Empire

Book reviews Empire M. Hardt and A. Negri, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass, 2000, £23.95, paper £12.95, 473pp. Hardt and Negri’s Empire traces the movements of capitalism from the nineteenth century model of imperialism, which saw the major western powers colonise other nation states, to the rhizomatic formation of today’s global society. They call this stage of global capitalism, which tends to over-take other cultures by harnessing their power of living labour, Empire. Following the developments of Empire along a time-line that stretches back to imperial Rome, Hardt and Negri argue that whereas traditional imperialism was defined by the presence of a central power, which we might understand as the nation state (they cite Lenin’s theory of capitalism and imperialism to ground their argument), Empire represents a form of virtual capitalism that exists apart from the territorialisations of any central power or single nation state. Through reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of capitalism and schizophrenia, Hardt and Negri are, therefore, able to see Empire as a rhizomatic, or centreless, network. In order to demonstrate the origins of the organisation of this state of disorganised capitalism, they suggest that Empire began life as Americanisation. However, through reference to a review of western political theory, which culminates in their foregrounding of Deleuze and Guattari’s version of capitalism, the authors of Empire argue that the total dominance of the American economic model has led to the paradoxical condition whereby imperial power is at once everywhere and nowhere. It is against this background, which Hardt and Negri augment through readings of Foucault’s notion of bio-power, as a form of power that maps the body of the citizen, and Deleuze’s theory of the control society, which advances the traditional Weberian idea of the disciplinary society by deepening the power of control, that Empire develops a dialogue between the twin infinitives of freedom and control. Hardt and Negri’s vision of Empire as a virtual structure (that is at once everywhere and nowhere) enables them to formulate a theory that contrasts the raw productivity of the multitude (freedom) with the faculties of territorialisation (control) that constitute the hierarchical structures of post-modern capitalism. In this regard, Empire follows Deleuze and Guattari’s interpretation of Freud’s symbolic move from © The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2002. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. Book reviews Beyond the Pleasure Principle. While the Freudian super-ego saves the ego by administering tough love (the super-ego punishes the ego to force the release of flows of libidinal energy along the channels of the symbolic order: this mode of punishment, which performs the function of pressure valve, saves the ego from total collapse), Hardt and Negri’s Empire exists only insofar as its structures are able to steer the productive power of the multitude along the supply lines of global capitalism. For this reason Hardt and Negri’s notion of Empire might be understood as (1) a kind of encrustation of libidinal flows, (2) a territorialisation of creative productivity, or, (3) a parasitical structure that lives off the very thing (das ding) that threatens to destroy its principle of symbolic order. In this respect we can see how the concept of Empire repeats Deleuze and Guattari’s Marxist vision of capitalism as vampire: the un-dead vampire feeds off the productive flows of its living other. However, whereas Deleuze and Guattari conclude Anti-Oedipus with the sobering recognition that there is nothing outside the symbolic order, Hardt and Negri want to maintain the impression of Empire as a utopic formation. Akin to Lacan, who views egoistic alienation as the condition of possibility of human life, Deleuze and Guattari conclude that raw productivity must always pass through channels of institutional control. Unlike, Hardt and Negri, who celebrate the possibility that the flows of living labour might over-power the structures of control, the authors of Anti-Oedipus accept that the potentially revolutionary energetics of productivity are also the definitive feature of overreaching capitalism. For this reason, Hardt and Negri’s formulation of Empire as utopia (like utopia, Empire is kind of non-place) tends to neglect the sustainability of capitalism – even though the authors understand the mechanics of this double-bind perfectly well – in favour of a revolutionary reading of living labour. Against pessimistic readings of capitalism, Hardt and Negri rely on the principle of hope to read Deleuze and Guattari as utopian authors. While they appear to accept the structuralism of the Lacanian version of flow (the symbolic order), which shows how desire runs along very specific channels of object causation, Hardt and Negri want to suggest that the productivity of the multitude might eventually over-code the capital control system. Thus, virtuality, or hope, becomes actuality, or practice, and we witness the occurrence of praxis: post-modern communism. In this respect we can see how Empire revolts against the authors of structuralism: for thinkers like Lacan and Deleuze there is no actual self-presence, the alienation of the symbolic order is a necessary condition of possibility for the survival of the wider organism. In short, the structuralists suggest that there can be no freedom without control. Following this argument, Gopal Balakrishnan critiques Hardt