 138 Reviews

Clandestine Political Violence

Abstract: with the post-war Beat and hippie generations. The question thus arises as to whether the variations in expression seen in this analysis will prove to be more diffuse and enduring than the variations in standards of accepted straightness seen earlier in the twentieth century. Despite the caveats raised above, the text provides valuable insight into a phenomenon that has not been well addressed. It is too commonly assumed that the only impact of changes in acceptance of lesbians and gays is on lesbians and gays. Straights can be an important tool in correcting that misconception.

Dropping Out: Why Students Drop Out of High School and What Can Be Done About It

Abstract: ly to learn anything of theoretical value here, but they will find useful anecdotes and qualitative information. Welcome to Resisterville is a case study of a few U.S.-born ‘‘Americans’’ who were ‘‘dissidents’’; their dislike of what was happening in the United States took place during the height of the Vietnam War, but their emigration may have been more directly due to the zeitgeist of the late 1960s. It is a qualitative study based mainly on interviews, without mention of a theoretical framework that is being tested. It would have been useful to see some linkages with symbolic interactionism or ethnomethodology. The use of documents helps to set the scene but is not entirely systematic. As discussed by John Porter and many others, the Canadian ‘‘mosaic’’ was a highly stratified ‘‘vertical mosaic’’ in the 1960s, and inequality remains significant today. The West Kootenay region was and is no exception. It is surprising that the author does not mention the considerable literature on stratification and does not even cite John Porter, arguably one of Canada’s leading sociological researchers. And despite interesting discussions of mining and forestry, there is no solid use made of rural sociology’s studies of rural communities. The overall situation of resisters to conscription is not examined in detail. We hear the voices of nine or ten men who came to Canada at least in part because of the draft. But the focus is not really on the Vietnam War or North American politics. The focus is on a counter-cultural movement that sometimes involved being a ‘‘draft dodger,’’ but often did not. Only those who chose to continue to live in British Columbia, even after amnesty had been declared, are interviewed. (Presumably they became dual citizens and now pay federal taxes in both countries.) This book is a retrospective study from forty years later and not a participant observation of the experience of moving to Canada in the 1960s. The research is primarily based on interviews of forty-four males and females who are U.S. citizens by birth but are still living in the West Kootenay region of British Columbia. When they came to Canada, they were in their twenties, and now they are in their sixties. They live in various small settlements. It would seem that the pull factors may have outweighed the push factors in the choice not only to leave the United States during the war, but also to stay in Canada. The push factor did not apply directly to the majority of those interviewed, and therefore it is a bit misleading to think of them as ‘‘resisters’’ or perhaps even as true ‘‘dissidents.’’ A study comparing those who stayed with those who eventually left would have been more directly relevant to the social movement literature. Such a comparison might have gotten at some of the questions Roders raises but cannot answer, such as why Canada was perceived as a haven. Chapter Five discusses the locals’ prejudices against the newcomers’ countercultural values and the locals’ rejection of drugs, public nudity, and extra-marital sex. The Canadian inhabitants sometimes did not like the hippies and ‘‘ragheads.’’ They were indignant that the foreigners were not behaving according to local norms. We hear their voices through second-hand reports, newspaper items, and a few interviews. It is clear from the interviews that many of the migrants were somewhat naı̈ve about Canada when they came. This naı̈veté about Canadian society, to which some fled looking for a romanticized countercultural haven, is not discussed as critically as one might wish. Welcome to Resisterville could be used in classes on community or rural sociology, especially if the instructor discusses ways the research design might have been improved.

Contesting Intersex: The Dubious Diagnosis

Abstract: was, pardon the pun, ruthless in her appraisal of them. Kornhauser saw culture as a ubiquitous feature of society and therefore as a constant that is not useful in explaining variation in crime. She called for the outright abandonment of the concepts of culture and subculture, writing that these terms should be ‘‘struck from the lexicon of criminologists’’ (a quote repeated multiple times throughout the volume: p. 175, p. 193, p. 259). Her view was consonant with a key pillar of control theories: the view that criminality results from a weakening of social bonds, attenuated culture, and the breakdown of mechanisms of informal social control rather than from an oppositional culture. Although a chapter on control theory by Chester L. Britt and Barbara J. Costello contends that Kornhauser’s directive to abandon the concepts of culture and subculture has been largely followed, other chapters by Charis E. Kubrin, Ross L. Matsueda, and David S. Kirk and Andrew V. Papachristos provide several arguments to the contrary. As some of these latter writers point out, sociology in the 1980s and 1990s began to conceive of culture in more nuanced ways, rejecting Kornhauser’s view of culture-asvalues through ethnographic studies of the community contexts of crime and, more recently, studies of legal cynicism. To be fair to Kornhauser, these views of culture were not part of the intellectual context within which Kornhauser was working. The introductory essay by Cullen and Wilcox describes the goal of the volume: ‘‘to honor Ruth Rosner Kornhauser and thus preserve her scholarly legacy’’ (p. 1). The book certainly succeeds in this regard, but it does much more by using Kornhauser’s work as a bridge between twentiethand twentyfirst-century criminology and by showing the continuity and change in key theoretical ideas past and present. As such, the volume serves as a compelling entry point for graduate students and other newcomers to criminological theory. Contesting Intersex: The Dubious Diagnosis, by Georgiann Davis. New York: New York University Press, 2015. 221 pp. $28.00 paper. ISBN: 9781479887040.

