Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews最新文献

{"title":"“Woke” in Love: The Persistence of Inequality in Intimate Relationships among Millennials","authors":"Hannah Regan","doi":"10.1177/00943061231191420b","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061231191420b","url":null,"abstract":"season through the frame of care and recognized their constrained agency in helping students navigate stressful testing environments. Their narratives displayed how a good school in the eyes of children, which is built on reciprocal care and relational learning, can be undercut by individual, quantitative assessments of education (p. 156). In Chapter Five, Luttrell displays the longitudinal elements of her research and focuses more on temporality. Luttrell reconnects with students in high school, interviews them about their interpretations of the photos, and completes a new video/photo project for their lives as high schoolers. As high schoolers, many look back on their middle childhood through a lens of nostalgia, while maintaining a sense of an aspirational future (p. 165). In these follow-up interviews and video projects, youth acknowledge how time isn’t their own and that they do not like the conflict between instrumental versions of being in time versus more relational experiences of time (p. 186). Young people like Mesha use humor to directly defy the adult, instrumental notion of time (p. 187). Other young people, like Kendra, who is pushed into low-wage labor and whose time is structured by obligation and financial survival, are forced to absorb dominant conceptions of time use as they manage systemic race, class, and gender inequalities in their microworlds (p. 198). Luttrell asks readers to recognize that working-class teenagers locate themselves in multiple spaces as they navigate the flow of time, their identities, and development. Luttrell concludes with a rich, reflexive discussion about how counternarratives of care and collective seeing with workingclass youth can provide possible social transformations in schools (p. 203). She asks us to consider what it would mean to take seriously young people’s insights into the centrality of care (p. 213). Luttrell argues that institutionally countering neoliberal policies and discourses of education requires that care work be valued and made visible. The ways working-class young people at Park Central School recognize that care is work, that care is value, and that care is dignified in school and at home are in fact crucial to building a social world with dignity, cooperation, and a collective sense of freedom. Care must be a social good for a healthy democratic society, and collaboratively seeing the social world with young people and communities who are rendered invisible by the social status quo is one way to get to that possibility.","PeriodicalId":46889,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews","volume":"52 1","pages":"400 - 404"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48650167","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Latinx Teens: U.S. Popular Culture on the Page, Stage, and Screen","authors":"Sylvia L. M. Martinez","doi":"10.1177/00943061231191421b","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061231191421b","url":null,"abstract":"mative Activism: Inauthentic Allyship in the Midst of a Racial Pandemic,’’ highlighting the tensions that arise due to the ease of social media engagement with social justice movements on the one hand, and the hard work and sustained activism required of creating social change on the other. A third main theme is higher education, including chapters about the challenges of creating change in higher education and rampant sexual violence and institutional silence. One chapter is about the logistics of creating an inclusive higher educational institution (Chapter 9, by Melanie Duckworth and Kelly Cross), while another is about the importance of Black studies and teaching African American history, particularly given this historical moment (Chapter 10, Idrissa Snider). A chapter that will likely be etched in the reader’s mind, given the vivid descriptions and courage of the author, is ‘‘The Silence of Laughter,’’ by Lydia Huerta Moreno, which describes the sexual harassment she experienced (as a professor) by a senior university leader. These parts of the volume, while fascinating, are especially heterogeneous. Much of the higher education material in the volume may be more for a graduate student or professoriate audience than an undergraduate audience. Overall, Badass Feminist Politics is an appealing text. Some chapters are just a couple of pages long while others are longer, meaning it is easy to pick up and page through. The editors do a good job linking together chapters and sections that in some ways seem highly divergent. The text would be most appreciated by students of feminism and those feminists who wish to grow and connect with the struggles of others and to find community through words. It is not only feminist in the subject and content, but also in the contributors’ and editors’ approaches: confronting urgent personal and societal issues with a blend of theory, data, and first-person narratives. Latinx Teens: U.S. Popular Culture on the Page, Stage, and Screen, by Trevor Boffone and Cristina Herrera. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2022. 