Labour and Employment in a Globalising World: Autonomy, Collectives and Political Dilemmas

This collection of essays provides new insight into the complex realities of labour and employment market globalisation. The pluridisciplinary and multi-faced understanding of globalisation is based upon ground research in ten countries from South to North. Its contextualisation of globalising labour and employment market, perceived as process, constitutes the originality of the book. Globalisation is understood through a single process of both standardisation and differentiation, which also underscores its political agenda. The globalising process incorporates trends of convergent and somewhat undifferentiated Southern and Northern situations in labour and employment. Strong political perspectives thereby emerge to help understand changes in current capitalism and question the longstanding North to South paradigm. As labour and employment markets standardise and differentiate, what other problematical threads can be pulled to strengthen the hypothesis that trends converge within a single globalising process? The comparative concepts and tools proposed in this volume help to answer these queries.

In Labour and Employment in a Globalising World: Autonomy, Collectives and Political Dilemmas, Christian Azaïs compiles 12 essays by authors from various epistemological perspectives. This book takes a multidisciplinary and multiregional approach, and endeavors to contextualize the current dynamics between labor, employment and political globalization.
This book is divided into three parts: Institutional Frameworks, Decentralisation and Specialisation of Labour and Employer Associations and Individual Autonomy vs. Collective Responsibility in a World of Flexible Labour. In each part, the authors comment on issues relating to globalized employment from both the micro and macro levels, focusing on the transformational aspects of globalized labor markets in relation to Australia, Brazil, Finland, France, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States, utilizing multiple disciplinary frameworks in analyzing each area.
Part I discusses globalized labor trends through an institutional lens, specifically focusing on public policy covering Brazil, Switzerland, Denmark, Finland, and Sweden. The authors focus on how local actors adapt to international employment trends by comparing various regions that have been affected by globalized labor.
Part II focuses on two central concepts: decentralization and specialization. The former has a spatial component, the later has an organizational one. The authors focus on both the private and public institutions and the labor-management interactions between the two in the context of globalization.
Part III addresses the issues of autonomy in the workplace. Labor market's flexibility has caused tensions between autonomy and the workplace, a tension which is not clearly defined. The authors also reflect on the individual's autonomy in relation to collective responsibility, and looks at the overall meaning of autonomy in the workplace.
While these articles are written by scholars from various fields covering a wide range of regions, the entire book focuses on a single theme: labor and contemporary globalization. By bridging globalization as a single process that is standardized and differentiated, these essays construct a coherent view of globalized labor in the modern era. This book is important and useful for political scientists, legal theorists, economists, and sociologists concerned with the dynamics of the world of work in the context of contemporary globalization. Tom Bissell's Extra Lives is part immersion into the world of video games and part personal memoir through which the author contends that video games are a form of art. For Bissell, video games can be a vehicle for conveying experiences and ideas much like a great painting or novel-and, like great art, have the capacity to generate genuine emotion. This perspective is conveyed through chapter-long discussions of his video game play experiences in works such as Fallout 3, Resident Evil, Left 4 Dead, Gears of War, and Mass Effect, among others. Bissell's emotional reactions to his gameplay range from the thrilling to the emotionally wrenching in his reflections on these primarily narrative-focused games (as opposed to first-person shooter-style games). The lengthy descriptions are intended to immerse the reader in the mise-en-scène of each game, conveying the sensation of playing the games ourselves-the environment, the moral compass, the narrative arc we may encounter. Through his descriptions, Bissell advocates for video games as a legitimate medium for encountering and considering our humanity.
The book also profiles a few of the people behind these video games, giving us a glimpse into those who conceive of and design these games, bringing to life their dreams or nightmares, such as Cliff Bleszinski of Epic Games and John Hight of Sony Computer Entertainment. The account becomes intensely personal at times, concluding with Bissell's description of the time he spent endlessly playing Grand Theft Auto IV while becoming increasingly addicted to cocaine. In this final reflection, he considers what video games give the player and how his own relationship toward video games became increasingly demanding, from wanting to experience something through a new medium to craving redemption through his playing. Ultimately, he surmises, ''I learned that maybe all a game can do is point at the person who is playing it, and maybe that has to be enough' ' (p. 182).
Extra Lives offers insight into the aesthetic realm of video game playing for those uninitiated to gaming; those familiar with Bissell's video games may find resonance with their own experiences. This book would be most useful for those interested in popular culture and the intersections of art and technology.