The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood

Abstract: Baltimore entered the national spotlight in April 2015 with the death of Freddie Gray and the ensuing citywide protests. While The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood does not deal specifically with issues of police brutality, its focus on the urban disadvantaged in Baltimore feels particularly important given these recent events. This book is the culmination of over two decades of research by some of sociology’s most respected scholars. Utilizing a life course developmental perspective, the authors examine the long-term outcomes of the Beginning School Study Youth Panel (BSSYP), a representative sample of Baltimore public school first-graders selected in the fall of 1982 and followed through 2006. A particular strength of the sample is the oversampling of poor whites. The existence and inclusion of poor and lower SES whites allows the researchers to examine racial differences within, and not simply across, socioeconomicstrata,a strategy that is often missing from studies of urban poverty. While the BSSYP study followed the children through high school, the authors fielded additional surveys after high school when the sample averaged age 22 (the Young Adult Survey, YAS) and 28 (the Mature Adult Survey, MAS). Sprinkled throughout the text are also short qualitative quotes used to illustrate some statistical points. The first chapter of the book introduces the reader to Baltimore, discusses the challenges facing the urban poor, and describes the study’s sampling and methods. The second chapter provides a relatively brief synopsis of Baltimore’s movement from ‘‘industrial boom’’ to ‘‘industrial bust.’’ While this narrative will be familiar to those with knowledge of the deindustrialization of Northeastern and Midwestern cities through the twentieth century, the authors do a particularly nice job of reminding readers that while these events might now seem to be in the distant past, they were crucial events in the life course of their sample’s parents. Chapters Three and Four focus on the early life of the BSSYP, paying specific attention to how family (Chapter 3) and neighborhood and school (Chapter 4) influence young people. Given that the research looks at these young people and their families in the early 1980s, much of what is discussed in these chapters should be familiar to readers. In Chapter Five, the authors move beyond the BSSYP and examine their sample’s transition into adulthood. The authors analyze four demographic markers: gaining employment, marrying (or partnering), moving out of the parental home, and becoming parents. They then identify the most common patterns of completion (or lack thereof) of these markers and the family background most often attached to these patterns. Those still reading this review carefully will notice educational completion is not included in the patterns discussed above. This is unique, as education has generally been treated as one of the ‘‘traditional’’ markers of the transition to adulthood by scholars. The authors argue that while the other transitions are clear-cut (that is, one clearly becomes a parent or does not), education does not have as finite an end and therefore is not included in these analyses. Instead, levels of education and employment (occupational status and earnings) are the socioeconomic destinations of the sample the authors focus on in Chapters Six through Eight. The authors find that baccalaureate completion by age 28 is particularly difficult for those from the lowest socioeconomic strata in the sample. There are also differences in employment by race and gender, a topic examined

Trading Democracy for Justice: Criminal Convictions and the Decline of Neighborhood Political Participation:

Abstract: killed, but mainly because the author did not interview active gang members whose attempts to convert failed to prompt effective change. There are well-grounded safety reasons behind the author’s decision to avoid active gang members. But this is a part of the story that at some point needs to be addressed to understand fully the interplay of context and feelings in religious conversions. Second, the study focuses exclusively on male gang members. The author’s use of Thomas Scheff’s theory of shame seems fitting there. But what about female gang members? Why do they join the gangs? More importantly, do they abandon gangs through spiritual conversion? What is the role of shame in the case of women who decide to abandon gang life? There is a missed opportunity here as around 15 percent of Central American gangs were composed of girls at the stated time of the research. By interviewing some former female gang members, the author could have helped us to understand the role of shame, if any, among female criminals. Regardless, few studies have tackled the phenomenon of religious conversion among Central American violent youth so remarkably. In a time in which many are wondering about the role of religious extremism in various forms of collective violence, this book offers an opportune examination of the role of fundamentalism—in the form of barrio evangelicalism—in subtracting away devotees of extreme violence and offering them an alternative to criminal life.

Women in War: The Micro-Processes of Mobilization in El SalvadorWomen in War: The Micro-Processes of Mobilization in El Salvador, by ViternaJocelyn. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. 288 pp. $26.95 paper. ISBN: 9780199843657.

