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ContemporarySociology
March 2010 • Volume 39 • Number 2American Sociological Association
A JOURNAL OF REVIEWS
Cover.indd 1 03/03/2010 6:27:35 PM
EDITORAlan Sica
MANAGING EDITORAnne Sica
ASSISTANT EDITORSKathryn Densberger
Richard M. Simon
EDITORIAL BOARD
Pennsylvania State University
A JOURNAL OF REVIEWSMarch 2010 – Volume 39 – Number 2
Jimi AdesinaRhodes UniversitySouth Africa
Paul AmatoPennsylvania State University
Robert AntonioUniversity of Kansas
Karen BarkeyColumbia University
Sharon BirdIowa State University
Victoria BonnellUniversity of California,Berkeley
Rose BrewerUniversity of Minnesota
Craig CalhounNew York University
Bruce CarruthersNorthwestern University
Donatella Della PortaEuropean University InstituteItaly
Paul DiMaggioPrinceton University
Elaine DraperCalifornia State University,Los Angeles
Anthony ElliottFlinders UniversityAustralia
Yen Le EspirituUniversity of California,San Diego
Eric FassinÉcole Normale SupérieureFrance
Eva FodorCentral European UniversityHungary
Joan H. FujimuraUniversity of Wisconsin
Joe GerteisUniversity of Minnesota
Janice IrvineUniversity of Massachusetts,Amherst
Devorah Kalekin-FishmanUniversity of HaifaIsrael
Caglar KeyderBoğaziçi ÜniversitesiTurkey
Nazli KibriaBoston University
Chyong-fang KoAcademia SinicaTaiwan
Marcello ManeriUniversity of Milano-BicoccaItaly
Ruth MilkmanUniversity of California,Los Angeles
Valentine MoghadamPurdue University
Mignon MooreUniversity of California,Los Angeles
Ann MorningNew York University
Andrew NoymerUniversity of California, Irvine
Jennifer PierceUniversity of Minnesota
Harland PrechelTexas A&M University
Wendy SimondsGeorgia State University
Neil SmelserUniversity of California,Berkeley
Nico StehrZeppelin UniversityGermany
Alenka SvabUniversity of LjubljanaSlovenia
Judith TreasUniversity of California,Irvine
Stephen TurnerUniversity of South Florida
Jeff UlmerPennsylvania State University
John UrryLancaster UniversityUnited Kingdom
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A SYMPOSIUM ON FRENCH SOCIOLOGY
Author Title Reviewer
French Sociology After World War II
123 Philippe Masson Faire de la sociologie: Les grandes enquêtes Howard S. Becker françaises depuis 1945
Fresh Work on the History of French Empirical Sociology
126 Philippe Masson Faire de la sociologie: Les grandes enquêtes Jennifer Platt françaises depuis 1945
126 Jean Peneff Le goût de l’observation: comprendre et pratiquer l’observation participante en sciences sociales
REVIEW ESSAYS Author Title Reviewer
Burawoy, His Memory
129 Michael Burawoy The Extended Case Method: Four Countries, Javier Auyero Four Decades, Four Great Transformations, and One Theoretical Tradition
Global Environment and Human Development
131 Kevin Watkins Human Development Report 2006. Beyond Scott Frickel Scarcity: Power, Poverty and the Global Water Crisis
131 Kevin Watkins Human Development Report 2007-2008. Fighting Climate Change: Human Solidarity in a Divided World
A Chinese World System, Again?