and Negri for their lack of realism. His suggestion is that Empire’s vision of the multitude as revolutionary force overlooks the practical situation of the global poor. Balakrishnan explains that Hardt and Negri’s theory, which suggests that the multitude will overcome capital control to achieve the utopia of pure drive qua post-modern communism, relies on Negri’s idea of proletarianiza© The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2002 301 Book reviews tion over the traditional Marxist notion of the working class. Negri’s idea of proletarianization refers to the generalisation of the idea of production as a response to the generalisation of the idea of control as written out by authors like Foucault and Deleuze. Thus, Negri’s answer to the failure of industrial communism was to broaden the definition of the worker: hence, the invention of the figure of living labour, the social worker, the multitude. However, while the examples Hardt and Negri use to support their theory of the revolutionary power of the multitude (mass immigration as a flow that currently supports global capitalism, but which may, in time, over-code these same systems of control) appear to support Empire’s principle of hope, their reference to Spinoza’s theory of mass democracy and American republicanism as a virtual / actual circuit for the realisation of the utopia of post-modern communism does seem to under-estimate the way this form of immanent governance is hard-wired into the revolutionary potential of global capital’s own control systems. We might argue, therefore, that Hardt and Negri’s problem resides in their desire to totalise the transformation of virtuality into actuality. In response to this claim one could suggest that the desire (qua all desire) for real totality is by definition an impossible task and maintain that, akin to every utopia, the non-place of Empire is always-already dead on arrival. This recognition would imply that the utopic non-place is necessarily about absence and that its perpetual presence only ever equals failure. From this perspective, Empire runs up against its own limits as Hardt and Negri seem to enact a perversion of their own principle of hope that can only ever realise itself as mutation. I believe that the authors of Empire are aware of this paradoxical situation. How are we, therefore, to understand their strange suggestion that because Empire is virtual capitalism, we are on the verge of the realisation of postmodern communism? Is Empire an ironic study of post-modern capitalism that knows its own limits, while at the same attempting to transgress itself? In order to reverse this ironic strategy, which hides the recognition of macroscopic determinism behind the veil of microscopic indeterminism, we might argue that capital control, or the necessary work of subsumption which binds living labour to imperial control, shows us how microscopic indeterminacy, or the power of the multitude, is only ever visible against the backdrop of macroscopic determinism. Akin to the anamorphism of Holbein’s The Ambassadors, which Lacan outlines in his Four Fundamental Concepts, I believe that we might discover the potential of the global poor only by looking awry. As Zizek’s text of the same name (Looking Awry) can explain, the true power of the multitude is inseparable from its potential for resistance, a resistance that we can detect only through the elements of control that define postmodern capitalism. In summation, then, the central problem of Empire concerns Hardt and Negri’s dissatisfaction with the paradox of utopia. Although they are willing to accept the double bind, whereby freedom is only possible as resistance to the structures of control, the authors of Empire are determined to define the 302 © The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2002 Book reviews real possibility of post-modern communism as (1) the end of transference and (2) the realisation of self-presence. Following the various structuralisms, such as those of Lacan and Deleuze, which teach us that the fundamental nature of desire is dissatisfaction and alienation, Hardt and Negri argue that there is no outside, only to suggest that post-modern communism is, indeed, such an outside-inside. In response to this desire to hold onto the reality of utopianism, at the expense of a recognition of the practicalities of capital control, we might suggest that a perspective that defines productivity as resistance, retains the principle of hope and maintains a critique of the definitive nature of the structural exploitation of post-modern capitalism. In other words, while Hardt and Negri run the risk of losing both ends of the freedom / control double bind, due to their insistence on the reality of utopia, I believe that a theory which understands the multitude as resistance holds onto the principle of freedom through a recognition of the harsh realities of control. As the original title of the recent war on terrorism, Infinite Justice, tends to suggest, the failure to recognise the expansive nature of control also sacrifices the powers of freedom to the abyss of the imperial non-place: the idea of Infinite Justice shows how Empire reduces the utopia of freedom and the dystopia of control to the totality of one moment of global indifference. Keele University Mark Featherstone A Phenomenology of Working Class Experience Simon J. Charlesworth, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000, £40.00, paper £14.95, 324pp. Simon Charlesworth describes himself as a working class man from Rotherham, a town in