Value and the Media: Cultural Production and Consumption in Digital Markets, by Gö ran Bolin. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. 159pp. $99.95 cloth. ISBN: 9781409410485. In the post-industrial media landscape, oftentimes the concept of value in media refers to the economic worth that contributes to economic growth. Even political economists whose concern is the effects of a capitalist mode of production on culture emphasize the transformation of cultural objects into industrialized commodities. The overarching principle of all these discussions is based upon the economic value in media production. However, Gö ran Bolin argues there are different forms of value in media and society, which are created in the process of both production and consumption of media.
Value and the Media: Cultural Production and Consumption in Digital Markets consists of seven separate chapters. Each chapter either separately or collectively presents the author's theoretical arguments and empirical examples on value and media. The general background to his argument is discussed in Chapter One by delineating the changes and development of cultural industries over the past few decades. Bolin provides concepts and definitions including text, audience, media production and consumption in the process of marketization and digitization of media. In Chapter Two, the author presents his analytic model developed from the field model of Pierre Bourdieu. He elaborates Bourdieu's field of cultural production related to fields of media consumption in an effort to fit the model to his purposes. In Chapter Three, the author develops his discussion on how the media industry has adopted new business models to show that new and old media have similarities in the way they are organized to produce value in media industries. In Chapter Four, the discussion moves on to the roles of media users as key features of contemporary media culture. Bolin concentrates on the labor of media users as a work of consumption that is beneficial to media and culture industries. Chapter Five is devoted to a discussion of new textual expressions and patterns of narration. This chapter explains how content can relate to the changes in business models of media industries. Chapter Six discusses the process of digitization and its impacts on the cultural industries and media commodities. In the last chapter, the author comes back to the concept of value in contemporary digital media markets. He summarizes his discussion of value in media by focusing on the dynamic relationship between aesthetic, social, and cultural value in media.
With the digitization of media industries, the business models of media industries and the process of value production have been changed. The author perceives value as a product of social relationship and activity, and argues that we need to understand there are similarities between new and old media in the production of value. Throughout the book, value in media production is discussed as a symbolic exchange that connects economic value and moral value rather than as use and exchange value. Bolin successfully analyzes how value in media is produced, and how it works to affect media practices in production and consumption under the current digitalized media landscape. The Television Entrepreneurs explores the way business entertainment formats have contributed to change in both the public perception of business as well as business' role in public life. Focusing primarily on case studies from Britain, Raymond Boyle and Lisa Kelly's work explores two dimensions of the rise of business entertainment. The first part of the book considers the way television discursively produces entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs through ''factual entertainment'' such as Kitchen Nightmares and Dragon's Den. The second part of the book delves into audience studies and seeks to understand the ways viewers engage and interact with these business entertainment shows. How is meaning invested in these programs by viewers, and what encourages the audience to engage with these programs?
The authors deftly combine the two parts, transitioning from the larger implications of televisual production to specifics regarding how such production elements are interpreted by audiences. Using focus group studies, Boyle and Kelly explore how and why individuals watch shows like Kitchen Nightmares; is it for the drama, the education, the management of affect, or some combination of all of these? The vox pop interludes offer insights into how particular audience members view (or, in many cases, do not view) particular programs and what they take away from them. Far from simplistic audience engagement, televisual showcases of entrepreneurs craft an image and a narrative of business acumen that shifts the public understanding of capitalism and introduces the cultural heroes upon which the system relies. The Television Entrepreneurs is an important step in the process of understanding how the culture of capital is reified and repaired. In Cities and Sovereignty, Diane E. Davis and Nora Libertun de Duren have compiled a collection of essays examining the interaction between identity conflicts and their dynamics in relation to the larger struggles over sovereignty and governance. Cities have always been the host of diversity and multiculturalism. Since the onset of contemporary globalization, there has been an increase in heterogeneity in many urban centers around the world, accelerated by the rise of migration workers and globalized labor. This has created an environment ripe for ethnic and religious conflicts, fueled by the struggle for cultural recognition in the urban center. Even though cities have been identified with tolerance and diversity, most modern conflicts occur in these urban centers. This book, then, examines the dynamics of identity-based conflicts and national sovereignty, by employing comparative and historical case studies with each author providing their own disciplinary perspective.
Part One, Modes of Sovereignty, Urban Governance, and the City, addresses the impacts of sovereignty and to what extent the type of sovereignty arrangements (whether it be an empire, a colonial power, or a nation-state) conditions the effects of public governance and conflict. This part looks at cases in Jerusalem, India, and Vietnam.
Part Two, Scales of Sovereignty and the Remaking of Urban and National Space, considers the overlapping form of sovereignty and identity conflicts within the urban context. It also looks at how these tensions affect the urban form and the relationship between the city and the nation.