134 Giovanni Arrighi Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of Richard Lachmann the Twenty-First Century
134 Deborah S. Davis Creating Wealth and Poverty in and Wang Feng Postsocialist China
REVIEWS
CONTENTS
139 Richard Alba, Albert J. Raboteau, and Josh DeWind, editors
Immigration and Religion in America: Comparative and Historical Perspectives
Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo
140 Joel Andreas Rise of the Red Engineers: The Cultural Revolution and the Origins of China’s New Class
Guobin Yang
141 Sarah Babb Behind the Development Banks: Washington Politics, World Poverty, and the Wealth of Nations
Michael Goldman
142 Paul Bagguley and Yasmin Hussain
Riotous Citizens: Ethnic Conflict in Multicultural Britain
Martin Bulmer
144 Carolina Bank Muñoz Transnational Tortillas: Race, Gender and Shop-Floor Politics in Mexico and the United States
Gretchen Purser
145 Scott N. Brooks Black Men Can’t Shoot Douglas Hartmann146 Lionel Cantú, Jr., edited
by Nancy A. Naples and Salvador Vidal-Ortiz
The Sexuality of Migration: Border Crossings and Mexican Immigrant Men
Héctor Carrillo
148 Eamonn Carrabine Crime, Culture and the Media Lynn S. Chancer149 Wayne A. Cornelius,
David Fitzgerald, and Scott Borger, editors
Four Generations of Norteños: New Research from the Cradle of Mexican Migration
A. Gary Dworkin and Charles Munnell
150 Tawnya J. Adkins Covert and Philo C. Wasburn
Media Bias?: A Comparative Study of Time, Newsweek, The National Review, and The Progressive Coverage of Domestic Social Issues, 1975-2000
James Landers
152 Jocelyn Elise Crowley Defiant Dads: Fathers’ Rights Activists in America
Martin D. Schwartz
153 David Crystal Txtng: The Gr8 Db8 danah boyd154 Anne-Marie Cusac Cruel and Unusual: The Culture of
Punishment in AmericaMichael Silberman
156 Sarah Daynes and Orville Lee
Desire for Race Mara Loveman
157 Jean Van Delinder Struggles Before Brown: Early Civil Rights Protests and Their Significance Today
Aldon Morris
159 Shari L. Dworkin and Faye Linda Wachs
Body Panic: Gender, Heath, and the Selling of Fitness
Natalie Boero
160 Anthony Elliott Making the Cut: How Cosmetic Surgery is Transforming Our Lives
Ann Branaman
162 Yuval Elmelech Transmitting Inequality: Wealth and the American Family
Edward N. Wolff
163 Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman
The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood
Michael Barnett
164 Andrew Gelman and Jeronimo Cortina, editors
A Quantitative Tour of the Social Sciences Stephen L. Morgan
166 Jack P. Gibbs Colossal Control Failures: From Julius Caesar to 9/11
Robert Gramling
167 Katherine Giuffre Collective Creativity: Art and Society in the South Pacific
Dustin Kidd
Author Title Reviewer
169 Joseph C. Hermanowicz Lives in Science: How Institutions Affect Academic Careers
Diana Crane
170 Ethan B. Kapstein and Nathan Converse
The Fate of Young Democracies James Burk
171 Diana Kendall Members Only: Elite Clubs and the Process of Exclusion
Karyn Lacy
172 Maren Klawiter The Biopolitics of Breast Cancer: Changing Cultures of Disease and Activism
Chris Ganchoff
174 Mire Koikari Pedagogy of Democracy: Feminism and the Cold War in the U.S. Occupation of Japan
Barbara Molony
175 Timothy Kubal Cultural Movements and Collective Memory: Christopher Columbus and the Rewriting of the National Origin Myth
Jennifer A. Jordan
177 Ahmet T. Kuru Secularism and State Policies Toward Religion: The United States, France, and Turkey
Roger Finke
178 Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo
Daughters of Aquarius: Women of the Sixties Counterculture
Marion S. Goldman
179 Rich Ling and Scott W. Campbell, editors
The Reconstruction of Space and Time: Mobile Communication Practices