South Yorkshire. He forthrightly expresses his anger at the institutional elitism within British Universities which ensures that there is a shortage of working class academics with the ability to articulate the daily rhythms of despair, alienation, fear, rejection, humiliation and emptiness of the lives of working class people living in the de-industrialised wastelands of Britain. Charlesworth draws with sophistication upon the work of influential philosophers and sociologists such as Bourdieu, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger and Wittgenstein in order reflexively to interpret the ‘personal testimony’ of working class people in Rotherham. He focuses upon the silences, the way that things are expressed, and the limited linguistic tools that working class people have to describe their sense of alienation, frustration and pain. Interpreting his informants’ silences and words through the phenomenological apparatus of Bourdieu et al., Charlesworth aims to reveal the ‘inherited background’ (Wittengenstein) (p. 107) of ‘unspoken practical sense’ and the ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu) of embodied knowledge of those people inhabiting the ‘poor and deprived urban space’ of modern Britain (p. 109). He thereby seeks to capture ‘the realm of the unreflective sense common to the majority of the © The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2002 303 Book reviews town’s people’ that constitutes working class people’s engagement with the world (p. 92). In many ways I applaud Charlesworth’s timely and evocative account of the empty and soul-destroying existence that constitutes some disadvantaged people’s life-world in Rotherham. The personal testimonies of poor people in the deprived areas of post-industrial Britain are often side-stepped in sociological debates about the heterogeneity of classed identities and the fractured middle and working class lifestyle strategies in the post-fordist era. Charlesworth’s moral commitment to exposing the injustices done to ‘his own people’ is itself testimony to the fact that empirical research inspired by and interwoven with the researcher’s biography can have a certain integrity and depth of feeling that less committed research projects can lack. However, I do have some less positive comments to make about aspects of the book’s methodological and theoretical framework. First, Charlesworth’s worthwhile aim to put class back onto the sociological agenda unfortunately overshadows any examination of the ways in which gender and ethnic differences are experienced. We are told that ‘at least’ one third of his informants are women; and a ‘significant number’ is drawn from the male members of the Pakistani community in the area (p. 8). However, he argues that ‘class is the fundamental modality of being-in-the-world and that it is fundamental because it is world-constituting for the body-subjects it constitutes’ (p. 278). Charlesworth’s privileging of class as the ‘fundamental modality of beingin-the-world’ leads him to side-step the widely accepted feminist argument that the structures of class, race, gender and sexuality are intersecting modalities of being that must be understood in relation to each other. He believes that feminist scholarship is the domain of career-minded academic women who have become obsessed with the ‘politics of representation’ to the detriment of an examination of the alienation of working class people (p. 9). Charlesworth’s account raises my suspicion that the experiences of white working class men are made to speak for all working class people in Rotherham thus over-looking the particularities of racial and gendered forms of domination. The second questionable aspect of the book is Charlesworth’s argument that working class people are ‘linguistically dispossessed’ (p. 138), ‘sensorily impoverished’ and ‘perceptually deprived’, rendering them unable to achieve many forms of ‘self-realisation’ (p. 284). According to him, working class people are unable to see beyond the realm of their everyday practices which constitute an ‘impoverished culture’ centred around the monotony of dull work (if they are lucky enough to be employed at all) and the basic human bodily functions of ‘a good trough . . . ; plenty’t beer, a shag, some decent kip an’a good shit . . .’ (p. 279). This is a world in which good conversation is hard to come by because all there is to talk about is the television (p. 227) and where to go shopping or drinking on Friday and Saturday nights (p. 182). Charlesworth argues that the reasons for working class people’s inability to articulate, or even to perceive, the degradation of their existence is that the 304 © The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2002 Book reviews education system denies them the means to appropriate the ‘secondary and special forms of language-use’ that remains the domain of the educated middle classes (p. 284). This second-order language enables middle class people to develop expressive and perceptual tools for the formation of ‘worthwhile relationships’, (p. 283) for insight into the depth and complexity of human emotions and for personal self-fruition (pp. 286–7). In contrast, working class people remain condemned to the inferior world of rudimentary linguistic tools adequate only for basic communication, and which ‘stigmatises working class people in relation to dominant markets and ensures a fractured experience of the social, an experience of degradation and not grace’ (p. 283). Thus without access to middle class language skills, working class