Abstract: emotions that were expressed by movement participants but also the way in which online forums moderated these emotions. Finally, Ruth Braunstein uses rich ethnographic work to examine how the conservative movement has transformed from the ‘‘silent majority’’ to ‘‘we the people’’—in other words, how it attempted to develop a collective identity. The chapter contains what is arguably the most colorful anecdote, in which a Tea Party activist compares their movement to the resistance against ‘‘the matrix’’ in the eponymous movie. Overall, the volume delivers in its promise to advance understanding of the Tea Party movement. Yet, it also has a significant limitation: it does not analyze and discuss the consequences of this important social movement. Given that many of the contributing authors recognize the strong relationship between the Republican Party and the movement, as well as the movement’s ambition to influence political processes, it is somewhat surprising that no chapter tackles head-on the movement’s influence on elections, the Republican Party’s ideology and brinkmanship, or policy making. At the risk of sounding cliché (again), more work is needed.

Cheap on Crime: Recession-Era Politics and the Transformation of American Punishment

Abstract: who have their own sets of interests. In addition to catering to foreigners, does Gurgaon cater to elite Indians? I also wonder whether place does matter, but in a different way— does the fact that these call centers have British and U.S. clients and are located in an Indian city, as opposed to a city in another country, matter? Do the historical connections and legacies of British colonialism facilitate their successful creations? Aneesh also weaves together natural and social science empirical research to analyze the unintended consequences of call center work hours, which are in line with the time zones of their customer bases, including restrictions to family life, transportation problems, and physical effects. Aneesh points out at the end of Chapter Five that these problems are not something limited to call center employees. Yet, it is also not something that is necessarily ‘‘new’’ in this era of increasing interconnectedness. Many people with lower socio-economic status have engaged in varied forms of night work— whether prostitution, janitorial services, security/police work, volunteer social services (e.g., hotlines), or fast food—for decades. On one hand, the increasing speed and interconnectedness of the current age of globalization involves the proliferation of such work to new realms and increasing numbers of jobs, as Aneesh contends. On the other hand, to what extent have poor, minority, and women workers experienced such night shifts and their unintended consequences while also maintaining families? Do the call workers of his study represent a shift of this type of work to the relative middle class and more educated in India? How might this align with shifting priorities with regard to balancing work, family, and ambition? In Neutral Accent, Aneesh has produced a well-written, clear, and concise manuscript that unravels how communication actually works in so-called centers of cross-cultural interaction. He provides several important and creative contributions to our knowledge about globalization, inequality, identity construction, and work, and does so by locating the multiple disconnections that are reproduced when people of different groups virtually meet. Cheap on Crime: Recession-Era Politics and the Transformation of American Punishment, by Hadar Aviram. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015. 252 pp. $29.95 paper. ISBN: 9780520277311.

Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline

Abstract: Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline, by Jennifer Carlson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. 248 pp. $29.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780199347551. It is easier for an average citizen in Dodge City or Tombstone to carry a concealed firearm in public today than it was in the nineteenth century, the heyday of the "Wild West." The expansion of "shall issue" concealed carry laws in the United States over the past three decades represents the greatest liberalization of gun laws in the nation's history. Consequently, many more ordinary citizens are legally permitted to carry firearms for self-defense in public. Reasonable estimates suggest 8 to 12 million Americans have permits to carry concealed weapons nationally, with over 10 percent of the population licensed to carry in some states. Jennifer Carlson calls this a "gun carry revolution," and she is right. And yet sociologists have been oddly silent about it. Carlson steps into this void with a case study of individuals who legally carry guns, either openly or concealed, in southeastern Michigan. In addition to interviews with 60 mostly white, middle-aged male gun carriers, Carlson did 150 hours of participant observation at shooting ranges, activist events, and gun training classes. In the process she also obtained a concealed carry license, carried a gun during her fieldwork, and became a National Rifle Association (NRA) certified firearms instructor. In the best tradition of ethnography, Carlson is a critical observer analyzing this aspect of American gun culture from the inside out. Carlson begins Citizen-Protectors with the stories of two individuals that illustrate the complex race, class, gender, and other social dynamics that influence gun carry. The first involves Corey, a white clerk at a corner store in Flint, who shoots and kills a black man in self-defense during … Language: en

The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race: A Political History of Racial Identity:

Abstract: “liberal” label such well-known scholars as William J. Wilson, David Ellwood, Mary Joe Bane, Alejandro Portes, and Ming Zhou, whom they see as minimizers of racism and perpetuators of morally-based cultural arguments about the poor. Their dismissal of these scholars makes it difficult to agree with many of their arguments at this point. Although initially refreshing, the strident criticism with which the book begins runs the risk of leading the reader to dismiss the authors’ own scholarship as leftist dogma. The impatient reader could readily develop an “I know where this is going” feeling, which would be far from accurate. Instead, what follows is a significant contribution to several theoretical currents including studies of neighborhood effects, immigration, poverty, families and welfare. Field studies that get at the fundamental negotiations of immigrants in their social contexts of poverty are sorely needed in much of the research literature. Poverty literature is overwhelmingly based on African Americans. Thus, European Americans and immigrants are left out of the public debate, which in turn fuels the idea that poverty is an African-American condition. Yet the majority of welfare recipients consists of European Americans. In addition, immigrants settle in low-income areas. One of the most significant contributions made by Marchevsky and Theoharis is to take into account issue of both poverty and immigration. This provides us with a better understanding of how these Mexican-immigrant women are negotiating welfare and work requirements while lacking viable child care, and of how women who are enthusiastic and expect to get viable training are taught instead to improve their self-esteem and act positively while compromising wages and health insurance. The authors remind us that there is fluidity embedded in immigrant families in relationship to rights and entitlements. This fluidity is the result of immigration patterns within a family. At any given time, a household can be populated by U.S. citizens, legal residents, and the undocumented, thus creating variation within families with regard to benefit eligibility. Moreover, as the authors find out, legality does not guarantee benefits. Racism and nativism combine with changing welfare laws that give cover to welfare workers, who discriminate against Mexican mothers who are legal residents by denying them benefits even when shown legal proof of legal residency. Marchevsky and Theoharis criticize the fact that welfare studies rarely take into account the neighborhood context, and never focus on suburbs. They bring to our attention the fact that many suburbs are now home to “ethnoburbs,” large pockets of low-income immigrants. Furthermore, they point out the need to “reconsider the landscape of poverty as including areas with single family homes, landscaped yards and wide boulevards,” emphasizing that these are also “global suburbs” (p. 75). Lastly, these authors make an important contribution by pointing out that when it comes to poverty relief, we Americans have very low expectations. The authors take the position that by celebrating individual success in a disadvantaged neighborhood, we are not only reinforcing the notion that urban change rests with individual initiative, but also agreeing that much can be done with little and in the process, normalizing social inequality. In a sense, that is exactly what this book is about, how increasing levels of inequality persist. This book also shows the strengths of ethnographic methods and their capacity to see more complete pictures of phenomena by allowing us to understand not only the “what, “ but also the “how” and the “why” of social issues.

The Ecstatic Edge of Politics: Sociology and Donald Trump

Abstract: The day before the Louisiana Republican primary in March 2016, I watched Donald Trump’s Boeing 757 descend from the sky at the Lakefront Airport in New Orleans, Louisiana. Inside the crowded hangar, Elton John’s ‘‘Rocket Man’’ was playing. Red, white, and blue strobe lights roved sideways and up. Cell phones snapped photos of the blond-haired candidate as he stood before thousands waving and shaking signs that read MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. A small, wiry man bearing this sign with both hands, eyes afire, called out to all within earshot, ‘‘To be in the presence of such a man! To be in the presence of such a man.’’ There seemed in this man’s call, I wrote in my field notes—part of a five year ethnographic study of Tea Party supporters in Louisiana—a note of reverence, even ecstasy (Hochschild 2016:224). How do we understand the states of mind and situations of those to whom Donald Trump appeals? How does such emotional appeal work? Whatever Trump’s future, he has touched a cultural nerve we sociologists need to study. In this essay, I explore illuminating works in and around sociology before venturing an interpretation of my own. In The Paranoid Style in American Politics, the historian Richard Hofstadter (1996) traced the relationship between paranoid political rhetoric and ‘‘style of mind’’ as these periodically emerged in the United States through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The leader expressing such a style, he says, ‘‘does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. . . . This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes’’ (p. 31). Propelling such movements, he argues, is not just economic deprivation as narrowly conceived, but the loss of an older America, inward-turned, Protestant, secure, busy turning the wheel of a thriving local capitalism. As one of the original so-called birthers (who questioned President Obama’s place of birth and religion) and as one who has extended this suspicion to Hillary Clinton’s religion, Donald Trump fits in Hofstadter’s ‘‘paranoid style.’’ Still, Trump’s appeal reaches far beyond the style of mind through which it is expressed. Updating Hofstadter, the excellent The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism by Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson (2012) takes an orchestral view of a wide array of forces, both predisposing and precipitating. The ferment of social class and status discontent, the Fox TV effect, the post-2008 bailout, highly upsetting to many, the financial backing of the oil billionaires David and Charles Koch—all these have led to the rise of the Tea Party. Part of supporters’ discontent, moreover, derives from their unsuccessful struggle for recognition—a key fact of social life noted by Frankfurt School philosopher Axel Honneth (1995). In follow-up research on the power of Koch funding, Skocpol and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez (2016) take an