Barry Wellman
181 Dan C. Lortie School Principal: Managing in Public Peter Meiksins183 George E. McCarthy Dreams in Exile: Rediscovering Science
and Ethics in Nineteenth-Century Social Theory
David Norman Smith
184 Rory McVeigh The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan: Right-Wing Movements and National Politics
Stewart E. Tolnay
186 Hiromi Mizuno Science for the Empire: Scientific Nationalism in Modern Japan
Masamichi Sasaki
187 Valentine M. Moghadam Globalization and Social Movements: Islamism, Feminism, and the Global Justice Movement
William I. Robinson
188 Colin Ong-Dean Distinguishing Disability: Parents, Privilege, and Special Education
Thomas M. Skrtic
190 Bryan D. Palmer Canada’s 1960s: The Ironies of Identity in a Rebellious Era
Mildred A. Schwartz
191 Edmund D. Pellegrino, Adam Schulman, and Thomas W. Merrill, editors
Human Dignity and Bioethics Michael S. Evans
193 Andrew Pickering and Keith Guzik, editors
The Mangle in Practice: Science, Society and Becoming
Eric L. Hsu
194 Antony J. Puddephatt, William Shaffir, and Steven W. Kleinknecht, editors
Ethnographies Revisited: Constructing Theory in the Field
Jacob Avery
196 Allison J. Pugh Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children, and Consumer Culture
Pamela J. Smock
Author Title Reviewer
197 Nicholas A. Robins and Adam Jones, editors
Genocides by the Oppressed: Subaltern Genocide in Theory and Practice
Clark McCauley
198 Diane M. Rodgers Debugging the Link between Social Theory and Social Insects
Ullica Segerstrale
200 Claude Rosental, translated by Catherine Porter
Weaving Self-Evidence: A Sociology of Logic
Steve G. Hoffman
201 Howard L. Rosenthal and David J. Rothman, editors
What Do We Owe Each Other?: Rights and Obligations in Contemporary American Society
Jane A. Grant
202 Michael Shiner Drug Use and Social Change: The Distortion of History
Patricia A. Adler and Peter Adler
204 Patricia K. Smith Obesity among Poor Americans: Is Public Assistance the Problem?
Virginia W. Chang
205 Cass R. Sunstein Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide
Arthur L. Stinchcombe
206 André Turmel A Historical Sociology of Childhood: Developmental Thinking, Categorization and Graphic Visualization
Barbara Heyns
208 Barbara Wejnert, Suzanne K. Steinmetz, and Nirupama Prakash, editors
Safe Motherhood in a Globalized World Barbara Katz Rothman
209 Michel Wieviorka, translated by David Macey
Violence: A New Approach Lois Presser
210 Howard Wilhite Consumption and the Transformation of Everyday Life: A View from South India
Sanjoy Mazumdar
212 Bill Winders The Politics of Food Supply: U.S. Agricultural Policy in the World Economy
Carmen Bain
213 Kam C. Wong Chinese Policing: History and Reform Bin Liang215 Robert Wuthnow Boundless Faith: The Global Outreach of
American ChurchesMary Jo Neitz
216 Wei-Hsin Yu Gendered Trajectories: Women, Work, and Social Change in Japan and Taiwan
Yoshinori Kamo
218 Min Zhou Contemporary Chinese America: Immigration, Ethnicity, and Community Transformation
Margaret M. Chin
BRIEflY NoTED220 Randall Amster,
Abraham DeLeon, Luis A. Fernandez, Anthony J. Nocella II, and Deric Shannon, editors
Contemporary Anarchist Studies: An Introductory Anthology of Anarchy in the Academy
220 Charles F. Andrain Political Justice and Religious Values
Author Title Reviewer
230 Comment and Reply
233 eRRatum
234 PubliCations ReCeived
239 index of authoRs by CategoRy
221 Karen L. Baird Beyond Reproduction: Women’s Health, Activism, and Public Policy221 John D. Baldwin Ending the Science Wars222 Ronald J. Berger Hoop Dreams on Wheels: Disability and the Competitive Wheelchair
Athlete
