Abstract
This interesting book marshals evidence and insight from various disciplines such as psychology, cultural theory and politics to illustrate how optimism and hope function to shape our daily lives. Bennett argues, as others have recently (Cieslik, 2015; Watson, 2015), that academe has become a little too fixated on the pathologies of modernity in the process ignoring key processes and experiences that shape social life. Bennett charted some of these obsessions that academics have with problems and deficits in his earlier book on Cultural Pessimism (2001). His most recent text, however, argues that optimism and hope have a significant part to play in everyday life. Cultures of optimism are interesting, Bennett suggests, as they can be linked to the development of resources and other positive outcomes – being healthier, more successful, being happier. Optimism and hope also function institutionally, in the workplace, families, through religion, medicine and politics. Optimism can be used by different actors in these domains in the pursuit of various goals – getting elected, increasing productivity, improving educational attainment and so on. By studying optimism then, researchers can reveal some of the ways that conflict and power work to shape individuals and the divisions that emerge through these institutional settings.
The author draws on some engaging examples to illustrate how hope has been used in different domains – for example, how Martin Luther King, Vaclav Havel, Barack Obama and others have all employed rhetoric around optimism and hope in the pursuit of their political agendas. In the world of work Bennett suggests that positive psychology cultivates optimism in workers in an effort to enhance the productivity of employees. The author does strive to offer some balance to these discussions suggesting that there can be both advantages and problems for organisations that encourage their staff to be positive at work. Readers familiar with Hochschild’s research on emotional labour will recognise the arguments deployed by Bennett when he argues that optimism and positive emotions can also function in oppressive ways in work settings.
I enjoyed the section on psychotherapy as it is an area that has mostly been neglected by mainstream sociology in recent years. It was intriguing to read that the key aspects of the discipline emerged from religious movements in the USA in the mid-19th century, rather than the work of Freud 40 years later. The author charts the growth in the wellbeing industry in recent decades and how our notions of a good life, flourishing and wellbeing have been framed by the operation of corporations and practices working through the institutions that make up everyday life. Bennett poses some important questions here about whether such changes to our cultures and notions of the self are benign, empowering or indeed problematic.
This book it is well researched and offers some convincing arguments about how we might reframe our assumptions about cultural policy and research. The book spans various intellectual traditions which is a strength of the text, the author knitting together a set of arguments about the importance of positive experiences in everyday life – which is a much needed corrective to academe’s usual preoccupation with pathologies, deficits and dysfunctions. Yet at the same time the breadth and ambition of the book in reviewing such a wide range of literature might, for some readers, be a weakness as no doubt they will find some chapters that gloss over key arguments and thinkers that are key to some literatures. For example the section on how religion promotes cultures of optimism is rather short and neglects work by writers such as Max Weber. Many sociologists would regard his book on The Protestant Ethic and the Sprit of Capitalism for example as central to any discussion about the way that religion has become rationalised in contemporary societies. Similarly some readers might have expected some further discussion of Frank Furedi’s work on parenting and therapy cultures in the chapter on optimism and family relationships.
In places I felt that the arguments being developed would have been strengthened through the inclusion of more empirical examples to illustrate the ways that optimism works in everyday life. At times, though we are offered plenty of detailed reviews and commentary of research, the argument would have been enlivened through the use of everyday voices to show how cultures of optimism play out in the lives of ordinary people. I was left wondering how children actually experience cultures of optimism at home, or how workers manage to deal with work cultures that are trying to persuade them to be positive and resilient? Having said that, this is a well-written and thought-provoking book that I will recommend to colleagues and students as it does pose some intriguing questions about how we conduct research into different facets of everyday life.