Abstract
Motti Neiger, Oren Meyers and Eyal Zandberg (eds), On Media Memory: Collective Memory in a New Media Age, Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke and New York, 2011; 300 pp.: £55.00
Remembering is ineluctably a social process, being structured and directed by the views and perspectives of the social groups to which people belong. Ever since Bartlett and Halbwachs, we have come to see memory as in many ways moulded by particular mental schemata and configurations associated with the various groups that exist within a social whole. Yet the notion of collective memory is beset with problems – problems of exaggeration, reification, functionalism, and more. It is therefore fitting that in this edited collection the work of Halbwachs in particular is regarded critically and extended historically while also being recognized as providing the necessary starting point: ‘social groups construct their own images of the world by constantly shaping and reshaping versions of the past’ (p. 3). The social frameworks of memory as well as the kinds of memory being actively promoted have also changed over time, and at least partly in relation to this the editors propose the shift from ‘collective’ to ‘media memory’. They provide a useful introduction setting out what they see is involved in this shift, following which they organize the book into five sections dealing with questions of theory and methodology, the ethical dimension of mediated memory and how this relates to the act of witnessing, media memory and popular culture, journalism and its prospective shaping of social memory, and the relationship between new technologies and collective remembering. As with any collection of essays, there is variable quality among its various contributions, but the volume as a whole is a welcome addition to the field of memory studies, and certain essays within it are particularly valuable in helping us think through questions of media and mediation in social or public memory. The scope of the essays is impressive, for they cover a range of different media, are related to a various different countries, and offer a diverse set of case studies. This is an important contribution to the Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies series. Three cheers to Motti Neiger, Oren Meyers and Eyal Zandberg for putting it together.
John B Thompson, Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century, Polity: Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA, 2010; 432 pp.: £20.00
Book publishing seems to have enjoyed a golden age in the early postwar period, but by the end of the 20th century evidence of its demise was everywhere and today, like most other cultural industries, publishing is undergoing considerable change. In contrast to those halcyon days when Penguin ruled, it is moving into a period of turbulence and uncertainty. This has partly come about through technological development and possibility, partly through global economic crisis. It is therefore appropriate for us to have at this time a thoroughgoing survey and appraisal of the book publishing industry. This is what John Thompson offers, focusing on the way the industry in Britain and the United States has changed since the 1960s. His book looks at the growth of retail chains and transformation of the broad retail environment of bookselling, the rise of the literary agent as a power broker, and the establishment of transnational publishing corporations. The establishment of such corporations has been fuelled by various mergers and acquisitions, with many independent publishers being absorbed as subsidiaries of a small handful of industrial conglomerates. Thompson then examines the manifold consequences of these three key patterns of development, along with digital transformation and the effects of this on the publishing of books. For Thompson, the book publishing industry has a distinctive logic and dynamic, and he is at pains to lay these open to scrutiny throughout the book. Merchants of Culture is based on research carried out over a four-year period from 2005 to 2009, funded by the ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) in the UK. This enabled 280 interviews to be conducted with executives, publishers, editors, sales directors, marketing directors, publicists and promoters, as well as agents, authors and booksellers. The result is a major contribution to our understanding of this important media industry and the changes it has been, and is going through. It is a wide-ranging and illuminating account that will stand out in its field for the foreseeable future.
Matteo Stocchetti and Karin Kukkonen (eds), Images in Use: Towards the Critical Analysis of Visual Communication, John Benjamins: Amsterdam and Philadelphia, 2011; 298 pp.: €95.00/US$143.00
The purpose of this edited collection is to develop critical perspectives on the social and political uses of images. The emphasis is thus not on the power of images in themselves, but on visual communication as a site of political competition, competition for control over how social values are represented and distributed. This entails a critical focus on the uses of images, rather than the images first and foremost, and within such uses the communicative strategies that inspire them. The two sections in the volume deal with the conceptual concerns of images in use, and offer a set of case studies of visual communication in late modern societies. The first involves critiques of existing analytical approaches, particularly those of poststructuralism and postmodernism, and (in Ruth Wodak’s chapter) the blurring of distinctions between fiction and reality, media and politics, as central to disenchantment with politics. The chapters of the second part cover a number of varied topics, from the visual politics of celebrities and humanitarian causes, the visualization of sexualities in contemporary consumer culture, power and desire in film plots, to visuality and narrative in superhero comics. Matteo Stocchetti and Karin Kukkonen have assembled a richly assorted collection of essays on images in social and political use. It is a worthy successor to their previous volume, Images and Communities (2007).