Democratizing Inequalities: Dilemmas of the New Public Participation

Abstract: research. She considers the role of Belarusian state and local institutions such as newspapers and community health clinics as well as powerful international institutions such as the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency. In the account that Kuchinskaya weaves together, all of these actors and organizations are actively shaping the discourses and material practices of invisibility production and the ignorance that is the ultimate consequence of this (dis)articulation. Another product is irony, given that the study of invisibility requires a watchful eye and an expansive field of vision. In my estimation, the book compares very favorably with two key texts in the small but growing literature in social studies of ignorance—Robert Proctor’s Cancer Wars (1995) and Matthias Gross’ more recent Ignorance and Surprise (2010). It is worth considering how data and analysis are related in these three books. For the historian Proctor, gaining access to old tobacco industry documents relating to what experts within the industry knew about the health effects of smoking was difficult, but once he had it, the story wrote itself: the villains all wear black hats and ignorance production follows from now-familiar corporate tactics of obfuscation, deceit, and denial. The sociologist Gross studied efforts by ecologists and environmental groups to remediate and restore contaminated industrial lands. His data were easier to come by because no one hid it from him. But because each set of decisions in the restoration process brought to light new elements of the unknown, the analytical path that Gross had to carve through the data was less certain and required more creative work to unravel. Kuchinskaya inherits both sets of challenges: Like Proctor, she faces the problem of getting access to difficult data and, like Gross, she must wrestle continuously with empirical ambiguity. In my estimation, she meets both challenges and in so doing sets a new bar for this genre of investigation. My three complaints about the book are fairly minor. I don’t understand the ordering of chapters, which bounce from topic to topic in ways that do not seem to straightforwardly support the developing argument. I am also less excited by Kuchinskaya’s theoretical framework, which is almost entirely dependent on two concepts mentioned earlier (alignment and infrastructure) and would be strengthened by a more forceful engagement with a broader set of sociological ideas relating to institutional power, resources, collective action, and inequality. And, having finished the book, I was left wondering what we learn about invisibility production beyond the Belarusian experience with Chernobyl. While the implications of this study would seem broadly applicable, the book offers little guidance for drawing a more general set of lessons about the politics of knowledge. I list these concerns to encourage critical conversation, not to dissuade readers of this review from assigning this book in their graduate seminars and upper-level undergraduate courses. This is another way to help people see the invisible. And who doesn’t enjoy a good ghost story every now and then? This one haunts and inspires.

Cognition and Crime: Offender Decision Making and Script Analyses

Abstract: this level, with these messages? Of the 53 photos reproduced in the book, a few are metaphorical in nature; several show students acting out scenes from their lives; some depict the insides and exteriors of schools, homes, and neighborhoods, and many images share the warm worlds of family and friends that one would expect to see. In general, the photos produce few surprises. Those that offer new insights describe aspects of the neighborhood that have specific meanings: physical deterioration in housing and perceptions of racially produced marginality. But I think that Kaplan expects a great deal from adolescents on a single photo assignment preceded by a modest degree of training, and I do not find evidence that the students’ photos achieved the insights that she attributes to them. Three photos are very troubling and should not have been published. They depict teachers the students reported not liking. One is a smiling man with a book who ‘‘does not teach us’’; another a stout P.E. teacher that the students say, because of her size, is not suited to be a P.E. teacher; and the third is someone accused of foul and disgusting habits. It is an ethical breach to include these photographs in the publication; the teachers are easily identifiable and the extensive criticism leveled at them (from 12to 15-year-olds) will likely cause them ridicule or even professional sanction. Kaplan should have understood the power of the image and instructed her participants on the damage that can be done by the wanton distribution of what are, in fact, shaming photographs. It is likewise disappointing and surprising that the publisher allowed these images to be published. Kaplan used the students’ photographs in public discussions with as many as 100 parents, enlarged on PowerPoint slides. This is a potentially interesting story on its own, but it is mentioned only briefly. It points to a manner in which participant-generated photography could have an ongoing and potentially important impact on communities. It is particularly interesting in her case to have images made by kids stimulate dialogue by parents and others in power. The adolescents’ words that accompany the photos are limited to a sentence or short paragraph and speak as much about early adolescence as they do about poverty, race, or ‘‘subjugation.’’ In places, they discuss disheartening themes concerning dirty school bathrooms, crowded classrooms, and parks they are afraid to visit. In these cases the reader is left wanting much more information, nuanced and developed in depth. To some extent, the author fulfilled her goal of encouraging voices from the inner city to tell us about its grinding poverty and structural inequality. She shows us that young adolescents will do photo assignments on serious topics. The method has the potential to become both a transformative pedagogy and a successful research strategy, and the author has provided a first, if limited, step toward understanding how this may take place.

Ethnography for the Internet: Embedded, Embodied and Everyday:

Abstract: take shape in the aftermath of the Sputnik shock in 1958, had a more sustained perspective on advancing methodological and theoretical sophistication in the sciences. The ensuing chapters then discuss various clusters of literature relevant for the takeoff of high modern science (Chapter Three) as well as for the development of key concepts of high modern social science: choice and reason (Chapter Four), modernity and modernization (Chapter Five), and models and modelling (Chapter Six). Chapter One, ‘‘High Modern Social Science: A Bird’s View,’’ the most interesting part of the book, presents the survey and basic distributions before introducing an analytic tool to structure the set of 1,828 articles. Using four main (system, structure, function, model) and 21 secondary keywords assumed to capture the intellectual essence of high modern social science, Heyck ordered the articles into seven concentric circles (cf. p. 23ff; p. 207ff), beginning with (1) epitomes (articles tagged with three or more of the main keywords; N = 50); (2) the inner core (two or more of the main keywords; N = 226); (3) a core (at least one of the main plus one of the secondary keywords; N = 444); (4) an outer core (at least one of the first three main keywords system, structure, and function, the keyword model being excluded for its polysemic character; N = 597); (5) affiliates (at least one of the 25 keywords, but not ‘‘model’’ alone; N = 849); (6) the margins (at least one of the 25 keywords including ‘‘model’’; N = 924); and (7) the outsiders (not tagged; N = 904). This structure allows Heyck to compare across these circles the frequency of the key concepts related to high modern social science and to show that some tags—like theory, communication, or behavior—appear more often the closer we come to the innermost epitome circle, whereas others—like control or organization—are distributed evenly across all the circles (including the outsiders) and again others—like public policy—are more likely to be found outside high modern social science, that is, in the outsider circle. The choice for constructing the circles of high modern social science—from (1) epitomes to (6) the margins—as cumulative categories is not explained and is potentially misleading, since articles belonging to the epitome category (1) are also counted in the further five categories. This makes it difficult to follow some of Heyck’s interpretations (e.g., pp. 25ff) and especially casts doubt on his use of the odds ratio as a measure of association, which in principle requires disjunct categories. Also, Heyck did not use all the potential of his data set, both with regard to the methods applied to analyze his data and to the option to cross-relate his data set to other data, for instance to citation statistics: were the articles in the core more influential in terms of citations? Regarding the use of other (multivariate) methods of analysis, one could think of more explorative methods (correspondence analysis, factor analysis), but also a network analysis might be possible relating the various actors (authors, patrons, and journals). As these brief considerations show, the most important contribution of Age of System is that it has become possible to answer such questions with reasonable further effort. Since Heyck declares his willingness to share the data upon request, the hope is that the book will succeed in opening a new line of historical research.

From Voice to Influence: Understanding Citizenship in a Digital Age:

Abstract: ions about political voice, the public sphere, and civic agency, the authors avoid engaging with the mechanical, technical, and mediated—details that matter to civic engagement. Making digital media peripheral to the analysis of contemporary civic engagement renders several theoretical ideas about contemporary civic engagement, including the notion of egalitarian participatory democracy, that much more aspirational than observed or experienced. Like many edited collections, the strength of the overarching theoretical contribution is in its case studies and process-tracing essays. So look here for great discussions of the history of youth political participation, the value of political hip hop, the role of technology in immigration activism, examples of how viral movements work in U.S. politics, and the challenge of using almost all of our ideas on this topic to understand the case of China. This collection features the most developed statement from Ethan Zuckerman on his Cute Cat Theory of digital media and political expression. This alone will make the collection a mandatory point of passage for modern students of social movements, even those who also want to put media into the background. Archon Fung, with collaborator Jennifer Shkabatur, does the usual fabulous job with typology-building. They nicely ground the stages of viral political movements using examples of mobilization around Kony 2012, Planned Parenthood, the death of Trayvon Martin, and the Stop Online Piracy Act/Protect Intellectual Property Act. Scholars looking for a historical perspective on youth civic engagement will value Jennifer Light’s chapter. The message in From Voice to Influence is not that the internet has been useful for supporting civic voice and is now the infrastructure for political influence. Instead, the contributors seem to argue that there are examples of political voice expressed through digital media, that those voices aren’t very influential, and that there are some plausible ideas for how citizens using digital media might become influential at some point. Ultimately, however, civic engagement must be operationalized. While Danielle Allen and Jennifer Light have put together a collection that suggests what democracy and civic engagement might one day look like, in ignoring the key technological capacities and constraints on contemporary politics, they are less equipped to offer practical contributions that could help us get there. At various points the contributors signal full awareness of the limits of theorizing about the modern public sphere, voice, and 714 Reviews Contemporary Sociology 45, 6 civic agency with diminished room for the politics of platforms, algorithms, and technology design. In his interesting study of hip hop culture, for example, Tommie Shelby admits that this cultural art form is not tied to technology, has no political consequences, and is normatively good only inasmuch as public expression is generally a good thing. Henry Farrell and Cosma Rohilla Shalizi’s democracy-with-an-adjective is ‘‘cognitive democracy,’’ the conditions of which they themselves argue are falsified in our everyday political experience. Archon Fung and Jennifer Shkabatur offer the intuitively sensible redux that viral social movements occur when political entrepreneurs initiate civic engagement and powerful intermediaries amplify the message. They admit, though, that public deliberation occurs in flawed socio-technical systems in which access to technology is a vital contextual factor. Sometimes scholars who work on digital media are accused of offering technologically deterministic arguments. This edited collection contributes to the debate by offering a set of organizationally overdetermined arguments. Herein is the current challenge for scholarship on digital media and civic engagement. We often set up straw-man arguments for what the other side says. For instance, it is actually very hard to find examples of techno-utopianism, since most of the research that treats technology and organization at parity comes with lots of caveats, exemptions, and cautionary notes. Young people have certainly been using new media for centuries to have political conversations not tolerated by their elders. No scholar who treats information infrastructure as an important ingredient in the recipe for contemporary social movement success would argue against that. Readers will probably agree with Howard Gardner’s call for more professionalism, Farrell and Shalizi’s eagerness for rambunctious amateurism, and Wendy Chun’s interest in separating our public and private lives. But information infrastructure and technology design are the material instantiation of the institutional problems they define. Moreover, it is hard to imagine any of these institutional changes without concomitant changes to the infrastructure of our contemporary political lives—digital media. Civic engagement is structured by institutions and technologies, so why foreground one at the expense of the other? From Voice to Influence is valuable for what might be called the ‘‘strong institutionalist’’ take on what citizenship looks like in a digital age, or rather what it may become. But its publication also demonstrates the need to advance our understanding of contemporary civic engagement by having the scholars who foreground institutions engage with those who foreground technology. It would still be productive to build theory about the institutions and technologies that large numbers of citizens actually live with and use. There is a growing cohort of social scientists who are actually quite comfortable studying complex, conjoined causal relationships between the people who constitute society and the technologies that provide both capacities and constraints on action. Science and Technology Studies, broadly speaking, has become an exciting domain of inquiry precisely because it has an evolved language for speaking of social and material agencies. Rather than having another group of scholars answer From Voice to Influence with an edited collection that foregrounds digital media and obfuscates the social, perhaps we could start synthesizing, assembling, and advancing. Inequality: What Can Be Done? by Anthony B. Atkinson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. 384 pp. $29.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780674504769.