222 Judith Blau and Marina Karides, editors
The World and US Social Forums: A Better World is Possible and Necessary
222 Prescott C. Ensign Knowledge Sharing Among Scientists: Why Reputation Matters for R&D in Multinational Firms
223 Karla A. Erickson The Hungry Cowboy: Service and Community in a Neighborhood Restaurant
224 Kevin Hylton ‘Race’ and Sport: Critical Race Theory
224 Lawrence R. Jacobs, Fay Lomax Cook, and Michael X. Delli Carpini
Talking Together: Public Deliberation and Political Participation in America
224 Kelly A. Joyce Magnetic Appeal: MRI and the Myth of Transparency225 Judith Walzer Leavitt Make Room for Daddy: The Journey from Waiting Room to Birthing
Room226 Patricia MacCormack Cinesexuality226 Carol McNaughton Transitions Through Homelessness: Lives on the Edge227 Julie A. Mertus Human Rights Matters: Local Politics and National Human Rights
Institutions227 Gerardo Otero, editor Food for the Few: Neoliberal Globalism and Biotechnology in Latin
America227 Dina Perrone The High Life: Club Kids, Harm and Drug Policy228 Craig Slatin Environmental Unions: Labor and the Superfund228 William Tregea and
Marjorie LarmourThe Prisoners’ World: Portraits of Convicts Caught in the Incarceration Binge
229 Kathleen S. Yep Outside the Paint: When Basketball Ruled at the Chinese Playground
Author Title Reviewer
Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews (ISSN 0094-3061) is published bimonthly in January, March, May, July, September, and November by the American Sociological Association, 1430 K Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20005. Copyright © 2010 by American Sociological Association. All rights reserved. No portion of the contents may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher. Periodicals postage paid at Thousand Oaks, California, and at additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Contemporary Sociology c/o SAGE Publications, Inc., 2455 Teller Road, Thousand Oaks, CA 91320.
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A SYMPOSIUM ONFRENCH SOCIOLOGY
French Sociology After World War II
HOWARD S. BECKER
San Francisco, [email protected]
For many years, students learned the historyof sociology pretty much the way I did fromLouis Wirth in the late 1940s as a string ofnames, dates, and the theories associatedwith them: Durkheim, ‘‘division of labor’’;Tarde, ‘‘imitation’’; nodding references toIbn Khaldun, Machiavelli, and Herodotus.In later years, students heard a more trun-cated and sophisticated version, with lessemphasis on history and more on an increas-ingly smaller list of names and theoriesthat eventually constituted the now totallyconventional trinity of Marx, Durkheim,and Weber. Once important thinkers likeVeblen, Park, and even Simmel more or lessdisappeared from the curriculum. Manyexceptions to this overly simple story exist,but I think most readers will recognize thebroad outline.
In any of its versions, this kind of historyfocused on ideas and theories, rather thanresearch and the way it was conducted. Ialways thought an alternative version—onetelling the story of sociology’s developmentas a chronicle of good research projects,the methods used to produce them,and the organizations that made thempossible—would produce a better under-standing of the discipline and how it got tobe the way it is. Paul Lazarsfeld (1993: 257–98) wrote about these problems from timeto time, but had few followers. In recentyears, scholars outside the United Stateshave produced such excellent examples ofthis approach as Jean-Michel Chapoulie’s(2001) insightful account of the ChicagoSchool and Jennifer Platt’s (1996) penetrat-ing book on the history of research methodsin American sociology.