David Hansen-Miller, Civilised Violence: Subjectivity, Gender and Popular Cinema, Ashgate: Farnham, UK and Burlington, VT, 2011; 205 pp.: £55.00
Graphic representations of violence and their influence over viewers is an evergreen topic in media studies, and it would seem that all that can be said has been said, but in this book David Hansen-Miller attends to a rather neglected aspect of such representations. This is their popular attraction and appeal. As he puts it at the start: the ‘appeal of cinema violence can be ascribed to the way in which particular narratives productively reinscribe violence in those areas where it is being concealed and absorbed’ (p. 2). In doing this they disseminate a modern pedagogy of violence and power, one quite different to the scaffold’s display of a sovereign’s authority. Hansen-Miller begins by tracing this transformation from the condensed power evinced in brutal spectacle to the distributed power of effaced forms of violence (or as Gellner once put it, the move from rule by the hangman to rule by generalized bribery). He thus takes key instances of violent cinematic representation, from The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, through The Sheik to Once Upon a Time in the West and Deliverance, in order to show how they operate as conduits for social and cultural relations of violence. Through his analysis of such films, Hansen-Miller shows us that the concealment and denial of the exercise of violence in modern societies explains why audiences are drawn to films where they can see violence restored to everyday life. It is an interesting thesis, and the book as a whole should help revitalize our thinking about visual media and depictions of violence by seeing these in a longer-term context in which violence has not been exorcized from modern views of the world but transfigured into new forms where it retains a certain atavistic appeal, yet is also made to quell social fears of the Other and reassure us that discipline and order will prevail.
Adel Iskander and Hakem Rustom (eds), Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation, University of California Press: Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 2010; 548 pp.: £20.95
Edward Said died in 2003. His passing seemed to leave a sudden and deep impoverishment, for we had lost one of the sanest voices on Middle East politics. It was a voice that had passionately, insightfully and eloquently appraised events and processes in the region over a 40-year period. Said was a public intellectual, not a media don. He combined cultural criticism and political analysis in a way that was distinctively his own. It is therefore fitting that we have this edited collection devoted to sympathetic yet critical engagement with his work, not least because it acts as a corrective to his detractors and the attempts that have been made to undermine, distort and derogate his work in quite partisan ways. The intention is to examine and discuss his intellectual legacy, and the realization of this has necessarily to be interdisciplinary (just as Said was) and move across and between academic borders. The book’s three thematic sections cover aesthe- tics and the colony; Palestine, Israel and Zionism, along with the politics of dispossession; and the intellectual at the margins. Each of these opens with an interview transcript, these in order of appearance having been conducted with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Daniel Barenboim and Noam Chomsky. The book as a whole is lengthy and rich, diverse and fruitful, lively and illuminating. The many contributors include such distinguished names as Jacqueline Rose, Ella Shohat, R Radhakrishan, WJT Mitchell and Benita Parry, but what is most impressive about the volume is its breadth, testifying to the expansive scope of Said’s work as well as the vitality of his thought. At the end, the lesson is clear: his legacy remains vibrant, and continues to inspire.