Part Three, Sovereignty, Representation, and the Urban Built Environment, looks at how sovereignty concerns manifest themselves within the urban context. The authors explore how the control of urban cities has become the object of national struggle within the nation state, where national and global actors seek to control the urban centers Briefly Noted 687 from sovereign powers as ways to model the general society after their own value systems.
This book offers valuable interdisciplinary perspectives on the nature of identity conflicts and governance, and their impacts upon the urban condition. This book is an insightful read for the urbanist, sociologist, political geographer, and historian alike-or anyone for that matter who is searching for a deeper understanding of the complexities of identities and their relations with networks of sovereignty.
Economic Mobility and Cultural Assimilation Among Children of Immigrants expands the idea of segmented assimilation theory for immigrants and their descendants. In the beginning of the book, Caroline Faulkner gives a historiography of assimilation theory. Scholars began to use the term assimilation theory (what is now known as classical assimilation theory) in order to study the assimilation patterns of European immigrants in the early twentieth century. Classical assimilation theory states that all immigrants will assimilate into mainstream American society and move up into the American middle class. This mobility is dependent upon mainstream assimilation and may take longer for some immigrants than others depending on their speed of assimilation. Segmented assimilation theory states that immigrants do not always assimilate and move upwards in society. They either assimilate and move upwards, semiassimilate and move upwards, or do not assimilate at all and never move upwards. Assimilation is dependent on the immigrant, his or her environment, and reaction to that environment.
Utilizing quantitative methodology, Faulkner broadens aspects of segmented assimilation theory. She found that immigrant assimilation and mobility is intergenerational and intragenerational, thus acknowledging the individuality of assimilation and that immigrant assimilation and mobility can affect the descendants of immigrants. Within the intergenerational and intragenerational framework, Faulkner discovered the importance of life course stage, assimilation starting points, and gender. Taking these factors into account, a commonality for the most stable upward mobility was semi-assimilation. Semi-assimilated immigrants and their descendants were able to maneuver within the family's native culture as well as the American mainstream culture. Until a scholarly relationship between Pareto and Benito Mussolini, which never occurred, was claimed by the dictator in his 1928 autobiography, then embroidered upon during the Second World War when a false link was posited between Pareto's ''circulation of elites'' and the bombastic historical claims of fascist propaganda, Pareto was a social scientist whom all educated people were supposed to know about, and to admire. He was lionized at Harvard by Lawrence Henderson, both in his famous weekly seminar and in Pareto's General Sociology: A Physiologist's Interpretation (1935), appreciatively scrutinized by George Homans in his first monograph (1934), and analyzed in detail by Parsons in his Structure of Social Action (1937). More astonishingly, in 1933 Pareto was introduced by Vincent Canby in the Saturday Review of Literature and by Bernard DeVoto in Harper's to an earnest middle-class readership, who wanted to learn about ''non-logical action'' and the ''irrational'' roots of the global socioeconomic crisis they were enduring. At that time most readers surely did not understood that he had invented modern econometrics (''Pareto ophelimity'' or ''optimality''), that he had developed a full-fledged theory and critique of socialism, and that at one point he wrote hundreds of political essays in a vigorous effort to be elected to the Italian parliament. But they did want to know about his sociology, translated from the 1912/16 Italian original and retitled for the anglophone audience as Mind and Society: A Treatise on General Sociology (4 volumes; Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1935), and were willing pay a lot to read it. For a time, Pareto was much more than a footnote in basic economics textbooks, and was considered essential to political sociology, economic sociology, and social psychology.
The editors of this new volume want to reinstate Pareto into the pantheon, and in a big way: ''This volume explores Pareto's astonishingly varied intellectual contribution from a range of disciplinary perspectives, the main intention being to show why it remains relevant and should not simply be consigned to the history of ideas. Pareto was an almost obsessive polymath, whose refusal to recognise disciplinary boundaries has few parallels. It might even be ventured that he deserves the categorisation of universal genius, commonly reserved for such as Leonardo da Vinci, owing to the sheer breadth and diversity of his talent and enduring insight'' (p. 1). Naturally, this sort of rapturous claim invites chuckles from non-believers, yet the editors' sentiments become less improbable as one goes through the nine chapters (by scholars from the United States, Australia, Britain, Iceland, and France) treating Pareto's theories of elites, stratification, social systems, political theory, risk, elite cycles, collective beliefs, his rhetoric, and his heretofore unknown 1921 manuscript on money (most of which is composed of equations).
