Incarcerated Resistance: How Identity, Gender, and Privilege Shape the Experiences of America’s Nonviolent Activists

Abstract

result in this case is a fair bit of wheelreinventing alongside assertions that would likely puzzle experts in any of the given subfields Schutz traverses. For example, an extended section on education is based on a classic 1976 reference, while an extended discussion of labor management and managerial bureaucracy is based on contributions from 1976, 1989, and 1996. The claim of everincreasing ‘‘numbers of supervisors, overseers, checkers of various sorts, and associated staff’’ (pp. 120–21), based on decadesold sources, is not very convincing in light of two decades of research on downsizing, outsourcing, offshoring, vertical disintegration, and lean production. His brief discussion of the core concepts of social and cultural capital refers to a single, 1997 source on (rather than by) Pierre Bourdieu, while the extended discussion of professional power does not cite anything from the extensive literature on professions. The assertion that ‘‘financial capital . . . is the main foundation of people’s ability to attain professional positions’’ (p. 126) reduces complex processes of cumulative advantage and disadvantage over the life course, which happen within and across institutional domains of the family, schools, the state, and the labor market, to a single variable. Noting that human, social, and cultural capital are all involved minimizes the reductionism, in principle, but after introducing the different forms of capital he does not systematically develop the analytical framework. The book is equally light on evidence, either from existing studies or from original data analysis. The discussion of poverty seems to suggest the main issue is unequal access to credit for education, again ignoring decades of literature on cumulative dis/ advantage occurring across key institutional domains of society and taking many forms (financial, psychological, institutional, etc.). He bases his entire case—that lending for education is biased toward those with a previous endowment—on private lending in the United States, failing to mention government subsidies (e.g., Pell Grants), governmentguaranteed loans, or fee-free university in many European countries. Descriptive charts on productivity, wealth inequality, income inequality, and other key topics come mainly from the work of other economists. At one point (p. 111), Schutz speculates about the size of the rentier class (based on secondary data) rather than attempt to derive an estimate based on his own data analysis. There is no attempt to provide evidential support for or tests of the theory. It is possible there is some mileage in bridging relational power-structure and gradational forms-of-capital approaches, and it is possible the theoretical framework could be used productively for empirical research, though the book does not offer any broad explanatory narrative, specific hypotheses about the drivers or contours of inequality, or guidance on how the theory might be operationalized.