Marshall T Poe, A History of Communications: Media and Society from the Evolution of Speech to the Internet, Cambridge University Press: New York and Cambridge, 2011; 337 pp.: £17.99
Marshall Poe believes that we do not have an effective way of explaining the emergence of new media. This is because, with one exception, existing theories of media causation are deficient. The exception is Harold Innis’s theory of media genesis and effects. Poe summarizes this as the proposition that new media are ‘pulled’ into widespread use by rising demand and broad historical trends, and once in widespread use, these media ‘push’ social institutions in predictable directions. This is all mapped out in the introduction in which Poe develops his approach in terms of the specific attributes and causal relations with each other which define all media, networks and cultures. Following this, he takes us through the history of communications set out in huge swathes of time that are characterized by epoch-defining communicative forms: speech, manuscripts, print, audiovisual media and the internet. This is balanced by attention to detail, example and case. The book concludes with a chapter which attempts to assess the relationship between media and human well-being. For Poe, the media may have improved the material and sensory experience of humankind, but it is doubtful if they have contributed much to our spiritual well-being (difficult though that is to define). This is certainly a wide-ranging, ambitious book, a grand historical survey of communications media. Some will find it too sweeping, omitting not only too much historical minutiae but also the analytical density of cultural history focused on a definite set of temporal experiences. Poe’s historical canvas is instead of the broadest possible because of his preoccupation with the impact of different forms of communication on history in the extremely long long-term. The book is nevertheless consistent and coherent in advancing its central thesis and there is clearly a place for a chronological panoramic tour across the development of successive epochs of communication. Universalist historiography rides again!
Leon Barkho, News from the BBC, CNN, and Al-Jazeera, Hampton Press: Cresskill, NJ, 2010; 185 pp.: US$49.50
The BBC, CNN and Al-Jazeera are arguably the three most significant media companies in reporting and representing the Middle East. It is therefore sensible to bring them together within one study. Leon Barkho is particularly concerned with how they mediate and give space to voices involved in the conflict in Iraq and in the struggle between the Palestinians and Israelis. Although he adopts the now familiar approach of critical discourse analysis, he does not confine himself to analysis of text, language and discursive structures. He also includes material from interviews with senior editors and journalists in the three outfits, ethnographic observation of news production, and data relating to their institutional organization and company policies. The attempt to avoid linguistic-centrism, characteristic of critical discourse analysis, is a welcome feature of the book, but its value goes beyond that in showing how each of these three broadcasters are central in shaping our understanding of the Middle East.
Patrik Wikström, The Music Industry, Polity: Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA, 2009; 204 pp.: £14.99
This was then: a new album was released and when, where and how it was marketed, distributed and promoted was controlled by multinational, vertically integrated music companies. This is now: a new album and when, where and how it is marketed, distributed and promoted can be controlled horizontally by the artist or artists involved, with the process also incorporating participation in remixes, video accompaniments, blog posts and the like. What the move amounts to is a considerable shake-up of the producer–consumer relationship in the world of music. It is this transformation which Patrik Wikström explores in this addition to Polity’s Digital Media and Society series. For him, there are three key features characterizing the dynamics of the new music industry: a shift from low to high level connectivity; a move from provision of a product to provision of a service; a change in the degree to which music listeners can actively participate by creating, remixing and publishing content online; and so also a change in the distinction between professional and amateur. These features in turn cut across the three interrelating dimensions of recording, publishing and (live) performing. Wikström takes us through the tension between copyright, profit maximization and creativity; changes in the music industry; the relationship between recorded music, media and audiences; the professional making of music, both in the studio and on stage; changes in the production system involving songwriters, composers, artists and producers; and the role of music fans in the new music ecology. This can involve some fascinating cases of consumption as creativity, as for example with the online projects of artists like Nine Inch Nails and Imogen Heap; such cases undermine what is understood by a finished song and song ownership, leading us to a more fully-fledged conception of music as a spatially and temporally extended conversation. Wikström has produced a clearly written, insightful outline of post-Napster development in the music industry. Its greatest value lies in explaining the digitally directed changes recently and currently happening in the industry, which, for the most part, comes across as wholly self-interested, slow to change and unable to respond to new possibilities until they are realized and come to smack it round the chops. If you want to bring yourself up to date with these changes, you will find this book very useful.