Now Philippe Masson has produceda book describing the development of socio-logy in France after World War II, which exem-plifies the kind of monograph I had so longwished for, and which we can hope will bethe first of many, by him or others, on thedevelopment of the variety of national sociol-ogies that now exist. Masson explains thatFrench sociology had no organizational exis-tence until well after the end of the war: nodepartments, no research centers, no PhDprograms, no regular sources of researchfunding, no real professional journals, noth-ing of what North Americans have becomeaccustomed to having around since the early1900s. Such organizational support as impor-tant individual scholars like Durkheim orMauss could create failed to endure and hadlittle long-term institutional consequence.After the war, Raymond Aron, a well-knownwriter on sociological topics, persuaded gov-ernment officials that sociology’s time hadarrived. As a result, several universitiesestablished departments, the CNRS (if theU.S. National Science Foundation had staffresearchers it would be something like theCNRS) organized sociology research centers,and, maybe most importantly, several youngscholars, more or less handpicked by Aron,were sent to the United States to learn thelatest stuff, among them Alain Touraine,
Faire de la sociologie: Les grandes enquetesfrancxaises depuis 1945, by PhilippeMasson. Paris, FR: La Decouverte,2008. 254 pp. e15.00 paper. ISBN:9782707154484.
123 Contemporary Sociology 39, 2
� American Sociological Association 2010DOI: 10.1177/0094306110361330
http://cs.sagepub.com
Michel Crozier, and others of that generation.They learned survey research, mainly, atColumbia and Chicago and, once home,established it as the basic research model(serious commercial polling businesses startedup around the same time). A professionalassociation and a few journals also got started.
Masson emphasizes the influence of earlyevents on what followed. The first recruits tothe new field had been trained in philosophy.That made them sensitive to the existentia-lism espoused by Sartre and his followers,a program indifferent to American-basedpragmatism and its sociological progeny,and quick to emphasize theoretical (thatis, philosophical) issues. They also quicklycame to depend on research grants awardedby various government offices and organi-zations, whose managers began findingresearch—preferably the kind based onsurveys, with lots of numbers, which looked,and could be said to be, scientific—essentialto the design and execution of the socialengineering projects then in vogue.
As the topics the government concerneditself with changed, the topics researcherssought and got money for changed accor-dingly. No surprise there. Most of these topicshad to do with the modernization of Franceafter the war: the growth of large economicorganizations and its consequences; the build-ing of huge housing projects on the edge ofParis, many of which quickly became ghettoessegregated along ethnic, racial, and economiclines; problems of social mobility or the lackthereof, especially as the schools were impli-cated; poverty. In each case, one or a fewmonographs created a form widely imitated,the most well known in the United Statesbeing Crozier’s The Bureaucratic Phenomenon,and Bourdieu and Passeron’s The Inheritors,and, later, Reproduction. People often spokeof this as an era of ‘‘chapelles,’’ researchgroups organized around a powerful leader,who raised research money, set researchdirections, exerted great influence on peo-ple’s futures, and generally dominated thosearound him. And they were ‘‘hims’’ (somewomen, e.g., the sociologist of art RaymondeMoulin, also having research centers andcollaborators but seldom creating this kindof tight, disciplined fighting outfit).
French sociology has never been a verylarge business. Today (it’s hard to know these
things exactly) there might be as manyas 2,000 people teaching sociology anddoing some kind of sociological research inacademia and government research organ-izations, and I can’t estimate the numberdoing research in the private sector. Thereare relatively few (to an American) academicdepartments, most of them overwhelmed bylarge numbers of undergraduates. Even so,the discipline manages to field entries inmany major specialties: medical sociology,crime (with major showings in delinquencyand drugs), the sociologies of art and science.But these small numbers make for a restrictedset of opportunities and possibilities com-pared to what the American discipline withits perhaps 20,000 practicing sociologistshas available.
That is one of the distinctive features of theFrench scene; another is one some Americansmight envy, though others of us will be happynot to have it: the prominence of sociologistsin the media. For years, you could watchBourdieu and Touraine battle in the pagesof major newspapers, and on television, espe-cially during hot political seasons. Sociolo-gists routinely write pieces for Le Monde,the most prominent daily newspaper, andare quoted there and elsewhere on a varietyof issues and problems.