I would urge prospective students of Pareto-which this book might well cause to increase-to begin their study with Giorgio Baruchello's chapter on Pareto's rhetoric, there being nothing else like it in English. Pareto was a great polemicist, and until his special use of language is appreciated, the full weight of his achievement cannot be comprehended or enjoyed to the extent it should be. American scholars will find refreshingly instructive the chapters by their countrymen, Franc xois Neilsen (on stratification research), Charles Power (on social systems), and John Higley (elite cycles), since so little reference is made to Pareto nowadays in sociology. Given the high quality of their work, and that of others in this densely constructed book, this avoidance of Pareto's obvious genius seems increasingly irresponsible-whether or not he rises to the level of Leonardo. For 30 years or more, appreciative inquiry (AI), participatory action research, and other methods of inquiry which privilege the role of target communities in research have been developed and applied in contexts ranging from organizational consulting and community development to scientific studies. While practitioners of such approaches rarely shy away from meta-inquiry about their personal goals and biases, Sheila McNamee and Dian Marie Hosking have continued beyond this to consider the meta-theory itself and its implications for practice.

Research and Social
For the authors of Research and Social Change, post-positivist models incorporating uncertainty or propensity are not enough, because they fundamentally objectify the subjects of research and rely on the assumed superior knowledge of the researcher to produce new insight. By contrast, McNamee and Hosking propose a relational multicentered model of research which privileges local knowledge and imagines the professional consultant or researcher as a partner in allowing self-understanding and mutual understanding to emerge organically. The authors, both practitioners and teachers of AI and other group processes at the Taos Institute, explore ideas of community, inquiry, transformation, value and evaluation, reflexivity and ethics, providing invaluable provocation, even to those whose methods and meta-theories are more traditionally academic. They emphasize that while some methods have more affinity with relational constructionism than others, any method, practiced with care and attention to co-construction with the local community, can be responsible or ethical in this way.
The authors reject universal knowledge construction as the principal motivation for research, preferring to privilege praxis and Briefly Noted 689 community development in their work. Practically, relational methods could be particularly valuable for those whose work spans research and helping professions, like social workers, but it also provides a revealing alternative criterion for anyone engaged in social research to consider their work in terms of meaning for its subjects. Today, more than ever, our everyday lives are influenced by forces outside our local spaces. But Harvey Perkins and David Thorns, as the authors of Place, Identity, and Everyday Life in a Globalizing World, argue that we are not only influenced by but also influence in return the lives and shared cultures of others outside our city, region, or nation in a bi-directional, interactive process. The authors mix the theoretical with practical and real space with virtual place to provide a comprehensive foundation of modern research on everyday life and identity in modern global cities.
The book is divided into three sections, each building on the previous. First, the authors establish their conceptual framework by reviewing the intellectual and theoretical developments of understandings about the role of place in constructing identity and the everyday lived experience. They also provide a clear and comprehensible working definition of globalization and the expansion of understandings of globalization into the social and cultural. In the second part, the authors begin with a sociohistorical explanation of urbanization. They continue with an explanation of the role of place and both real and imagined spaces in the development of everyday identities. The final section of the book addresses modern issues of sustainability, especially as climate change discourses shift from the global and national level to what can be done at the city and community level (i.e., the everyday experience level).
This book presents a clear introduction to the theoretical foundations and literature regarding culture, identity, experience, and economy in the modern world. It would serve as a useful text for upper level undergraduate or introductory graduate courses, especially within geography, sociology, and urban studies. The Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua is far removed-in time, technology, and geography-from the wave of Arab Spring revolutions witnessed recently. Yet, books like Adiós Muchachos allow us to understand the intricacies of political struggles in our current world. As Sergio Ramírez's recollection of the Sandinista liberation suggests, revolutions are a tricky business. They do not happen within a vacuum. In fact, navigating the resulting power vacuum left by overthrowing a regime may be the best that revolutionaries could hope for. Furthermore, in the case of Nicaragua, the Sandinista Revolution occurred during the Cold War, resulting in further entrenchment in U.S. global politics as well as a less-than-subtle conflict with the Catholic Church.
Originally published in 1999, this edition of Adiós Muchachos contains Ramírez's views on more recent developments in the Sandinista regime, including the re-election of Daniel Ortega as president in 2006. Like many memoirs, the book has a nostalgic tone. But despite being inter-dispersed with Nicaraguan poetry, it stops short of the melodramatic. A reader will undoubtedly ache for the purity of ideology and become queasy about the role that the United States played in Nicaragua's history. Yet, Ramírez's candid and ultimate disillusionment with the Sandinistas provides ample opportunity to respect the reality of what makes ideals so difficult to uphold.