160 pp. $22.95 paper. ISBN: 9780816542758.","PeriodicalId":46889,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews","volume":"52 1","pages":"418 - 420"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47277737","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Literature in the Dawn of Sociological Theory: Stories That Are Telling","authors":"A. Singer","doi":"10.1177/00943061231191421x","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061231191421x","url":null,"abstract":"Literature in the Dawn of Sociological Theory: Stories That Are Telling is a challenging book to classify sociologically: its sociological details and observations have largely been excavated through literary analysis. Focusing on novels and novelists from the early 1800s to the early 1900s, and more specifically on the connections they make to the insights of what the author refers to as ‘‘the ‘classical’ canon of sociological theory’’ (p. 1), Sarah Louise MacMillen’s work engages deeply with the literary and aesthetic frameworks of György Lukács, Raymond Williams, and Lucien Goldmann (among others), while the book’s main chapters discuss the fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Virginia Woolf, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. With this monograph, MacMillen intends to surface sociological observations contained within novels published around the period during which much of classical sociological theory emerged. According to MacMillen, this time period anticipated an important and transitional moment within literary aesthetics, and so she brings multiple analytical lenses to bear on the novels and stories she understands as ‘‘telling.’’ By mining a selection of particular novels for sociological insights, MacMillen argues that such literature ‘‘creates the possibility for an early stage of critical sociology, and a nascent analysis of social problems as they carry into the 21 century’’ (p. 2, italics original). MacMillen argues that these ideas are full of potential for developing a deeper understanding of how sociological questions can be seen within and across literary landscapes. MacMillen’s analysis of the novels she selected demonstrates an impressive knowledge of both literary and aesthetic frameworks, and it is exciting to see sociological theories brought into conversations with novels of the same period of time. It is clear that a great deal of care and effort has been taken in the conceptualization of this manuscript and in the analysis of its literary data. As a sociological reader of this work, however, my disciplinary training leaves me with lingering questions. The author is doing interdisciplinary work in pursuit of her research question and so, from a methodological perspective, this book—at times strategically—stands apart from other sociological analyses of literature. MacMillen does not, however, discuss her sampling process or procedures, noting only that she has selected particular novels to analyze and describing how the monograph approaches their analysis in an organized fashion. Further, she does not seem to have selected these novels at random: my sense is that each was purposefully selected to represent an idea or a particular theoretical or literary conversation. The author, however, holds such methodological cards close to her vest. Sociologists of literature and culture would likely point out that the successful, influential authors she has included in her sample represent a ","PeriodicalId":46889,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews","volume":"52 1","pages":"460 - 461"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42286758","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Explosive Conflict: Time-Dynamics of Violence","authors":"C. Barrie","doi":"10.1177/00943061231191421g","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061231191421g","url":null,"abstract":"The latest title by Randall Collins—Explosive Conflict: Time-Dynamics of Violence—extends the micro-interactional insights of his previous work to explain the temporal dynamics of violence. The book is made up of chapters dedicated either to stand-alone theoretical contributions or illuminating case studies. Overall, the work is a mixture of the familiar (interaction ritual chains; CT/F) from previous work and the new (case studies of the storming of the U.S. Capitol in January 2021; case files from the Harvey Weinstein trials). So diverse are the contents that it would not be possible to cover the book’s entire range in the space of a short review. Suffice it to say that we cover, in true Collins style, everything from high-tech warfare to territorial warfare, via chapter-length sojourns into sports matches, sexual assault, revolution, and police violence. The logic of this diversity is clear: the emotional processes that Collins has previously identified as central to violence obtain anywhere conflict occurs. However, perhaps curiously for someone who has made their name defining the messiness of violence in parsimonious terms, there is no one conceptual or theoretical lesson here. That doesn’t detract necessarily from what is useful in the book. It does contain some key lessons that will be stimulating—and often provoking—to students of violence. One oddity is that these new insights abut against pragmatic policyoriented solutions: for example, cops wearing heart-rate monitors or strategies for going on the offensive if you fall victim to attempted sexual assault (more on these later). In prior work by Collins (e.g., 2008) such recommendations were confined to an Epilogue section, where they were better placed. Chapter One will be familiar to readers of the American Sociological Association Presidential Address (Collins 2012). This is the closest the book comes to a self-contained theory of time dynamics in violence. But some key elements are conspicuously under-theorized: what does Collins mean by polarization here, for example, and how do the more familiar dynamics of ‘‘emotional processes’’ link to more mundane concerns around resourcing and personnel (p. 22)? This gap between the emotional processes Collins sees as inherent to all violence dynamics and other (rival?) explanations for violence outcomes is the weakest part of the framework and the book overall. This gap is most stark in the chapter on police violence. In Chapter Fifteen, Collins