Still another is the changing, often ambiv-alent relationship to the sociology andsociologists of the United States. In the earlypostwar period, Sartre and his followerswere resolutely anti-American, so mostsociologists had little to do with Americans(though Everett C. Hughes, who read andspoke French and German, visited industrialsociologist Georges Friedmann now andthen). But the same sociologists wanted tobe scientists, making theories and testinghypotheses, preferably statistically, and youhad to go to the Americans to learn how todo it, as Touraine, Crozier, and others did.Raymond Boudon embodied this position,and Bourdieu was notably ambivalent, de-nouncing survey-based sociology in onebreath and in the next practicing it. Parsons,Merton, and Goffman were translated intoFrench, but not much else from America.
Beginning in the late 1980s, a new gener-ation, more numerous and somewhat moreinternational, took up versions of con-structivism, learning from ethnomethodology
124 Review Essays
Contemporary Sociology 39, 2
and from symbolic interactionism, first in theperson of Anselm Strauss and then the Chi-cago School more generally. (A useful list ofworks in these traditions published in Frenchappears on p. 187.) These developments showup in another book Masson treats as emblem-atic, Jean Peneff’s (1992) participant observa-tion study of hospital emergency services,L’Hopital en urgence (Hospital EmergencyServices). Masson points out that observa-tional studies, costing less, didn’t requiregovernment grants (Peneff has alwaysemphasized that he never asked for orreceived government money for any of hisresearches) and that this made it possibleto study and write about a wider range oftopics. At the same time, reflecting a differentset of connections and influences, BrunoLatour began his impressive series of worksin the sociology of science with LaboratoryLife (collaboratively with Steve Woolgar,from England).
Masson tells his complicated story ele-gantly, providing many substantial sidebarsto explain who all these people, organi-zations, and events are (many of them willbe unfamiliar to non-French, and even toyounger French, readers). He skillfullytraces the mutual influence of organization,biography, government policy, and historicalcircumstance on professional standardsand interests, individual careers, and intel-lectual foci over 50 years. His work providesa model for how such studies might proceed.
As sociology grows and develops in manymore countries, we can see that, while thesenational sociologies share many features andincreasingly respond to one another, they
differ in favorite topics of study and methodsfor studying them, in national resources andforms of intellectual organization, and in thedegree to which they are aware of each otherand of the work done outside their borders.Linguistic differences remain a problemalthough, since the United States and otherAnglophone countries still dominate sociol-ogy, English is de facto the lingua franca forlarge parts of the world. Still, a country likeBrazil, because of its size, supports a largenumber of social scientists who write booksin Portuguese that are printed and sold bya substantial publishing industry, whichallows a distinctive national sociology todevelop there. But hardly any sociologistselsewhere can read this unique body of work.That situation exists on a smaller scale formany other places where substantial amo-unts of work get done in the national lang-uage (e.g., Italy).
The dialectic between national sociologiesand international sociology will shape thefuture of the discipline. Books modeled onMasson’s work will help to make thosedevelopments intelligible to us.
References
Chapoulie, Jean-Micher. 2001. La tradition sociol-ogique de Chicago 1892-1961. Paris, France:Seuil.
Lazarsfeld, Paul F., and Edited by RaymondBoudon. 1993. On Social Research and Its Lang-uage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Peneff, Jean. 1992. L’Hopital en urgence. Paris,France: Editions A.M. Metailie.
Platt, Jennifer. 1996. A History of SociologicalResearch Methods in America. Cambridge, UK:Cambridge University Press.
Review Essays 125
Contemporary Sociology 39, 2
Fresh Work on the History of French Empirical Sociology
JENNIFER PLATT
University of [email protected]
Philippe Masson’s book is a very interestingenterprise, of an uncommon kind. It presentsa history of French postwar sociology that, inrefreshing contrast to much other work onthe history of sociology, is based on analysisof key empirical works. Moreover, it does sofrom a firmly stated position: sociologicalknowledge is knowledge of the findings ofempirical studies, without which sociologywould be merely speculation, and the basictask of the ordinary sociologist is to carryout such studies.