The Routledge International Handbook of Migration Studies

Abstract: largely been confined to the sociology of work and social movements—into the study of collective violence and collective memory. Göc xek demonstrates that the exercise of violence against another group with a shared history and indifference to the suffering of human beings that belong to a certain category are outcomes of an affective topography of a particular sort. And if the mention of collective emotions in relation to collective violence might alarm some with its echoes of mob psychology, Göc xek’s nuanced analysis should relieve these concerns. She shows how collective emotions are produced in a complex manner at the intersection of existing patterns of meaning, transformative events, and political manipulation. While political and intellectual elites seek to induce collective emotions that will favor their interests, they have to do so by drawing upon the existing affective landscape and are often themselves driven by these pervasive emotions. Denial of Violence is the product of an impressive breadth of research and offers many original insights for students of collective violence, collective memory, and the sociology of emotions, not to mention late Ottoman and Turkish republican history. It is likely to remain the definitive study of the denial of the Armenian Genocide for a long time.

The State and the Grassroots: Immigrant Transnational Organizations in Four Continents:

Abstract: Reviews 779 Overall, their book breaks new ground on the topic of transnational policy networks, revealing how power works through these technocratic, expert-driven networks. Fast Policy is a brisk, engaging read, full of ana- lytically rich and empirically driven sub- stance that teaches us much about new experiments of statecraft, their lure and agendas as they travel, and the tensions which arise as they confront the structural inequities that they are often designed to mask or ignore. The State and the Grassroots: Immigrant Transnational Organizations in Four Continents, by Alejandro Portes and Patricia Ferna´ndez-Kelly, eds. New York: Berghahn Books, 2015. 338 pp. $120.00 cloth. ISBN: D AVID S COTT F ITZ G ERALD University of California-San Diego dfitzgerald@ucsd.edu The State and the Grassroots: Immigrant Trans- national Organizations in Four Continents reports findings from a set of ten related proj- ects on the migrant organizations of eighteen different national-origin groups, which are spread across the United States, France, Spain, the Netherlands, and Belgium. The volume, edited by Alejandro Portes and Patricia Ferna´ndez-Kelly, provides a wealth of empirical detail on the activities of these organizations and makes substantial advances toward answering major questions in the literature on migrant transnationalism. The central contributions are fourfold. The book brings together 1) the U.S. and western European destination contexts, 2) national- origin groups with highly variable relation- ships with the governments of their countries of origin, and 3) migrant groups that vary widely in the extent to which they are pre- dominantly working class or highly skilled. Finally, it includes surveys of migrant organ- izations that enable some comparisons across national origin and destination coun- try cases. Early scholarly accounts of migrant trans- nationalism, by which the authors mean engagement of various kinds across state borders, paid insufficient attention to how source and destination country governments shape the contours of migrant organization. The accounts in this volume are far more attuned to the political constraints and opportunities in part because the studies include such different contexts. For example, the relaxation of hostilities between source and destination countries opens up spaces for migrant activities oriented toward the homeland. The growth of such activities in the Vietnamese American case following the establishment of diplomatic relations in the 1990s is the most vivid such example. The political economy of the origin country also structures migrant ties. Market reforms in China and India set the conditions for intensified relationships and investments of overseas Chinese and Indians. On the destination country side, govern- ments vary widely in their interest in assisting organizations oriented toward the homeland. France, Spain, and Belgium have provided government support for ‘‘co-devel- opment’’ in migrants’ countries of origin, though this has been more difficult in Belgium given its complex federal system. The Spanish government has made co- development a condition of much support for migrant organizations, thus shaping their agendas. Reliance on state resources can car- ry a price. Budget cuts in Spain during the 2008 to 2012 financial crisis dealt a ‘‘death- blow’’ to the organizations (p. 267). Destina- tion country factors may also inhibit migrant organization. The political culture in France, which emphasizes national republican unity, restrains the development of national-origin migrant associations with a strong political focus. Destination country policies may have dif- ferent effects on cross-border organizing over different time scales. In his introductory essay, Portes notes that permanent outmigra- tion is accompanied by a weakening of the local productive structure in places of origin, whereas circular migration encourages great- er investment. In the case of Mexican migra- tion to the United States, the 1986 Immigra- tion Reform and Control Act’s legalization provisions and stricter U.S. border enforce- ment have shifted Mexican migration from a pattern of circular mobility to permanent settlement. I would argue that in the short run, mass legalization created the conditions Contemporary Sociology 45, 6 Downloaded from csx.sagepub.com by guest on October 20, 2016