people remain frustrated with the lack of possibilities in their lives. As one informant says, ‘The best we can “ope of” is a video an’ a shag; if wi lucky! [Laughs]’ (p. 282). Charlesworth illustrates well the ways in which the British education system fails working class people, instilling within them a sense of their own inferiority which destroys their chances of fulfilling any academic and professional potential they might have. Many working class students are thus left with the belief that their own ‘competence’ in the world is ‘negatively valued’ (p. 280). Although I agree with this important aspect of the book’s argument, I am left with the impression that the almost exclusive emphasis upon the desperation of working class experience undermines people’s potential to reflect critically upon, actively question, and even resist, the conditions of their own alienation. This is due in part to the book’s theoretical focus upon the alleged pre-verbal and unconscious nature of working class experience. If the analysis had focussed in a little more detail on what people say about their lives, then perhaps it would have become apparent that some working class people in Rotherham are reflexive actors. That is, people who in key critical moments consciously question the dramatic socio-economic changes that have shaped their existence. A third and related aspect of Charlesworth’s argument that working class people are unreflective actors is that ‘formal education’ is the necessary condition for the liberation of working class people from their cultural dispossession. Charlesworth writes: To found a world on the kind of relation the Greeks called philia (Bourdieu and Eagleton 1992: 116), a refusal of instrumentality and a valuing of personal relationships for the joys of association and the pleasures of involvement in the mutual projects of talk as an end in itself, would require the adoption of a relation to language that was akin to the bourgeois relation, one of distance and ease that allowed them to develop the dispositions of contemplation amidst realized practices, and it would demand the forms of acculturation acquired in formal education (p. 281). © The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2002 305 Book reviews It seems to me that this aspect of the book’s argument over-optimistically privileges and idealises the empowering effects of ‘formal education’ and the middle classes’ ability to reflect upon their own cultural practices. The potentially negative effect of this argument is to place working class people outside of the reflexive practices associated with late modernity. My criticisms of Charlesworth’s book should not detract from the fact that this book makes a valuable, refreshing and sophisticated contribution to the philosophical and anthropological study of people’s experiences of urban deprivation and class in post-industrial Britain. Katharine Taylor University of Exeter Organizational Culture and Identity Martin Parker, Sage, London, 2000, £18.99, 266pp. If nothing else, Parker’s volume has supplied me with a readymade examination question that will doubtless stretch undergraduates taking my organizational behaviour class next term: ‘Capitalist society and organization depend on explicit and implicit control mechanisms and culture is simply the latest [managerialist] fad that hides the reality of class inequalities, work intensification, and the proletarianization of more and more workers’ (p. 68). Discuss. Even more incentive for the students concerned to read Sociological Review. Yet there is a good deal more to this stylishly written and lucid attempt to rescue the concept of culture, ‘from functionalist managerialism’ (p. 219). Based substantially on Parker’s Ph.D. thesis, the book constructs and addresses a number of related problematics that arise at the multiple intersections of self-identity and dimensions of culture. The argument is presented in three parts: (1) a comprehensive review of the literature and derivation of a poststructural theory of organizational culture; (2) the presentation of three detailed and contrasting empirical case studies, and; (3) an analysis of the case material through the conceptual lenses fashioned in Part I. The espoused inspiration for the book is Parker’s distaste for what he characterizes as the ahistorical managerialist abuse of organizational culture in recent decades. As he puts it, ‘For business gurus,’ – the likes of Peters, Waterman, Ouchi, Deal and Kennedy – ‘culture was being used as an evaluative and prescriptive term which combined capitalist imperatives with an anthropological “added value” ’ (p. 220). Parker’s mission is thus to set the record straight historically, intellectually and empirically. In chapters 1, 2 and 3 he is meticulous in tracing the legacy of culture and related terms through sociological and organizational literature stretching over the last hundred years or so. Although he is almost dismissive of this work in his introduction, the argument and scholarship in these chapters perhaps mark the most important contribution of this volume. Parker is also intent (chapters 4 and 9) on introducing a more sophisticated, critically informed and politically charged understanding of culture in the context of organizational identity and identi306 © The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2002 Book reviews fication. To this end, he engages in a synthesis of ideas drawn from Habermas’s critical hermeneutics, Saussurean linguistics and Gidden’s theory of structuration to generate a poststructural