Despite the Durkheimian legacy, Frenchsociology had to reconstruct itself at the endof World War II. The periodization starts withthe pioneers of 1945–58, then comes the stageof institutionalization of sociology (1958–79),constructivism and its effects (1980s), and thesecond expansion of the 1990s. For each period,the presentation focuses on two or three keystudies, which are analyzed and placed in theirsocial and intellectual contexts, with biograph-ical information on the authors and descrip-tions of their institutional settings. The workschosen for analysis are Paul-Henri Chombartde Lauwe, Paris et l’agglomeration parisienne(1951); Alain Touraine, Le travail ouvrier auxusines Renault (1955); Michel Crozier, Le Phe-nomene bureaucratique (1961); Pierre Bourdieuand Jean-Claude Passeron, Les Heritiers(1964); Luc Boltanski, Les Cadres (1982);Francxois Dubet, La Galere (1987); BrunoLatour and Steve Woolgar, La Vie de labora-toire (1988); Jean Peneff, L’Hopital en urgence(1992); and Stephane Beaud and MichelPialoux, Retour sur la condition ouvriere(1999). Some of these may sound familiarbecause they have appeared in English,and been influential in the English-languageliterature, while others have been much lessknown abroad—in itself something that per-haps throws light on aspects of the history ofsociology.
Until 1958 France had no degrees in soci-ology, so those recruited to it came initiallyfrom varied academic backgrounds, oftenwith interests that followed from political
motives. A number were Communist Partymembers, but care should be taken to inter-pret this in terms of locally relevant mean-ings, including the CP’s leading role in theResistance. CP membership divided thosewho became sociologists; a quite differentideological strand was that of social catholi-cism, and its early work in what became thesociology of religion had a concern with fig-ures of religious practice that led to an earlyrole in the use of quantitative methods. Thedevelopment of empirical research waspart of a larger process of institutionalizationin which research units, departments anddegrees, journals, and professional associa-tions were also emerging. Initially therewas no training in research methods avail-able in France. Like the rest of Europe atthat stage, it reconstructed under strongAmerican influence, so for many, Rockefel-ler-funded visits to America helped to fillthe gap. Georges Friedmann, known in par-ticular for his work in industrial sociology,played a role of great importance: from1951 he directed the first research unit, theCentre d’etudes sociologiques (CES), whichemployed those who became the leadingyoung researchers. He allocated researchtopics among them that led to numbers ofinfluential publications—including those ofTouraine and Crozier mentioned previously.
The CES was under the auspices of the gov-ernmentally funded CNRS (Centre national
Faire de la sociologie: les grandes enquetesfrancxaises depuis 1945, by PhilippeMasson. Paris, FR: La Decouverte,2008. 256pp. e15 paper. ISBN:9782707154484.
Le gout de l’observation: comprendre etpratiquer l’observation participante ensciences sociales, by Jean Peneff. Paris,FR: La Decouverte, 2009. 250pp. e17paper. ISBN: 9782707156631.
126 Review Essays
Contemporary Sociology 39, 2
de la recherche scientifique). Masson givesconsiderable attention to the role of fundingpossibilities in influencing the directionof research over the years, and shows howthe topics studied were often steered bythe availability of research contracts, com-monly from government departments—where some senior civil servants were inter-ested in the social sciences—and related tocurrent policy issues, rather than by intellectu-al movements originating within sociology.An interesting observation is made on anabsence: Cicourel’s critical approach to officialstatistics had little influence in a local situationwhere there was close collaboration betweensociologists and the organizations responsiblefor their production. The lack of any alterna-tive local tradition made the sample surveyinitially seem the only scientific method, whileover time this changed without the samedirect American influence; when Peneff car-ried out his participant study of a hospitalER department, he was one of a number ofFrench sociologists who, rather late in theday, chose ‘‘Chicago School’’ influenceswhen there were more alternatives open tothem. What this led to is expressed in theappearance in his book (discussed below) ofcontributions from Howard Becker, nowfamiliar in France.