writes compellingly of the perceptual distortion that accompanies adrenaline-filled confrontations between police and members of the public. But we are then given just four short paragraphs (p. 280) on why these situations are less about race and more about situational dynamics. That is, racism can’t explain why cops shoot black people—the answer instead lies more in the particular dynamics of any given conflict situation. This is a provocative argument that deserves more attention. After all, the si","PeriodicalId":46889,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews","volume":"52 1","pages":"428 - 430"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45855434","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Working-Class Kids Photographing Childhood: Valuing Care, Reciprocity, Sociality, and Dignity","authors":"A. Manning","doi":"10.1177/00943061231191420a","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061231191420a","url":null,"abstract":"or barrier, to attaining this academic justice by bringing our attention to a deep contradiction that underlies contemporary U.S. society (and indeed, a contradiction that I think runs throughout many geopolitical regions across the world system). Namely, political and media elites, along with the so-called ‘‘people’’ of the nation, are vehement in their belief that higher education is a space of radical far-left ‘‘wokeist’’ ideology. In this imagination, higher education instructors are part of a propaganda machine that plagues students’ minds. Many of us who work in higher education know that this narrative is brazenly inaccurate, and Reyes’s book is a case in point. As Reyes states: ‘‘Alt-right politicians decry academia as a liberal hotbed. But in my experience, and many others’, it’s conservative and resistant to change’’ (p. 93). Ironically, changes that have been made recently push academic life even further toward precarity and conservativism, rather than what leading commentators exclaim. Moral panics over a bogeyman called ‘‘critical race theory’’ (CRT) have led seven states to ban its inclusion in public educational institutions (as of August 2022), with sixteen more states in the process of passing bills through their legislatures to the same effect. Of course, given that these states are defining CRT in such broad ways to refer to any theorizing about race and racism, we are seeing public educational institutions coming under intense pressure to avoid any critical ‘‘sociologizing’’ about structural racism. Aside from the regulation of what can and cannot be taught in higher education, the United States has also seen an increasing rollback of the tenure system, further mainstreaming the precarity and casualization of labor in the academy. Reyes’s conclusion therefore leads us to what I would see as an optimistic pessimism. The (justified) pessimism centers on the fact that the academy is shaped by capitalism, sexism, ableism, racism, homophobia, and coloniality. These are not underlying structures that can just be taught out of a system or forgotten overnight; unless we approach these structures with a pessimism and a rejection of the assumption of social progress, we have no chance of ever dismantling them. Nevertheless, optimism comes from a recognition of the malleability and durability of these structures of inequality and how they shape academic life. Once we recognize the grand size of the issues confronting us and achieve an understanding of how these structures work and make themselves felt, we gain a clearer vision of how social worlds can ultimately be transformed. Without the intention of misreading Reyes’s central messages, and with the hope that the academic community discusses this book at length, I think this optimistic pessimism is what underlies the closing remarks of the book: ‘‘change begins in small acts,’’ and sustained change requires us to create ‘‘broader structures to nurture and support one another’’ in the a","PeriodicalId":46889,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews","volume":"52 1","pages":"397 - 400"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41555580","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Gastronativism: Food, Identity, Politics","authors":"Gary Alan Fine","doi":"10.1177/00943061231191421cc","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061231191421cc","url":null,"abstract":"There are fewer surprises here than in the barbershop essay since Nash follows in the footsteps of Löic Wacquant’s study of African American boxers, Body and Soul (1994). Like Wacquant, Nash finds that the young wrestlers whom he studied care a great deal about body image, emotional self-control, and the strategies and techniques of their respective sports. Nash pays close attention to how the young wrestlers try to avoid serious injury. As Nash suggests, wrestling may involve a certain kind of aggression, but perhaps for that very reason it also possesses a well-observed moral code. More than any other chapter in this collection, nothing justifies Nash’s title, Personal Sociology, more than his essay on his own penile implant. Actually, the essay reports his own physical and emotional experiences, from his initially hesitant deliberations, through the surgical procedure, to his postsurgical adaptations. Nash must be credited for his remarkable candor in documenting a process that most men might regard as a private matter. In doing so, he underscores how central the penis is to masculinity. Because Nash reports exclusively on his own experiences, any sociological inferences he might offer would be highly speculative. However, his account does suggest a broad sociological line of inquiry. If the penis is central to masculinity, how is this so? Do men with implants regard themselves differently than men who are naturally potent? How does impotence affect a man’s