Kembrew McLeod and Peter DiCola, Creative Licence: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling, Duke University Press: Durham, NC and London, 2011; 325 pp.: £16.99
Mix, mash-up and remake: this is the basic formula for music sampling. It is a latter-day extension of the folk process whereby a tune is borrowed and reapplied, lyrical motifs are passed on, or narrative structures are borrowed and adapted, as well as the same song or tune being creatively modified as it passes from person to person. Part of the extension involves cross-genre rejoins, which makes the music far more varied: a patchwork of different styles and idioms. It is still old wine in new bottles. And here’s the almighty snag: music copyright. Sampling can be taken as infringement of copyright and an illegal activity. It all depends on the context, on how what is done is interpreted, whether in respect of the legal proprieties of intellectual property, or in respect of fair use doctrine. In this book, Kembrew McLeod and Peter DiCola help unravel the complexities involved in licensing digital samples. In so doing they draw on interviews they have conducted with over a hundred musicians, managers, lawyers, industry personnel, journalists and scholars. Their book puts music sampling into historical, cultural and legal context. They begin with the ‘golden age’ of sampling in the 1980s and early 1990s, and the lawsuits that shaped US copyright law on sampling, before looking at the broader history of musical collage across time and in relation to different musical genres. They outline the different positions and perspectives people have in the industry, and the competing interests that are at stake. We learn of key judicial decisions that have determined how copyright law applies to sampling disputes, of the sample clearance system, and of the various changes and adjustments musicians have made in response to this system. The final chapter in the book is devoted to several proposals for reform. McLeod and DiCola’s aim is to find ‘a set of complementary solutions that are practical, uphold the value of compensating musicians who are sampled where appropriate, and reduce the extent to which sample-licensing burdens creativity’ (p. 16). It is clear that the current entangled system, at least in the United States, is inefficient and likely to inhibit creativity. This book makes an important contribution to arriving at a better understanding of what sampling involves and how it is hampered, and a better means of handling and managing it so that it can be deployed and developed in as many creative ways as possible.
Nordicom Review, Vol. 32, No. 2, November 2011, Nordicom: Göteborg
The second issue of Nordicom Review for 2011 contains a number of interesting articles. It begins with Birgitta Höijer’s outline of social representations theory and argument for its value in media research. She focuses particularly on anchoring and objectification as communicative mechanisms, and shows how they provide conceptual tools in empirical analysis. Harry Arne Solberg and Knut Helland discuss sports broadcasting and the ways in which it has been affected in Norway by various forms of business integration and technology innovation. Håkon Larsen scrutinizes the rhetoric used in white papers on public service broadcasting and cultural policy in 2005 and 2007 in Norway and Sweden, while Steen Steensen attends to the aggrandisement of feature journalism, this having moved from a minor supplement to news journalism to a family of genres dominating today’s newspapers. Challenges faced by journalists in covering innovation topics are aired by Maria Lassila-Merisalo; Holger Pötzsch investigates the discursive construction of the enemy as less than human in various war and action movies; Wenche Vagle explores the early years of radio broadcasting in Norway from 1925 to 1940; and Trine Kvidal attends to tensions between globalized orientations and local cultural identity as they emerge in TV commercials. The Review as usual lives up to its reputation as a vehicle for scholarly analysis and debate in media and communications.
Sean Burns, Archie Green: The Making of a Working-class Hero, University of Illinois Press: Urbana, Chicago and Springfield, 2011; 232 pp.: US$25.00
In 2009 there passed away a champion of the expressive culture of the American working class. This was Archie Green, born in 1917 to Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine. He is known for such books as Only a Miner (1972), a study of the songs of coal miners; Wobblies, Pile Butts, and Other Heroes (1993), described as ‘explorations in labour lore’; and Torching the Fink Books and Other Essays on Vernacular Culture (2001). Green believed strongly in labour unionism, and a radical pluralist, democratic political culture, with the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) being a touchstone for him in this respect. He studied culture from the bottom up, and took an inclusive approach to it, though he was perhaps most interested in working-class and labour movement songs. In this book, Sean Burns offers a fascinating account of Green’s life and work. We learn of his political and intellectual formation, and his extensive scholarship on the traditions and cultural practices of working people. The book is valuable not only for this, but also because Green’s life experience was interwoven with the social history of the American left. Burns draws on oral history interviews as well as on Green’s letters and personal essays, and blends this with material from archival sources and secondary historical research. He begins with the passage of early 20th-century immigrants from the Old World into the New, and their negotiation of new identities, before taking us stage by stage through Green’s life. Three chapters are devoted to Green’s passion for vernacular music, a passion that went hand in hand with his political activism. Burns expresses this combination well when he says that ‘Green’s considerable intellectual and activist contributions might be best summarised as an effort to assert the intelligence and dignity of workers within a social order that consistently denies and silences their voices’ (p. xxii). This is a rewarding account of a remarkable man. Burns has certainly done him justice, and the book is to be recommended not only as a biography but also as a study shedding light on the left-wing politics of 20th-century America.
