{"title":"Machine Habitus: Toward a Sociology of Algorithms","authors":"Vivian Guetler","doi":"10.1177/00943061231191421","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061231191421","url":null,"abstract":"There is a race within the technology field to develop machines and AI technologies that mimic humans. Artificial intelligence (AI) and automated systems are transforming human lives and becoming part of our social lives, radically changing the world. Automated systems determine financial transactions, credit risks, labor, hiring, and advertisement, and they recommend what to purchase or watch next. However, while AI has benefits, there is a growing concern about algorithmic discrimination and harm. Scholars and practitioners within the interdisciplinary fields of artificial intelligence, ethics, and society have shown the harms and benefits of AI and society by focusing on biases and discrimination, fairness, accuracy, and societal impacts of the algorithmic systems. For non-technical scholars, understanding AI’s complex and technical aspects can be intimidating and challenging. In Machine Habitus: Toward a Sociology of Algorithms, Massimo Airoldi has taken up this challenge by providing the sociological tools and theories required to study the social implications of algorithms and AI technologies. After all, machines are sociological objects that affect daily lives and hold societies together. Airoldi poses timely sociological questions about AI and society and provides significant theoretical contributions to the new field of the sociology of algorithms. Throughout the book, Airoldi investigates machine learning, algorithms, and AI, which are all automated systems, introducing the reader unfamiliar with these technologies to the complex terms used to explain AI. A necessary addition to the sociology of AI, the book expertly ties together concepts from cultural sociology, computer science, AI research, and Science and Technology Studies. In five chapters, Airoldi provides detailed explanations and examples of algorithmic systems and the problems of bias and inequality. Airoldi builds his work on the classical theoretical framework of Pierre Bourdieu, specifically the concepts of habitus, agents, social fields, structure, and culture to explain contemporary social issues. The book is an inspiration for readers interested in applying Bourdieu’s sociological theory within the techno-social world. For Airoldi, machine habitus is a key mechanism where socialized algorithmic systems reproduce cultural dispositions and social structures. Throughout the book, Airoldi focuses on two key sociological questions: how algorithms are socialized—what he terms the social shaping of algorithms or culture in the code—and how the socialized machines participate in society and reproduce it—the code in the culture. First, Airoldi effectively establishes how culture shapes the codes, how machine learning tools learn from society and, specifically, culture. According to Airoldi, culture in the code occurs when machine learning systems are developed and socialized from user-generated data, design features, and decisions created by machine creators. As such, human beha","PeriodicalId":46889,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews","volume":"52 1","pages":"415 - 416"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47465681","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":"Risky Cities: The Physical and Fiscal Nature of Disaster Capitalism","authors":"K. Tierney","doi":"10.1177/00943061231191421l","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061231191421l","url":null,"abstract":"in Switzerland thought intersex individuals should have a say in which sex they were assigned. They disputed Money’s assertion that by the age of 2 sex assignment and socialization needed to occur. Moreover, Eder traces the development of knowledge in textbooks between the 1950s and 1970s to document how widely the Hopkins research circulated. In these textbooks, we begin to see fractures in the scientific community as some researchers in the 1960s returned to biological explanations for sex assignment determinations. By the 1960s, Money’s recommendations for the treatment of intersex individuals were widely embraced, and gender ‘‘took on a life of its own’’ (p. 195) for a wide variety of stakeholders including feminists, social scientists, and in transgender medical care. Chapter Seven traces these various epistemic communities and how they put gender to use. Readers are introduced to Robert Stoller, who worked in the University of CaliforniaLos Angeles Gender Identity Research Clinic in 1962 and developed the term ‘‘gender identity’’ as distinct from gender role. While Stoller’s team was cautious about using surgical interventions, Hopkins centralized surgical interventions as a primary tool in the medical management of intersex individuals. Meanwhile, by the late 1960s and 1970s, Money’s ideas about the malleability of gender roles was taken up by feminists who advocated that if gender was learned, it could also be dismantled. Messy and complex, How the Clinic Made Gender offers a genealogy of sex categorization and the contradictions between prevailing theories and treatment protocols for working with intersex individuals. As Eder demonstrates, it was neither biological determinism nor