Ramírez is the former vice president of Nicaragua and original member of the revolutionary government, making him a valid source of information, privy to intimate knowledge of the Sandinista revolution and the fallout thereafter. He provides as unbiased an assessment as we can expect from a memoir. He does not shy away from the fact that the revolution for the masses was led by a minority of elite individuals: writers, doctors, and lawyers.
Beyond being a valid and interesting source, Ramírez is also an accomplished writer, whose literary skill shines through in every detail of the memoir. His words leave vivid details lingering in the mind of readers: intrepid mothers bringing food to their sons on the battlefield, bodies lying in pools of blood, and the swell of elation among the people as the revolutionary government returned to the country. The book is overflowing with fascinating anecdotes, including recollections of Ramírez's personal meetings with Jimmy Carter, Fidel Castro, and Muammar Gaddafi. Perhaps most memorable is the Sandinista interaction with Pope John Paul II and the events surrounding his disastrous 1983 visit to Nicaragua.
In short, a lot can be learned from this book that transcends history and presentday affairs. Adiós Muchachos provides the reader with inside knowledge of revolutions, global politics, and human aspirations. And perhaps the best gift this book offers is the opportunity to learn while enjoying a great read. The history of sociology has become a thriving subfield in Europe and Britain while U.S. sociologists continue to ignore it except incidentally. This is partly because there are few courses on the proper history of the discipline (as opposed to the history of its theories), therefore no reason for textbooks in that area, and no need for faculty. Psychology, by contrast, teaches the history of its field regularly, so publishers have provided a slew of suitable textbooks and monographs. Faculty who specialize in the history of that discipline are not rare. The Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences features far more articles on psychology, of course, than on sociology; and the short-lived journal, History of Sociology, during the 1980s was at that time impossible to sustain financially. There were plenty of submissions for publication but few academic libraries willing to foot the bill. This means that when histories of U.S. sociology are currently written, the authors are most often historians proper whose work flies under the flag of ''intellectual history.'' Some of these scholars do superb work, but one wishes that an historian of a given field would have enough education within it to feel at home there, rather than passing through as an interested visitor.
So it is that a Lecturer (i.e., Assistant Professor) at York University in the United Kingdom, Chris Renwick (PhD, Leeds, 2009), based in the history department, has decided to specialize in the complex story of biology's impact on the nascent social sciences of the nineteenth century. He has covered sociology in this book and will presumably move to economics in his next one. The story in outline is simple, and little known in the United States. The first sociology chair in Britain went to L.T. Hobhouse in 1907 at the London School of Economics, who simultaneously took over the editorship of Britain's only sociology journal, The Sociological Review. Hobhouse is mentioned today as a political theorist, but his work was broader than that. Renwick explains how debates were being held since the 1870s among learned societies, like The British Association for the Advancement of Science, on the question of ''what to do about sociology''-which in practical terms meant either that of Spencer or Comte. Politicaleconomy was being attacked for its narrowness and improbable domain assumptions, and it was thought that sociology could cure its ills, while also showing how to reconstruct society along lines that would ease class tensions.
But far more importantly, Francis Galton and Patrick Geddes were both pushing hard to integrate genetics and biological theorizing into the social sciences, and were having some success among scholars and the public. Followers of Galton and Geddes himself stood in hot contention for the sociology chair that Hobhouse won, and in the latter's inaugural speech, he firmly swept aside the claims that biological reductionism Briefly Noted 691 had been making on sociology during the preceding years. His orientation was instead toward political philosophy, the philosophy of history, the natural sciences, and political-economy as inspired by Adam Smith (p. 170). Sociology was to earn its keep by providing the British government and other interested parties with scientifically tenable solutions to social problems, and Hobhouse's approach, not Galton's nor Geddes', would, he claimed, succeed in that.
Renwick's book is clearly written, well documented, and gives all the information that modern sociologists might want about Galton's eugenics program and Geddes' ''biosocial science of civics,'' in addition to a precis of Hobhouse's triumphant counterprogram. It also, of course, illuminates obvious parallels between our own geneobsessed intellectual period and that of the Victorians. As Steve Fuller correctly says in his foreword, ''This is history of science at its best.'' Although considered a peripheral concern for the majority of sociologists, the analysis of music and its dissemination into social groupings provides a more than adequate window through which to view the relations between cultural development, economic structures, and technological change. Chris Rojek demonstrates this admirably through an eminently sociological approach to understanding the formation and maintenance of pop music in the contemporary world. What is specifically important about this book, however, is depth of the analysis, as it spans the process of music production from the early oral traditions all the way to the now common practices of file-sharing and internet radio.