Paul Hodkinson, Media, Culture and Society: An Introduction, Sage: Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington, DC, 2011; 320 pp.: £22.99
There are a fair few general introductions to media and communication studies now on the market, so what does this have going for it? For starters, it is clear, informed, wide-ranging and well organised. It has the usual questions and exercises, and suggestions for further reading, but more importantly it illustrates its discussion of media structures and processes with many examples and case studies. There are three sections. The first covers ‘elements of media’, these being technologies, industry, content and users. In the second part, Hodkinson focuses on questions of influence and power, regulation and control. More specifically, he deals with ideology, news media as representations of the contemporary world, public service versus neoliberal models, and the relationship between nationality, commercialization and globalization. The third section is devoted to media, identity and culture. The chapters here offering outlines of work on stereotyping, racism and diaspora, gender and sexuality, subcultures, fans and identity groupings. A final chapter in this section asks whether everyday culture is now so media-saturated that we are faced with excessive fluidity of meaning and a dissolution of representational stability. Throughout the book, Hodkinson is careful to keep in continual view the media/society relation, so avoiding looking at the media in an isolated, or isolating, manner. The book also manages to summarize and synthesize a huge amount of work. It would certainly provide students with a good start in media and communications, giving them a firm foundation for further work and a broad range of issues to think through.
Joel H Wiener, The Americanisation of the British Press, 1830s–1914, Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke and New York, 2011; 253 pp.: £55.00
The label ‘New Journalism’ was first used in Britain in the 1880s. It heralded the mass journalism of tabloid newspapers and signified the relative eclipse of old-style newspapers that were read by comparatively small numbers of people and were ‘staid, prosy, and expensive’, as one press historian has phrased it. How did this transformation come about? Joel Wiener sets out to answer this question by looking at the ways in which the British and American press of the 19th century mutually influenced each other. The transformation can be viewed in two ways. On the production side it involved commercialization, depoliticization and increasing legitimation of the social status quo. On the consumption side it involved a massive expansion of readership, and a movement towards cultural democracy. Mathew Arnold’s description of the New Journalism as ‘literature in a hurry’ seems in accord with the modern age, and with the experience of living in modernity, though of course he meant this as criticism. Opinion on the popular press has remained divided ever since, so it is useful to see how contemporaries responded to the ‘Americanization’ of the press in its early stages. Wiener’s approach is, quite rightly, to view changes in journalism as incremental, collaborative and long-range. He attends therefore to innovations in technology; developing relationships between proprietors, editors and reporters; the collection and redistribution of news; and the reconfiguration of newspaper content. These are changes that can be viewed transatlantically, and this is the whole point of Wiener’s project, though intentionally he concentrates on the journalism of London and New York, mainly because key elements of mass journalism derived from London and because New York was at the centre of change in North America through most of the 19th century. We see many of the common features of tabloid journalism emerging and taking hold. These include sport and crime reporting, gossip, comic strips, banner headlines, human interest stories, and of course advertising, perhaps the central element of commercialization. Some of what is covered in the book was prefigured by a collection Wiener co-edited with Mark Hampton, Anglo-American Media Interactions, 1850–2000 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), but this new book is nevertheless the first monograph to focus comparatively, and in a concerted fashion, on journalism in both Britain and America during the Victorian and Edwardian periods. It is carefully researched and clearly written, providing a valuable addition to the historical literature on journalism and the press.