masculine self-image? How is a man with a penile implant regarded by his sexual partners? Nash’s essay suggests that the study of men with sexual implants opens new vistas in our understanding of masculinity at large. As befits a book entitled Personal Sociology, what ties together essays in this collection is not a continuity in themes, but rather a continuity in the author’s personal sensibility. This sensibility seems to begin with Nash’s absorption in the contexts and events of his own personal life. As Nash makes clear in his introduction, he wants to avoid the overprofessionalized voice that so many students acquire in graduate school. But it requires a certain kind of individual to lead a life filled with contexts and experiences so remote from the mainstream of academic life as to provide the material for sociologically engaging publications. Other sociologists may or may not fit this description, but Nash clearly does.","PeriodicalId":46889,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews","volume":"52 1","pages":"468 - 470"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48613978","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Prophetic City: Houston on the Cusp of a Changing America","authors":"Van C. Tran","doi":"10.1177/00943061231191421s","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061231191421s","url":null,"abstract":"ascriptive groups’’ (p. 143). This insight is, however, dismissed alongside the significance of the racial wealth gap to U.S.-style capitalism. Chapter Three does acknowledge the deep-seated role of world systems and global corporations in reproducing abject poverty. However, perhaps due to its focus on breadth over depth, it presents such ongoing global struggles over systems of political economy and power dynamics as somewhat flattened rather than complex, racialized, deeply contested, and historically rooted. Moreover, it does not thoroughly examine how transformations in the United States toward this system might occur. Perhaps these are merely tasks for another book. Yet it would have been pertinent, in the conclusion at the very least, to consider how global and local political and economic conditions shape the challenges and opportunities faced by democratic socialist (or even democratic socialist capitalist) movements and political projects, particularly outside of this small region of Europe. These issues aside, the book is vital for public and scholarly debate about systems of political economy and support for advocates of socioeconomic progress and equality. It provides essential empirical data and argumentation that establish the benefits of a general move toward social democracy and presents policy insights to help ameliorate the multiplied crises of our current quasi-oligarchic political systems and the immiseration brought on by extreme neoliberal capitalism. Prophetic City: Houston on the Cusp of a Changing America, by Stephen L. Klineberg. New York: Avid Reader Press, 2020. 336 pp. $28.00 cloth. ISBN: 9781501177910.","PeriodicalId":46889,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews","volume":"52 1","pages":"450 - 452"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42816488","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Academic Apartheid: Race and the Criminalization of Failure in an American Suburb","authors":"Jasmine L. Whiteside, M. Gast","doi":"10.1177/00943061231191421j","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061231191421j","url":null,"abstract":"in three different regions (Bosnia Herzegovina=Islam; Croatia=Western; Macedonia, now Macedonia/North-Macedonia=Orthodox). I would also have liked to see a map of these regions here. Nonetheless, the chapter concludes that overall transnationalism is and continues to be regionally structured. It segues into Chapter Four, which addresses why regionalism occurs. Chapter Four tests for various contexts that may affect a region, such as culture, economy, technology, and political, legal, and geographic contexts. The chapter is more technical and methodheavy than the rest of the book. It concludes that geographic proximity is the strongest explanation for transnational human activity’s clustering within world regions and that political, economic, and cultural factors play a much weaker role. These patterns hold for both transnational human mobility and communication. I enjoyed Chapter Five, the final content chapter, the most. Here, Deutschmann grapples with two central questions. First, are the patterns of transnational human activity observed in Chapters Three and Four unique to human activity; and second, will space and distance matter, or will their role vanish as predicted by many social scientists? Using Lévy flight, a mathematical model that shows that mobility is most likely to occur over short distances as opposed to long distances, across species, Mapping the Transnational World shows that humans, just like sharks, tend to be more likely to move across short distances and thus regionally. What is more, the chapter shows that geography does matter and continues to shape patterns of human activity across the globe. And while it has certainly become easier to overcome distances, this—as Mapping the Transnational World argues—does not mean that transnational human activity has become more global. Instead, Deutschmann asks us to think of what is typically considered globalization as mobilization. Mapping the Transnational World is a timely and important read. I appreciated the way Deutschmann describes the data used and analyzed in a way that is easily understandable even for a reader who may not have a heavy quantitative background. In fact, with its counterintuitive yet wellsubstantiated findings, the book invites the reader to engage with its core questions and themes. For instance, as someone who communicates regularly with family and friends