cultural reductionism that enabled the team at Johns Hopkins to develop the idea of gender, but a feedback loop between the two. Moreover, Eder’s work shows how since its early formulation by Wilkins and appearance in the writings of John Money and the Hampsons, ‘‘gender’’ has never been a straightforward concept. Nor, as Eder shows, is gender neutral or value-free. Instead, How the Clinic Made Gender offers a poignant reminder that scientists and medical professionals are shaped by social and cultural norms and the contexts within which they work and the relationships they have established.","PeriodicalId":46889,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews","volume":"52 1","pages":"437 - 439"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42542536","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":"Shaping the Futures of Work: Proactive Governance and Millennials","authors":"A. Wolf","doi":"10.1177/00943061231191421ff","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061231191421ff","url":null,"abstract":"The rise of digital technology, algorithms, and artificial intelligence is fueling a fourth industrial revolution, which appears to be generating a sense of both opportunity and fear in equal measure. In Shaping the Futures of Work: Proactive Governance and Millennials, Nilanjan Raghunath argues that changing technology has generated ‘‘societal flux,’’ which has complicated the incorporation of millennials into traditional social and economic structures. She uses the example of Singapore to explore how proactive governance can mitigate this societal flux, by working in collaboration with the population, businesses, and the education system to predict changes to the economy and help citizens ‘‘ride the waves of future trends,’’ potentially ameliorating the challenges technological change poses for the youngest generations. The book is framed around two overarching themes. First, Raghunath aims to explore how the creation of the flux society is affecting the millennial generation. She argues that flux means social capital is no longer enough, and millennials know they must also build their ‘‘skills-updating capital,’’ constantly working to improve themselves and their employability. This anxiety results in behaviors such as moving jobs frequently, which generates stereotypes of millennials’ work ethic and commitment that, Raghunath argues, are largely unfounded. Second, the book argues that the flux society and its impact on millennials and Gen Z demand a proactive governance, of which Singapore is presented as a useful archetype. Proactive governance is described as a process of anticipating the future and building the social, economic, and physical infrastructure to enable constant skills upgrading. Importantly, proactive governance in Singapore is just as much about the actual programs being implemented as their project of building a culture that promotes adaptation. Sociologists of automation, generations, and economic culture will find much to consider in this book. The exploration of automation is in debt to Mandel’s (1975) thinking on the subject as well as Beck’s (1992) notion of the risk society. Raghunath’s finding that automation produces anxiety that affects social behavior even among digital natives, such as millennials, presents interesting questions for how to shape work and the welfare state. Building on Mannheim’s ([1952] 2013) seminal conception of generations, the book presents a narrative of how older generations are struggling to incorporate millennials into firms. A central challenge is that millennials desire to find meaning in their work. Finally, the experience of Singapore with its unique cultural project of promoting deep multiculturalism and obsessive focus on meritocracy raises interesting Weberian ([1905] 2002) parallels to the protestant work ethic in thinking about how social culture affects economic outcomes. Although the issue of automation is discussed in detail, the book could have more deeply explored the theore","PeriodicalId":46889,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews","volume":"52 1","pages":"475 - 477"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45544090","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":"Fitting the Facts of Crime: An Invitation to Biopsychosocial Criminology","authors":"Volkan Yücel","doi":"10.1177/00943061231191421ee","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061231191421ee","url":null,"abstract":"The cognitive blindness inherent in the specialization of scientific fields is particularly common in the social sciences. For advancement in some scientific areas, knowledge from different disciplines needs to be increased and combined. Criminology requires the synthesis of the greatest amount of knowledge due to the fact that it draws on sociology, psychology, anthropology, chemistry, and social architecture. It requires knowledge of everything concerned with urban life and constant updating with respect to social change. Chad Posick, Michael Rocque, and J. C. Barnes, in their book Fitting the Facts of Crime: An Invitation to Biopsychosocial Criminology, present a biopsychosocial perspective to explain common findings in criminology and to guide new research and public policy. The main contribution of the book is to adapt some of the facts of criminology that