Rojek's primary argument focuses on the notion of ''pop culture,'' a term which goes beyond the traditional approaches to popular music, as it seeks to incorporate the range of experience from artist production to the evolving technologies of performance, reproduction, and dissemination. This is demonstrated through his concept of ''cultural de-differentiation''; a process whereby the traditional genre boundaries dissolve into less concise demarcations, and the avenues of dissemination move toward an aggregation of previously disparate forms (such as the marketing of ringtones or internet streaming). This process, Rojek argues, leads to the generation of cultural monadism among individuals, who shift their cultural consumption patterns through a distillation of broad cultural forms, producing a private form of gestural currency and cultural savvy which is simultaneously rationalized and uniquely individual. This transitioning between various cultural fronts allows for a passive consumption which lends itself to the translation of political, economic, and cultural issues into the establishment of gestural culture, or the expression of commitment and solidarity as a form of representation as opposed to a basis for action. One can hear echos of the Frankfurt School in this work, but such a comparison could be considered inappropriate given the nature of Rojek's analysis.
Despite what seems like a relatively simple topic, Rojek's book is both complex and engaging. Additionally, the book also provides a concise look at the empirical developments and perspectives in the study of popular music. Therefore, this book is best recommended as a companion to undergraduate courses on popular music (or even contemporary Western culture). Furthermore, scholars who focus on culture, music, and the intersections between technology and society should find that Rojek's book is a worthwhile read on a fascinating subject. Timothy Rowlands' Video Game Worlds delves into the virtual realm of EverQuest, a massively multiplayer online game (MMO), delivering both an account and critique of online gaming culture. While the widely-known MMO World of Warcraft supplanted the popularity of EverQuest in the late 2000s, Rowlands uses the specific case of EverQuest to analyze both the rise and decline of an MMO from its release in 1999 to the present. Ambitious in scope beyond simply an ethnographic record of an MMO, Rowlands' work has two primary research questions: to identify and describe EverQuest's game culture, and to determine how this culture has emerged through ''design decisions made by the virtual world's producers and by gamers' collectively negotiated meanings of the rules'' (p. 14). Rowlands examines these research questions through both immersive experience and interviews with gamers, imbuing his research with a theoretical framework, including Roland Barthes' use of myth and values and Jean-Francois Lyotard's notion of the grand narrative (p. 17).
In his account, Rowlands first describes the strategies and practices that have come to dominate the game, such as the normative ''Holy Trinity Camp Group'' strategy that combines the efforts of three types of characters to wage attacks on monsters. Rowlands then proceeds to unpack the series of management decisions and gamer practices that led to the formation of EverQuest's social norms that he describes. Moreover, Rowlands seeks to understand why these particular norms have developed and are so entrenched in the game, despite being ''a severe curtailment of what is actually possible in the virtual world'' (p. 65). Rowlands suggests that a critical shift occurred within EverQuest, wherein a player's actions within the game became institutionalized at the cost of ''playfulness'' in the game's virtual world (p. 88). Later in his book, Rowlands examines the ways in which the hegemonic structures of EverQuest are connected to global economic forces and the philosophical underpinnings that reinforce these structures, invoking both ''a nineteenth century notion of the civilizing mission and a twenty-first century notion of global corporate hegemonies'' (p. 128).
This work is engaging, even to those unfamiliar with online gaming, and a comprehensive glossary is beneficial for explaining general gaming and EverQuest-specific terminology. This book would be of most interest to scholars of cultural studies, the sociology of knowledge, social psychology, and the role of myth and ritual in the virtual world. In this ambitious ethnography of postwar El Salvador, Irina Silber examines the complexity of reconstruction and development through the lived experiences of rural peasants in transition from one struggle to another. Everyday Revolutionaries considers two key periods, the postwar reconstruction (1993)(1994)(1995)(1996)(1997)(1998) and the recent period of emigration from El Salvador to the United States (2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008). The author begins her fieldwork in a former insurgent stronghold of northern El Salvador, but finds that the full story of reconstruction takes her to the United States where an unofficial development policy turns former revolutionaries into undocumented migrants. Silber uncovers how in the transition from war to peace, everyday lives are ensnared in the contradictions and conflicts which emerge between hope and disillusionment, development and marginalization, repatriation and diaspora.