The Politics of Performance Funding for Higher Education: Origins, Discontinuations, and Transformations

Abstract: The Politics of Performance Funding for Higher Education: Origins, Discontinuations, and Transformations is the most comprehensive volume on the current state of performance funding in higher education. Because ‘‘performance funding represents a significant departure from previous approaches to the finance of higher education’’ (p. 1), Kevin Dougherty and Rebecca Natow explore several questions about the origins, diffusion, evolution, and future of funding in higher education. Though it seems logical that states would enact performance funding—tying state funding to institutional outcomes—in higher education as they have done at the K–12 level, the authors note that one quarter of states still have not done so and another two-thirds have discontinued their use of performance funding. Using interview data and reviewing thousands of documents from their study of performance funding in Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Washington, the authors conclude that performance funding will likely expand and intensify, making the next several decades a pivotal time for higher education policy. The authors draw on diffusion, institutional, and policy theories to make sense of their data, providing a unique and much-needed synthesis of theory from sociology, higher education, and political science. In doing so they reveal holes in our understanding of diffusion as a proximate phenomenon and show that states use nonadjacent states and national policy organizations, professional associations, and consultants to make decisions and enact policy. This broadening of ideas about how isomorphism operates will be useful for understanding the spread of other educational policy within higher education and K–12 schools. In addition, their data and analysis have revealed that policy theory lacked an understanding of actors’ indirect influence on policy. The work has the potential to advance our understanding of how policy is formed, enacted, and maintained. The broader theoretical implications of this work make it a good read for anyone interested in educational policy, not just those interested in performance funding in higher education. Nevertheless, the book is clearly aimed at those engrossed in the details of performance funding. It is and likely will remain the go-to text on higher education funding and on the history of performance funding more specifically. The detail and discussion of the eight states are exhaustive and reveal an incredible data-collection process. More importantly, the analysis and connections the authors make are a terrific example of combining breadth and depth. Because they examined eight states in detail and followed their paths, they were able to uncover trajectories: first wave and second wave adoption, discontinuation, and readoption. Dougherty and Natow keenly theorize about the three stages of performance funding. Their nuance in analysis of the adoption phase was particularly interesting for understanding how diffusion and isomorphic forces work on state policy-makers in early and late adoption. Though the work is strong in its ability to follow the states through adoption, discontinuation, and readoption (in some cases), it lacks a particular comparison group—at least one of the one-quarter of states that never adopted performance funding. To understand fully how diffusion, policy theory, and institutionalism are at play, the book 596 Reviews

Weber’s Rationalism and Modern Society: New Translations on Politics, Bureaucracy, and Social Stratification

Abstract: of claiming some individual control over one’s actions to the site of moral judgments. Walsh is well aware that the unfinished Life of the Mind hardly solves all of the problems of agency and reflexivity. But he does think it provides a corrective to other theorists who fail to distinguish clearly enough among activities aimed toward different ends (knowledge versus meaning) and who only make vague gestures toward the concrete historical and social conditions from which capacities such as reflexivity emerge. I hope this one example gives my reader a taste for the quality of Walsh’s engagements with sociological theory and the ways in which he brings Arendt’s work to bear. He covers an enormous amount of ground in this short work, but his renderings of the work of multiple theorists always struck me as fair, and he has an enviable talent for going right for the key issue. I think readers are likely to be more resistant to his argument that Arendt’s ontological triad is fundamentally right and that an attention to its consequences would benefit sociological theory. But buying that argument seems to me rather beside the point. Every reader will learn a tremendous amount about Arendt’s work and about the main issues in sociological theory from reading this terrific book.