and ‘radical humanist’ insight into organizational culture. Never homogenous, culture is as diverse as the vocabularies of occupation, class, gender, ethnicity, age, and so forth, that members routinely draw from in speaking about their relationship to others in organizations. Varying ‘cultures of’ are akin to linguistic dialects through which we instantiate ‘us’ and ‘them’ divides in social acts of identification. Following a poststructual line of thought, Parker seeks to elicit a grammar of cultural identification. With guarded qualification he proposes a tripartite scheme as follows: ‘spatial/functional’ divides of ‘them over there, us over here’; ‘generational’ identification of history or age – ‘them from that time, us from this time’; ‘occupational/professional’ divides of ‘them who do that, us who do this’ (p. 188). Through a consideration of accounts focussing on the introduction of IT in three empirical case studies – a District Health Authority, a medium-sized domestic appliance firm and a building society – Parker makes a convincing case for the pragmatic value of his framework. There is a sophistication to his interpretation of events and human responses, based on an eighteen month period of participant observation and key informant interviewing, that owes much to the Actor Network Theory that forms a complementary theoretical strand to his poststructural critical hermeneutics. However, just as Parker accuses the ‘culturists’ – his pejorative term for the managerial manipulators of culture – of overlooking the rich complexity of serious organizational sociology in this field, he, too, could be accused of missing a few links in the chain of analysis that he proffers. The detailed interrogation of division and sameness, for instance, brings on a decided sense of déjà vu. Here is a motivational calculus with an intellectual pedigree that stretches at least as far back as Aristotle’s characterization of drama as per genus et differentiam, and probably beyond. The apprehension of this pairing explicitly as a ‘grammar’ of human motives in philosophy (with the writings of Kenneth Burke on ‘merger and division’) and sociology (Hugh Daziel Duncan, Richard Harvey Brown) also causes one to question the originality, though not the value, of what Parker is offering. Likewise, while he talks explicitly of exploring the fieldwork in terms of ‘social dramas’ and ‘dramatis personae’ (p. 239), acknowledgements of the legacies of dramaturgical sociology and sociology of accounts are conspicuous by their absence. Parker’s claim to render the data in dramatistic terms does not tally with the narrative substance of the empirical case studies, which largely centre on what people say and write about their organizational experience. This cognitivist and logocentric preference – a corollary of the poststructural linguistic turn that he takes – raises a more fundamental question about the form of the cultural theory and analysis on offer. Although eager to provide thoughtful, informed and reflexive qualifications about his claims throughout, Parker could perhaps have been clearer about aspects of culture that his approach overlooks. A consequence of the methodological choices he makes, for example, is that con© The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2002 307 Book reviews cerns with the culture of embodiment, artefact, physical setting, paralinguistic gestures, the symbolism of apparel, and so forth – all central to rounded understandings of social drama – come in for little or no systematic attention. In pursuit of a definition of culture as the ‘contested local organization of generalities’ (p. 214) we find Parker taking the dualistic notions of ‘culture/organization,’ ‘structure/agency’ and placing them in a conceptual alembic, the better to avoid the habitually unhappy social scientific paradoxes of ‘macro’ versus ‘micro’ analysis. A poststructural reading of organizational culture permits what he refers to as a ‘meso’ level of analysis; a middle way between conceptual poles. Speaking as someone suffering from cultural fatigue, I wonder whether more space could have been devoted to a fundamental questioning of the utility of culture as an analytical concept. A considerable debate over just this issue, for example, continues to rage in the fields of social anthropology and literary criticism. From my perspective, Parker’s empirically based contribution is most interesting where it addresses the double hermeneutical effects of organizational members picking up the concept ‘culture’ and using it in situated talk about their worlds. To some extent, worries over categorical precision and social scientific meaning of the term (the etic dimension) are less sociologically engaging than interpretations of what people do with it (the emic dimension). Pursuing this line of inquiry would require a different approach to the research question and one effectively proscribed by Parker’s choice of methods. He would probably like to melt down the uncomfortable etic/emic dualism along with the others in his meso analysis alembic, but I suggest that Parker’s own categorical imperatives do not make for such easy evasion of the issue. These quibbles are relatively minor and in no way detract from the fact that this volume is probably the most important contribution to a critique of organizational culture in recent years. I will doubtless be recommending and consulting it as a source book for some time to come. Who knows, it may even inspire a few more exam questions. Oxford Brookes University Peter Case Organising