have been accepted for more or less 30 years to the present day. The authors draw on the results of empirical research and evidence from biopsychosocial criminology to address established facts about sex and gender, age, environment, education, class, social ties and associations, stress and other influences, the etiology behind these facts, and exactly how they relate to criminal behavior. One of the important facts that the book highlights is that defining macrocriminology is as difficult as defining the neurophysiology of the human brain. Biology and the environment interact to affect human behavior. Criminal behavior is precisely the result of this interaction. Posick, Rocque, and Barnes, as biosocial criminologists, examine the genetic and environmental factors that cause behavioral disorders. However, it is difficult to bring these factors together because behind antisocial behavior, and thus crime, there is an overdetermined psychology. The authors show how biopsychosocial criminology can provide a unifying framework for enriching our understanding of some of the most robust and well-established issues in the field. In doing so, they augment existing inquiry and analysis by showing how biological and psychological findings can be seamlessly combined with social theories. Developed to become a standard text for criminology, especially for undergraduate education, the book introduces the basic concepts in the field and illustrates them in everyday life. In this respect, it can be extremely helpful in undergraduate education. The book contains many new insights about criminology. Findings that address early sexual behavior and pregnancy in disadvantaged areas, the brain’s ability to increase impulse control as it matures, or the relationship between hypocortisolism and stress and antisocial behavior are discussed in depth. The brain is the primary organ responsible for purposeful behavior. Genetic predispositions that influence the function of brain structure interact with environmental factors to generate behavior. Despite all the new methodologies and advances in technology, it has n","PeriodicalId":46889,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews","volume":"52 1","pages":"472 - 474"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44048560","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":"Come Out, Come Out, Whoever You Are","authors":"Marni A. Brown","doi":"10.1177/00943061231191421hh","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061231191421hh","url":null,"abstract":"with feminist politics meaningfully to her grandmother’s activism in the 1930s for India’s independence. Reza Nakhaie and Carl E. James’s chapters show the enduring impact of racism on their careers, and Nakhaie’s in particular is quite poignant in its explication of how migration, racism, and the precarious academic labor market in Canada shaped his worldview. Cora Voyageur’s thoughtful and engaging chapter details her journey from residential school to academia. Using Indigenous protocol as an approach to the chapter, she outlines her career insistence on not just cataloguing harms but researching First Nations’ labor market participation and continuity using a Marxist, anti-colonial, and effectual approach to Indigenous Studies that takes her life’s knowledge into account. Some chapters include the usual farcical politics of academics and their departments befitting the Netflix series ‘‘The Chair’’— though, dare I say, no Asian women chairs of departments are part of Canadian institutional sociology represented here. Further, the question of white straight men’s dominance in the field is insufficiently attended to in this text as a whole, though they write the majority of the chapters in, and edit, the text itself. Additionally, the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, where critical sociological work has flourished, including but not limited to the globally recognized scholarship of Dorothy Smith, is mentioned by just one of its graduates in the volume. This is a notable absence given its record at placing students in tenure-stream position in sociology departments. After reading Canadian Sociologists in First Person, I found myself asking hard questions about whether sociologists are in the main interesting people, whether sociologists are led principally by intellectual or political passion, and whether some chapters were a comical rejoinder to Peter Berger’s Invitation to Sociology. Berger presciently describes sociologists as academic versions of Babbit, concerned with being middle—middle class, middle managers, middle politically— rather than thinkers or riskers. One contributor confesses to writing an introductory textbook to pay for a child’s orthodontia. Most contributors spent considerable time talking about their spouses and heterosexual life – a fact which must calculably affect the discipline, but upon which they did not choose to reflect. Canadian sociology is richly informed by theoretical, political, social, and intellectual concern with power, yet it also mirrors the U.S. practice of continually documenting inequality for its own sake. This volume touches on Canadianization and the struggle against U.S.-dominated hiring and influence, and it is time to have this discussion again, mostly within the highest ranked and largest departments across Canada. Neil McLaughlin, one of the editors, has already done impressive intellectual work bringing these questions to us and continues to do so in this edited collection. For that","PeriodicalId":46889,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews","volume":"52 1","pages":"478 - 480"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46879682","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}
