Abstract
The stubbornly parochial nature of western (and especially American) social science is well documented. Social science journals, university presses, and job markets show a strong preference for U.S. and European knowledge and for authors based at institutions in the West. James D. Wright’s The Global Enterprise: Social Scientists and Their Work around the World aims to challenge this intellectual lacuna by lifting up analyses and insights from scholarship published in journals based outside the United States.
Wright organizes the volume’s twenty-six essays into regional categories, examining studies from Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, Australasia, the Middle East, Latin America, and “Elsewhere.” The basis for each chapter is a single, previously published article from the global social science literature, largely from scholars based outside the United States. Wright takes each of these articles, summarizing their findings and discussing them through his own sociological lens. An overarching goal is to challenge the narrow frames that have enabled “a great deal of what we think of as social science knowledge” to come from a “largely Western experience” (p. xi).
There should be little question that this is a laudable goal. Each of the chapters does indeed bring key knowledge and findings to light that might not otherwise have reached social scientists in the United States and Europe. What Wright refers to as “source documents” for his chapters are the original social scientific articles published in journals like Sotsiologicheski Issledovaniia (Sociological Research) or in books published by Poland’s Wydawnictwo Naukowe University Press. There are also plenty of examples drawn from international social science journals and encyclopedias, which may not have otherwise reached the desks of social scientists who predominantly read journals published by national disciplinary associations.
In this sense, then, Wright’s project to raise the profile of international scholarship in the social sciences is an important intervention in its own right, even without his additional analyses and commentaries. But his own take on the research findings, peppered with anecdotal stories and notes about his experiences in these regions, are also useful. In a chapter on street children in Honduras, Wright’s description of touring numerous orphanages in Honduras in the early 1990s as part of a research project (Proyecto Alternativos) on health education and structured play for “street kids” adds welcome context to the discussion of the research findings. Other chapters offer similar personal history and context that helps ground research findings in Wright’s own lived experience.
When I sat down to write this review, I had two critiques to note. The first is that I wondered whether it might not have been possible to include some of the authors of the original articles as coauthors of the essays that summarize and analyze their work. There is no question that these essays are refracted through Wright’s own lens and that there is value in lifting up knowledge to social scientists in the United States and Europe who might not otherwise have encountered that knowledge. But on some level, I found it unsatisfactory for the solution to require a member of those same western structures to be the sole author of work that so clearly relies on the work of so many from more marginalized places.
My second critique was that the essays sometimes conclude with personal notes and postscripts that did not always add value to the analysis presented. But during the course of writing this review, I learned that James Wright passed away a few months ago. In light of that news, the personal notes and postscripts took on new meaning for me as a reader—as notations that add a human note to a kind of scholarly writing that is typically more detached. I am glad to have had the chance to learn more about James Wright as a scholar and as a human being while reading his final book. I suspect that other colleagues, students, and scholars may find these postscripts more meaningful in that light as well.