Bodies: Policy, Institutions and Work Linda Mckie and Nick Watson (eds.), Macmillan, Houndsmills, 2000, £45.00, paper £16.99, xxiv + 230pp Organising Bodies is one of four books published recently (or going to press) containing selected papers from the 1998 BSA conference, Making Sense of the Body. It is comprised of twelve papers (plus an introduction) which are distributed across three broad ranging sections: 1) ‘The embodiment of Politics and Policy’, 2) ‘Institutions Constructing and Representing Bodies’ and 3) Working Bodies. These section titles go some of the way to describing the basic themes of the papers but, as is often the case with collections based upon large and open conferences, there is a great deal of diversity within each 308 © The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2002 Book reviews section, not to mention the volume as a whole. The empirical topics of the chapters, for example, range from safety in motor racing, through media representations of ‘race’, to political activism. And there is also considerable diversity in theoretical/methodological approaches, and in the ‘angle’ which the authors take on the body. I have to admit to approaching the book with a certain degree of reservation. ‘The body’ has been and perhaps still is a very fashionable concern within sociology. And as with a fashionable garment there is a subtle but strong pressure for individuals to dress their ideas up in it, whether or not it fits. Add to this that the BSA conference is a meeting for the UK sociological community as a whole, rather sociologists with a specific interest in ‘the body’, and the outcome could have been disastrous. However, my fears were not confirmed. Although, as I discuss below, the book illustrates the lack of any central identity within sociological studies of the body, each paper tackles questions of ‘the body’ or ‘embodiment’ head on, often in quite interesting and inspiring ways. And many manage to bring to light important new (or emerging) themes: e.g. the organisation of physical space and its social-psychological consequences, ‘energy’ and ‘smells’. More importantly, most of the papers are empirically grounded and, as such, reveal how an interest in embodiment has served to open up new areas of empirical inquiry in sociology and/or revivify certain more established areas. The quality and scope of the papers is variable. All are interesting and each, in its own way, has a spark of originality, making the collection as a whole very thought-provoking. However, the arguments of some of the papers are clearly more developed and well grounded than others. The strongest paper, to my mind, is Craig Gurney’s ‘Accommodating Bodies’; an account which focuses upon the management of bodily odour within the home from the point of view of ‘the civilising process’. The real strength of this paper is the manner in which Gurney makes his theory and his data work together in a mutually informative manner, such that the paper contributes simultaneously to our understanding of human embodiment, of dirt and odour, and to our understanding of the civilising process. In addition, in contrast to several other papers, Gurney genuinely brings the materiality of the body into view, highlighting some of the tensions which form around it in contemporary social life. Other strong papers are Twitchen’s study of the ‘second skin’ in motor racing, Timmermans’ revisiting of ‘social death’, Adkins and Lury’s reflections on reflexivity, and King’s analysis of the energy of ‘activist bodies’. Even if we grant that each of the papers in the collection is good, however, and that each addresses a question relating to ‘bodies’, ‘the body’ or ‘embodiment’ in a central way, the book still highlights, for me, a question mark which hangs over all sociological interest in bodily matters. Although one can identify certain common reference points in some of these papers, and though each has some nominal common link to the others via the theme of ‘organisation’, there is very little evidence of a common research agenda amongst ‘body researchers’ and many of the papers appear torn in their focus between © The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2002 309 Book reviews addressing a community of ‘sociologists of the body’ and addressing a wide range of other and unrelated sub-disciplines: e.g. (in the case of this volume alone) social policy, disability studies, sociology of education, medical sociology, media sociology, sociology of work etc. Such ambivalence might, in some circumstances, prove to be productive. It could be that papers contribute both to our understanding of ‘the body’ and to other substantive areas – as I have suggested that Gurney’s does. I am not convinced that many papers achieve this ‘double whammy’, however, and the loser in most cases is ‘the body’. Whatever contribution papers on the body (in this collection and elsewhere) may make to other substantive areas, the ‘sociology of the body’, such as it is, remains a messy patchwork of (admittedly sometimes good) studies with no underlying sense of a common problematic or engaging central controversies and debates. This is not a fault with this collection, as such. It is a problem for all of us who aim to research and perhaps particularly to teach on ‘the body’. But it prompts the question of whether common reference to ‘the body’ is a sufficient basis for a coherent research domain or, indeed, even an edited collection. University of Manchester 310 Nick Crossley © The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2002