Central to the investigation is a concern with how people navigate the transition from revolutionary action to nation-building in the face of continued marginalization. Through participant observation, in-depth interviews, and the collection of life histories, the author gathers stories from former revolutionaries and refugees as they live out new roles (e.g., activist, community leader, mother, and migrant). This work helps to illuminate the challenges and possibilities of democracy in postwar El Salvador. However just as importantly, it bears witness to the experiences of violence, despair, and loss that constitute the history of war. The author explores how this history is actively constructed and how the celebration of memory is selective, often emphasizing the heroism of revolutionary struggle. The author suggests that these acts seek to create feelings of community and solidarity, which stand Briefly Noted 693 in tension with many people's experiences of disillusionment and betrayal. Through this broad lens, Silber offers insight to a number of phenomena including the gendered experiences of war and reconstruction, the NGO-boom that followed the war, the failure of development and return to diaspora, and the emergence of new forms of governance and control (i.e., neoliberal governmentality). The book will be of interest both to area specialists as well as more generally to those researching collective memory, peace and war, development, and migration. Was Social, 1948-1980, by Michael E. Staub. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011 At present, the utility of psychiatry is welldocumented and presents a relatively uncontroversial solution to mental health issues ranging from minor neuroses to larger problems of family relations and inter-group interaction. As author Michael E. Staub demonstrates though, this assessment of the value of psychiatry in contemporary life has undergone radical change since the 1980s, from a time when the notion of psychiatry was seen as repressive, and mental illness was viewed an outgrowth of societal conditions rather than as an individual medical problem.

Madness is Civilization: When the Diagnosis
In Staub's illuminating account of the postwar era of anti-psychiatry, the author traces the dramatic rise in social explanations for mental health issues brought about by the development of attuned psychodynamic theories in tandem with the rapid social change occurring from the 1940s until 1980. During this period we find the culturally-and politically-charged idea that madness was an appropriate response to extant social conditions. When placed alongside the emergence of the New Left, the Civil Rights movement, and feminism, as well as the rise of Fascism and the Cold War, Staub is able to chronicle the development of American psychiatry. In this process, Staub is able to uncover the dynamics between political and intellectual institutions, and the role of social diagnoses in shaping general notions of the self, the family, and even avenues for social change.
An interesting and accessible read, Madness is Civilization sheds new light on the subject of mental health in the United States, while cohesively drawing together disparate intellectual developments under the rise (and fall) of the anti-psychiatry movement. While it may be a (small) stretch to suggest that most social scientists should take a look at the book, the topic intersects a wide selection of sociological sub-fields, such as family, social psychology, political sociology, education, and others. As such, any scholar with an interest in the changing dynamics of American culture and politics should include this book on their reading lists, as it provides both a unique and insightful analysis of the emergence of social diagnostic thinking and its importance in social change. Power is a ubiquitous feature of social life, particularly within the context of modern organizational society. Yet, as the editors of this volume highlight, power is a slippery concept, which receives less attention by organizational scholars than its importance merits. In particular, Dean Tjosvold and Barbara Wisse emphasize that, as organizations increasingly operate in globalized environments, more research is needed on how cultural and individual understandings of power influence the management of power and its impact on organizational effectiveness. This volume contributes to such a project by presenting insights from international scholars across a diverse set of disciplines, including sociology, organizational studies, social psychology, and leadership and management studies. Divided into five sections, the contributions address key issues emerging from contemporary research such as the social nature of power and how positive and negative aspects of power are managed through relationships, theories of leadership and power-sharing, exchange dynamics and outcomes, the power to influence, and how values and ethics shape forms of leadership.
The chapters address a wide variety of topics. For example, Jeffrey Pfeffer considers the roots of ambivalence towards power and politics. Barbara Wisse and Daan Van Knippenberg examine how self-concept influences individual behavior, including tendencies towards cooperation versus competition and susceptibility to influence. Considering the importance of implied theories of power, Peter T. Coleman provides evidence that the basic views individuals hold about the nature of people and of social reality may influence willingness to share power in organizational settings. Linda D. Molm elaborates a perspective to power studies based within social exchange theory. In a chapter on leadership and conflict management, Randall S. Peterson and Sarah Harvey highlight the benefits of indirect power (e.g., structuring the group, directing group processes, managing external boundaries), which is often more effective at diffusing conflict than direct power (e.g., taking over tasks, making decisions, instructing others). The closing chapter by Ping Ping Fu and Caroline Fu examines non-Western, specifically Taoist, values of leadership and their potential usefulness in Western management settings. All told, this volume provides a useful reference to contemporary research on power in organizations. It presents a broad array of disciplinary perspectives and findings, which would be useful to those with an interest in organizations, management, leadership, power, or conflict. In Selling the Amish, Susan L. Trollinger presents a thorough cultural analysis of the tourism surrounding ''Amish Country'' in the United States, addressing issues far beyond the economic relationship between tourists and tourist sites. Trollinger incorporates information from 15 years of research, including original fieldwork among her sources. She frames the Amish as a subculture choosing its way of life to best serve its religious beliefs, with guidelines promoting ways of voluntary simplicity, and the tourists as ''middle Americans'' seeking contact with the Amish way of life and its benefits. However, the Amish are less directly involved in tourism scenes than might be expected-they serve as more of an image or ideal in these contexts, yet their presence plays a vital role.