John Hill, Ken Loach: The Politics of Film and Television, BFI/Palgrave Macmillan: London, 2011; 250 pp.: £16.99
Ken Loach is among a small handful who can deservedly be referred to as the most important filmmakers in Britain. He has had a distinguished career, starting in television directing Z Cars, moving on to join The Wednesday Play, making such classics as Up the Junction and Cathy Come Home, before going on to make his first feature film, Poor Cow. Since then there have been such brilliant films and TV productions as Kes, Days of Hope, The Wind that Shakes the Barley and Looking for Eric. The most valuable feature of all his work, and the most to be honoured, is his unswerving commitment to a socialist perspective, and his dedication to bringing working-class voices to the screen and telling stories of ‘ordinary’ people honestly and sympathetically. Loach turned 75 years of age in June 2011, so it is perhaps a fitting time to look back retrospectively over his career and assess all that he has achieved. This John Hill does splendidly in his new book. He quite rightly keeps Loach’s political viewpoint fully in his sights throughout while at the same time dealing critically with questions of aesthetic style and technique. He also eschews an auteurish approach, understanding film and television production as always a collaborative process, and in Loach’s case acknowledging the significance of his fellow creators, including such film producers as Tony Garnett, Sally Hibbin and Rebecca O’Brien, and such writers as Nell Dunn, Jeremy Sandford, Jim Allen, Barry Hines and Paul Laverty. Hill moves more or less chronologically through Loach’s work, starting with his entry into television in the early 1960s and his attempt to go beyond the theatricalism of television drama at that time. He charts Loach’s growing politicization and assesses the controversy and debate which the work has aroused. He also shows the various ups and downs of Loach’s career and seeks to provide, as he says, not the ‘last word’ on Loach, but ‘rather a contribution to the understanding of a body of work that has been remarkable not only for its consistency but also for its continuing capacity to divide opinion and provoke strong – critical and political – reactions’ (p. 7). As such, the book is a fine tribute to Ken Loach and the screen work associated with him.
Petros Iosifidis, Public Television in the Digital Era: Technological Challenges and New Strategies for Europe, Palgrave Macmillan; Basingstoke and New York, 2012; 211 pp.: £19.99
The hardback edition of this book was published five years ago, and was reviewed in the journal by Thomas Gibbons who, despite various criticisms, found it ‘an impressive piece of research’ (see EJC, 24:2, 2007, pp. 239–342). Gibbons found the surveys of public service broadcasting in six European countries, featuring the BBC, France Télévisions, Television Espanola, Radio Teléfis Éireann, Sveriges Television and ERT (Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation), to be comprehensive and detailed descriptions of key trends affecting PSB across Europe. Since the first publication, there have been various policy developments, not least the threat to the values and viability of PSB which is increasingly posed by neoliberal economic agendas. There are certainly other pressures, such as those brought about by channel proliferation and audience fragmentation, but the privileging of market forces and political manoeuvring in favour of the commercial sector is the most serious danger to PSB. As Petros Iosifidis notes, one of the consequences of this is likely to be moves away from ‘the dissemination of information supporting citizens’ needs to make informed choices about major social issues’ (p. xxi). So it is good to see this comparative study out in paperback form, for as well as examining the strategies of adaptation which various PTV broadcasters are making as we move into a new phase of television history, it also supports the continuing merits and worth of public broadcasting.
Karen Donders, Public Service Media and Policy in Europe, Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke and New York, 2012; 234 pp.: £50.00
In a book that nicely complements that by Iosifidis, Karen Donders examines EU policies on public service broadcasting. Contrary to the generally negative view of such policies, she argues that the application of EU rules has contributed significantly to public service media. She questions the widespread assumption that the EU marginalizes public broadcasters, and shows how European interventions foster and strengthen the transition from PSB to public service media. The book is organized in three sections. The first offers a historical overview of PSB in transition, critically evaluates different perspectives on public service media, and provides a conceptual framework for studying such media. The second part looks at different aspects of the involvement of the European Community and of the Commission with PSB policy, internal market policies in the broadcasting sector, EU state aid rules and actual Commission policies. The final section offers case studies in Germany, Flanders and the Netherlands. Donders’ investigation into the move from PSB to public service media shows how the Commission has stimulated accountability and responsible attitudes to change, and why there is a need for a sustained policy and legal framework in this area.