across continents and nation-state borders, I found myself wondering whether an inclusion of recent popular communications applications, such as WhatsApp, would in any way affect the patterns observed by Deutschmann. I can envision Mapping the Transnational World being of interest to scholars and students of globalization, migration, global culture, and international relations.","PeriodicalId":46889,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews","volume":"52 1","pages":"433 - 435"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43009144","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"On Expertise: Cultivating Character, Goodwill, and Practical Wisdom","authors":"Larry Au","doi":"10.1177/00943061231191421aa","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061231191421aa","url":null,"abstract":"In On Expertise: Cultivating Character, Goodwill, and Practical Wisdom, Ashley Rose Mehlenbacher lays out an ambitious agenda to chart how different types of experts— professional researchers and citizen scientists—think about expertise. The book relies primarily on an online survey of over 90 participants and interviews with some 40 experts to elicit self-descriptions of how respondents acquired their expertise and how these experts assess the expertise of others. It should be obvious that I am no expert in rhetoric. As a sociologist asked to review a book about expertise from rhetorical studies, I have had to rely on a form of ‘‘referred expertise’’ or when ‘‘skills that have been learned in one scientific area are indirectly applied to another’’ (Collins and Sanders 2007:622). Yet such cross-field engagement is often fruitful as it exposes us to new ideas and helps us clarify the assumptions that we hold when thinking about expertise. Mehlenbacher’s rhetorical approach to expertise certainly has affinities to sociology. As Mehlenbacher writes, ‘‘rhetoric offers a complex theoretical framework that allows for contingencies, tensions, characters and credibility, socialization and socio-cognitive apprenticing, tensions between stabilization and change, and cognitive wetware in a formulation of expertise’’ (p. 20). This resonates with Goffmanian approaches to expertise that have examined the audiences, scripts, and frontstage/backstage performances of scientific expertise (Hilgartner 2000). The description of expertise in the book also accords with the distinction between experts and expertise in the sociology of expertise, which places experts within broader expertise networks that are often fraught with instability, conflict, and change (Eyal 2013). A sociology of expertise that incorporates some of the insights of rhetorical studies should pay attention to how performances of expertise are situationally dependent and include tried and true repertoires but also improvisation and novel scripts. The book is divided into five substantive chapters in addition to an Introduction and Conclusion. Chapters One, Two, and Three engage in theory-building by reviewing the literature in rhetorical studies, psychology, and sociology, as well as virtue ethics. These chapters also occasionally draw from the interviews to discuss how experts honed their knowledge and skills. Chapter Four draws more heavily on the empirical material, looking at how professional researchers engage in interdisciplinary work by evaluating the expertise of others. Chapter Five looks at how citizen scientists build credibility as quasi-outsiders from more credentialed and institutionalized forms of expertise. In the first set of chapters, Mehlenbacher elaborates on the concept of phronesis or practical wisdom and good judgment, which draws on Aristotelian ethics. Phronesis, for Mehlenbacher, matters because expertise ‘‘is not simply a matter of acquiring some knowledge and practicing ","PeriodicalId":46889,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews","volume":"52 1","pages":"465 - 466"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42300789","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Sociology in Post-Normal Times","authors":"Michael J. Thompson","doi":"10.1177/00943061231191421kk","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061231191421kk","url":null,"abstract":"accountability in platform governance. Social media companies already have private governance mechanisms in place to limit harmful accounts and content on their platforms, but we have very little insight into how effective these mechanisms are, or how evenly they are applied to countries around the world. Insight into these mechanisms provides a starting place for analyzing the scope and scale of the problem, and democratic governments could facilitate this transparency. Overall, Tyrants on Twitter provides a comprehensive overview of contemporary influence operations by Russia and China, making the reader aware of the myriad problems around influence operations on social media, while also discussing solutions to these challenges. Research and writing on these topics have tended to focus myopically on diagnosing the problem, and few authors have attempted to discuss solutions to these complex global challenges. Sloss’s book adds a new and interesting dimension to the solutions conversation by exploring what can be done through transnational governance arrangements and legislation. Because the challenge of foreign influence operations requires solutions across multiple levels, Sloss’s legal analysis provides a framework to start reflecting on some of the hard questions about how technology affects democracy around the world and the competing values we must weigh to achieve democratic freedom.","PeriodicalId":46889,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews","volume":"52 1","pages":"484 - 486"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43709000","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}