Trollinger focuses on three carefullyselected tourist destinations in Ohio's Amish Country: Walnut Creek, Berlin, and Sugarcreek. These sites have important differences in the focus of their tourist attractions, and illustrate themes underlying Amish country tourism as a whole. Walnut Creek features gift shops, a chocolate shop, an inn, and the famous Der Dutchman Restaurant. She discusses how the Victorian architecture is seemingly inconsistent with the Amish theme, explaining it as part of a process giving tourists a sense of hope for being able to create a simpler world in which time is more plentiful and ambiguity about gender roles is resolved, modeled after that of the Amish. Berlin features vendors of antiques and other goods as well as the Farmstead Restaurant, with an American frontier theme displaying American heritage as peaceful and resulting from the agency of inventive pioneers. This site serves to inspire tourists to reconsider their relationship with technology, and to reflect on the sense of autonomy from the technologies accepted by the Amish (similar to many of those of the frontier period). Sugarcreek, also called ''The Little Switzerland of Ohio,'' hosts the Ohio Swiss Festival annually (which started in 1953 as a way to increase demand from the local Swiss cheese factories), and features some Swiss-style architecture. Trollinger frames the Swiss festival as a performance of ethnicity, reminiscent of the identification becoming lost over time. The Amish have a strong sense of ethnic identity and performance-it is a constant process, while the Swiss festival only takes place once every Briefly Noted 695 year. The Amish population does not seem to be diminishing, either.
Trollinger reminds us of the disconnect between Amish reality and the tourist sites and their cultural importance. The tourism indeed seems to thrive on the meaning generated and how important it is to visitors (p. xix). Her Amish informants described crossing paths with tourists not as chances to put on a show for them, but ''opportunities to make visible another way of being in the world, a way that is peaceful and fulfilling'' (p. 149). Overall, the book is very readable, and should be engaging for those interested in the Amish subculture and the tourism surrounding it. The chapter notes provided before the index were very thorough and informative, but would receive more attention if they were formatted as footnotes or pages at the end of each chapter. This book also may be appropriate for coursework focusing on tourism or cultural studies more generally.
In The Rhetoric of Racist Humour, Simon Weaver presents a rhetorical critique of racist humor, explaining ''what racist humour does and how it does it'' (p. 2). Weaver draws extensively on theory, literature, and many specific examples of relevant themes for various types of racist humor. This book fills a gap in the literature by discussing racist humor as an active part of the process of ''othering'' and ambiguity between racial groups, instead of as simply a result of these processes.
The introduction outlines the argument and presents current approaches to, as well as challenges associated with, studying humor. Chapters One and Two establish the foundation for analysis of the rhetoric of humor in general, and humor as order-building specifically. Chapter Three focuses on embodied racism and uses examples of U.S. internet joking, distinguishing this type of racist joke from non-stereotyped jokes. In Chapter Four, cultural racism, or ''new racism,'' is discussed and applied in examples of British stand-up comedy. Chapters Five and Six discuss reverse discourse as attempts to reverse initial racist meaning, and how it is applied in black and Asian comic performance, respectively. Chapters Seven and Eight focus on two specific examples of liquid, postmodern, or ''layered'' racism (p. 153): Sacha Baron Cohen's character, Ali G, and the publication of cartoons illustrating the Islamic Prophet Muhammad in the Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten. The conclusion addresses the continuing shift toward postmodern humor and its accompanying polysemia.
The main themes are discussed throughout the book, but individual chapters may be especially useful for exploring a specific element or type of racist humor. Graduate students and scholars studying the sociology of humor, as well as those interested in related topics in popular culture and communications, will find this book informative. Tom Wilber has written the only book about fracking that you would care to read. Highvolume hydraulic fracturing, AKA fracking, is an industrial process that releases tiny bubbles of natural gas in layers of shale by obliterating the shale stratum with millions of gallons of highly-pressurized water, some sand, and a chemical cocktail. Josh Fox visited many of the same locations and political contests in his documentary Gasland that Tom Wilbur explores much more thoroughly and academically herein.
Wilber is a career journalist who covered an environmental beat around Binghamton, NY until the shale gas boom began. Two years ago he quit reporting to focus completely on writing this book, and the density of factual information and evenhanded reportorial style evident in this exposé prove he quit for the right reasons. Wilber traveled to many of the locations in the northeastern United States where property leasing, drilling, and regulating for shale gas development has been happening since the