Trevor Boffone, Cristina Herrera, M. Casper, W. Luttrell, Albert S. Fu, S. Klineberg, Colin Mcfarlane, R. Collins, Lynne A. Haney, Posick, Michael Chad, C. RocqueJ., Barnes, Karen A. Cerulo, J. Ruane, C. Dalessandro, S. MacMillen, Louise, A. Mehlenbacher, Rose, Parasecoli, Fabio, Abigail C. Saguy, Kathleen S. Lynch, Ethnography Cha´vez, eds Gina M. Pe´rez, J. E. Nash, S. Riggins, Harold Neil, Mclaughlin, S. Blithe, C. JaneJanell, Bauer, Eder, Sandra, D. Kaplan, Eva Illouz, E. Deutschmann, Lo´pez, J. Lilly, Dayna Bowen, Cristina A Pop
{"title":"Index of Reviews by Category","authors":"Trevor Boffone, Cristina Herrera, M. Casper, W. Luttrell, Albert S. Fu, S. Klineberg, Colin Mcfarlane, R. Collins, Lynne A. Haney, Posick, Michael Chad, C. RocqueJ., Barnes, Karen A. Cerulo, J. Ruane, C. Dalessandro, S. MacMillen, Louise, A. Mehlenbacher, Rose, Parasecoli, Fabio, Abigail C. Saguy, Kathleen S. Lynch, Ethnography Cha´vez, eds Gina M. Pe´rez, J. E. Nash, S. Riggins, Harold Neil, Mclaughlin, S. Blithe, C. JaneJanell, Bauer, Eder, Sandra, D. Kaplan, Eva Illouz, E. Deutschmann, Lo´pez, J. Lilly, Dayna Bowen, Cristina A Pop","doi":"10.1177/00943061231191423","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061231191423","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46889,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews","volume":"52 1","pages":"492 - 492"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45619220","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":"Critical Political Economy Meets Historical Institutionalism in the Study of Asian Precarity: Assets and Liabilities of a Methodological Hybrid","authors":"J. Glassman","doi":"10.1177/00943061231191420d","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061231191420d","url":null,"abstract":"Precarious Asia: Global Capitalism and Work in Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia is an ambitious and, in my view, successful book. Arne Kalleberg, Kevin Hewison, and Kwang-Yeong Shin deploy their considerable experience in studying precarious labor to fill in a significant gap in the literature by providing a detailed analysis of the varied conditions of precarity in Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia. The comparisons and contrasts the authors engage allow them to specify some of the different conditions of work that are often subsumed under the heading ‘‘precarious’’—in particular, as they outline in Chapter One, nonstandard/non-regular versus regular employment, informal versus formal sector employment, and self-employment/household labor versus labor remunerated by others (pp. 22–26). Mainstream modernization theorists have often placed all such distinctions under headings designating the characteristics of a premodern and a modern economy, respectively, with the assumed-to-be-normal direction of historical change being from the first to the second. The authors of Precarious Asia reject this overly simplistic framework (p. 25), both because evidence from the neoliberal era suggests there is no unilinear direction of change—in fact, the evidence is that ‘‘premodern’’ conditions are becoming increasingly prevalent again—and because the nuances of difference between the three types of precarity they identify enable them to better analyze specific differences between their country cases. Thus, for example, an increase in non-regular employment, with removal of various protections against socially unacceptable practices and working conditions, has been more characteristic of the Northeast Asian states, while Indonesia, with a much larger agrarian population, has maintained a very high level of informal sector employment—that is, employment with low and volatile earnings—throughout its entire process of ‘‘modernization.’’ At the outset of the study, the choice of these country cases might strike some readers as odd. Both Japan and South Korea have been widely regarded as successful cases of industrial development under developmental states (in South Korea’s case, ‘‘late’’ industrialization), while Indonesia has never been included in the list of Asian developmental states and still today features an economy with an enormous amount of agrarian labor. Yet this choice of cases for comparison allows the authors to highlight some important variations within Asia—and not just between Northeast Asian developmental states and Southeast Asian states, a distinction that sometimes involves a geographically conventional and overly generalized binary, but between the two Northeast Asian cases themselves. Indeed, for all the conventionally assumed similariPrecarious Asia: Global Capitalism and Work in Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia, by Arne L. Kalleberg, Kevin Hewison, and Kwang-Yeong Shin. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022. 