Peter Wagner, Modernity: Understanding the Present, Polity: Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA, 2012; 190 pp.: £12.99
From the early 1990s, Peter Wagner has become well known for various books and other publications on modernity, and in the process he has gained a reputation as one of the most thoughtful sociological writers on this complex topic. In this latest book he seeks to advance the development of what he calls a world sociology of modernity. This will have to address the changed and changing forms of modernity, the compromising of progress towards freedom and reason by capitalism and consumerism, and the impossibility of either a single model of modernity or a Eurocentric conception of it. Wagner does this by reconsidering our ways of theorizing modernity in the first half of the book, and analysing key aspects of contemporary modernity in the second, doing so in the light of the revised understanding of modernity elaborated on in the first part. An interesting chapter in the latter looks at the idea of progress and how this can be sustained in relation not only to the plurality of modern forms of sociopolitical organization, but also to the continuing change, sometimes quite abrupt, which is attendant on the multiple courses of modernity. There has arguably been a long erosion of belief in progress, but quite where this leaves social critique, where such critique stands in relation to this erosion, and on what credentials it may now be based, remains far from clear. From this kind of re-evaluation of key ideas concerning modernity, Wagner moves on later in the book to a comparative assessment of the different trajectories of modernity in different regions of the world. This involves him in reconsidering the relationship between capitalism and democracy as core institutions of modernity, exploring the varieties of modern self-understanding around the world, developing a case study of South Africa in order to address the commonalities that link different modernities and the distinctions which make any specific form of modernity singular. The final chapter brings things together by thinking of how all that precedes it contributes to a world sociology of modernity. The book as a whole takes forward Wagner’s work on the theorization of modernity and raises a number of important questions and issues. It is lucid and accessible in style, and deeply informed by previous work on the topic without ever parading the fact. Wagner’s book provides not only a fine primer on modernity but also offers an important set of markers for rethinking our understanding of what modernity involves.
Christian Fleck, A Transatlantic History of the Social Sciences: Robber Barons, the Third Reich and the Invention of Empirical Social Research, Bloomsbury Academic: London and New York, 2011; 406 pp.: £40.00
The central topic in this book is the transatlantic transfer of people and ideas, money and institutions, and the impact they had on empirical social research in the early 20th century. During the interwar period, more and more scholars and intellectuals were forced into exile as a result of the rise of Nazism and Fascism. Their move across the Atlantic coincided with, and contributed to, the ascendancy of empiricist social science, a science of social facts that was increasingly funded by philanthropic foundations set up by rich and powerful magnates (the ‘robber barons’ in the subtitle). Christian Fleck is concerned with this empirical social research, the people who helped develop and build it up, and the foundations who provided the financial backing. His book forms a collective biography of the German-speaking social scientists active between the 1920s and 1950s. Their number is around 800, and include not only those who emigrated to the United States but also those whom Everett Hughes called the ‘home guard’, those who were left behind in central Europe. Collectively, they were members of the same generation even if they responded differently to the historical developments of their period. Fleck begins with an overview of the transatlantic shift he is studying before proceeding to discuss post- doctoral fellowships and institutional support in Europe, and the German-speaking social scientists at the heart of his book. He then focuses on two research projects in particular in which migrant German-speaking social researchers played a key role: the Princeton Radio Project, involving Lazarsfeld and Adorno; and the project that resulted in the five tomes of Studies in Prejudice, including, perhaps most famously, The Authoritarian Personality. The final chapter presents the accounts of foundation officers and American guest professors concerning their experiences in Germany and Austria after 1945. This book is a wonderful scholarly achievement. It is a mine of information and evidence based on painstaking archival research, providing a rich historical account of this very significant period in the development of transatlantic social research. It is in this respect a major contribution to the history of sociology.