Masson gets considerable mileage from theanalysis of published texts. He discusses foreach stage aspects not conventionally statedby authors of the dominant ‘‘research formu-lae,’’ such as that represented in the 1980s bythe movement for biographical data. But hemaintains that research reports cannot beadequately understood without taking intoaccount their context, so he also considerswhat they meant to their users, and suggests,for instance, that certain positions were cho-sen as acts of deliberate dissociation fromBourdieu. However, it is his backgroundknowledge of the setting as much as his ana-lytical skills that enables him to make suchobservations. A reader without the back-ground knowledge of a community partici-pant is grateful for this opportunity to sharewhat ‘‘everyone’’ in French sociology possi-bly then ‘‘knew,’’ but Masson does not citedata to support this; the probable difficultyin doing so, even if he is certainly correct, istypical of a range of problems that the histor-ian faces in dealing with matters in the oral
culture of a past period, which at some pointsunavoidably lessens the weight of hisinterpretations.
An older participant in this history, JeanPeneff, has written a fascinating book, asmuch methodological as historical, aboutparticipant observation, and how it hasbeen used in France as compared with theUnited States. He starts from observationof society as an activity by no means exclu-sive to social scientists, but also carried outby, for instance, novelists, natural scientists,and political militants. (He himself was forsome time a member of the last category, assecretary to a CP cell, and describes theactivity involved in the task of understand-ing and reconciling the perspectives of thosecoming from different angles to build sup-port, and also of covert entryism—observa-tion up—to find out the enemy’s plans andweaknesses.1) He offers a chart comparingthe characteristics of the observation carriedout by groups ranging from novelists tosociologists.
Peneff sees the emergence and valuationof the practice of participant observation insociology as depending on the general socialsituation, and personal experience withinthat. Thus, conscription to the war in Algeriaplayed a key role for a generation of sociolo-gists (including Bourdieu) who experiencedthe cultural relativity of novel situations andlearned not to take the word for the deed.Social mobility could, less dramatically, per-form some of the same functions. He notesthat French observation in factories was ori-ented to different issues from those of Amer-ican studies, and considers the differencesbetween observers from ‘‘popular’’ andsalariat backgrounds. He attributes the vir-tual absence of participant observationfrom French sociology between 1955 and1990 in part to a cohort effect: the postwarfounders who became the leading figuresuntil 1980 were largely converted philoso-phers from bourgeois families, but by the1990s those from humbler backgroundsand with sociological formation were com-ing to the fore and taking over elite posi-tions, including those controlling journalsand book series. But he also sees observationin the postwar period as devalued in thename of expertise and ‘‘science,’’ and flightfrom the world to the office as perhaps
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necessary to the establishment of disciplin-ary autonomy, though research sufferedfrom it: survey methods in practice placedresearchers at a greater distance from per-sonal familiarity with their subjects.
Peneff faces some of the same problemsover data as Masson, but the stock of experi-ence and wisdom on which he can draw,combined with sophisticated and perceptiveanalysis of what has actually been doneintellectually in different uses of participa-tion, make the possible limitations unimpor-tant. There is far more in both these booksthan can be shown here. Anyone concernedwith the history and sociology of sociology,and the subtleties of research method, willfind something of interest in them, whetherin substantive detail or methodologicalapproach. Their French is not very difficult,
and there is no ‘‘theory’’ jargon to obscureits meaning. Cxa vaut le detour!
Note
1. There was also a 1960s Maoist program ofintellectuals taking factory jobs to establish them-selves in the proletariat to promote politicalactivity; at least one became a professional sociol-ogist and published a book about this. For anaccount in English of this movement, see Reid(2004). Exotic as this may seem, there have beenU.S. and British examples of similar projectsundertaken by left activists acting as individuals.
Reference
Reid, Donald. 2004. ‘‘�Etablissement: Working inthe Factory to Make Revolution in France.’’Radical History Review 88:83–111.
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