248 pp. $65.00 cloth. IS","PeriodicalId":46889,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews","volume":"52 1","pages":"410 - 414"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43414712","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":"Unauthorized Love: Mixed-Citizenship Couples Negotiating Intimacy, Immigration, and the State","authors":"J. Cook","doi":"10.1177/00943061231191421v","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061231191421v","url":null,"abstract":"In Unauthorized Love: Mixed-Citizenship Couples Negotiating Intimacy, Immigration, and the State, Jane Lilly López addresses the experience of navigating ‘‘family reunification’’—the legal process through which U.S. citizens can petition for their noncitizen spouses to obtain legal immigrant status. The central focus of the book is how couples with different legal positioning visà-vis the immigration system experience the family reunification process. Most of the book uses qualitative interview data to describe how the mixed-status families in López’s study navigate the family reunification process, and how the process shapes family life. In Chapter Three, López’s descriptive analysis focuses on agency and constraints to agency, showing that even the most strategic approach can result in an unfavorable outcome for families positioned disadvantageously vis-à-vis the immigration system. Faring especially poorly in the process are those of lower socio-economic status, and those with preexisting immigration enforcement histories (e.g., previous unauthorized border crossings and deportations). Chapter Four shows that mixed-citizenship families face restricted spatial mobility within the U.S. and transnationally. This restricted mobility inhibits the family’s ability to fully engage in family life. For example, a U.S. citizen spouse and their children wishing to live together as a family with a noncitizen spouse may be compelled to live outside the United States when the noncitizen is denied legal status or while awaiting a decision on a family reunification application. Contrary to the assertion by the Supreme Court in Kerry v. Din that U.S. citizen family members can simply ‘‘visit’’ noncitizen members denied legal immigrant status, López’s interviewees show that the family reunification process forces a choice between country and family. As one of López’s interviewees pointed out, ‘‘being able to live together ‘somewhere’ was not the same as being able to live together in their country of choice’’ (p. 84). The unauthorized families López interviewed report feeling ‘‘trapped.’’ But the borders that confine their movements are invisible to anyone not initiated into the world of unauthorized life. Unauthorized families avoid travel outside of the city or state where they live. International travel and travel by plane are also off limits. They must also avoid areas unsafe for noncitizens (i.e., international border regions); and, as most of López’s unauthorized interviewees are of Mexican or Central American origin, they may also feel compelled to avoid predominantly white areas (where people of color face increased racialized visibility and surveillance). Ultimately, these forms of ‘‘spatial disintegration’’ result in the erasure of noncitizen family members from family life, both on a daily basis and over the long term. The experiences of ‘‘authorized families’’ (those who successfully pursue legal status through family reunification), especially thos","PeriodicalId":46889,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews","volume":"52 1","pages":"456 - 458"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42594560","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":"A Taste for Oppression: A Political Ethnography of Everyday Life in Belarus","authors":"Mikołaj Pawlak","doi":"10.1177/00943061231191421p","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061231191421p","url":null,"abstract":"is praiseworthy (Chapter 12), as she demonstrates how aloof policy-makers and regional experts were in terms of addressing and acknowledging the needs and political rights of youth in the MENA region (UN 2016). A minor though noticeable editorial lapse can be found in two separate case studies in which the author confusingly uses the same pseudonym (‘‘Dina’’) for two different female youth studying at university. Similarly, Educating Egypt outlines the highly competitive nature of university entrance examinations and the resultant obsession with grades among students, families, and broader segments of society (e.g., the mass media). However, to avoid the reader interpreting this as a solely Egyptian or MENA phenomenon, Herrera could have alluded to similar obsessions with grades and high-stakes examinations found in neighboring and far-flung societies such as South Korea and Japan. Shadow education plays a major role in many societies, with families in South Korea (for instance) allocating approximately ten percent of their budgets to private tutoring and after-school lessons. The current transformations taking place in the Egyptian education system belie the widespread dependence on so-called shadow education across almost all socioeconomic strata of society.","PeriodicalId":46889,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Sociology-A Journal of Reviews","volume":"52 1","pages":"445 - 447"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42773730","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}