Multiculturalism Without Culture – By Anne Phillips

Book reviews

Harvey, David Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven GeographicalDevelopment Verso 2006 154 pp. £45.00 (hardback) £14.99 (paperback)

Chase-Dunn, Christopher and Babones, Salvatore J. (eds) Global Social Change:Historical and Comparative Perspectives The Johns Hopkins University Press 2006 371 pp.£36.50 (hardback) £18.00 (paperback)

Held, David and Kaya, Aye (eds) Global Inequality Polity Press 2007 282 pp. £50.00 (hard-back) £15.99 (paperback)

Even if we concede that globalization is a marker for our times and that understandingglobal social change requires an historical perspective, it is questionable whether it pro-vides an appropriate way to look at values such as equity. Since values are always locatedculturally, somewhere, where are ‘global’ values located? ‘Global’ usually implies anabsence of location, a geopolitical space that encompasses everything. It is clear that glo-balization is, in some sense, a cultural process implying, as this does, that concern with thedistributional effects of the development process is also prone to cultural distortions, andthat we are part of those distortions. Each of these three books contributes to this dis-cussion in very different ways. Together they provide an interesting context for the dis-cussion of globalization and social change in the first decade of the twenty-first century,but they ultimately fail to provide an adequate account of what global changes imply forcitizens, as well as for their societies.

The collection of essays edited by Christopher Chase-Dunn and Salvatore J. Babonesrepresents the most scholarly contribution to these discussions in that it deliberately sets outto review the history of a debate, drawing widely on the sociological literature in particular.The book is intended to provide an accessible introduction for ‘students who are interestedin globalization’ and enters the discussion through an historical comparison of cycles ofchange – aiming to locate present discussions within a broader, historical context. Most ofthe chapters are not original, and have previously been published in the Journal of World-Systems Research, and, indeed, a world systems approach to globalization is evident in manyof the pieces. The book includes an introductory chapter that contextualizes the discussion.This is followed by a chapter on methodological issues that need to be confronted in studyingglobal social change. The volume is then divided into six sections, each of which contributesa substantive element to the discussions: conceptualizations of globalization; global inequal-ity, globalization and the environment, hegemony and global governance, global social

© London School of Economics and Political Science 2008 ISSN 0007-1315 print/1468-4446 online.Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden,MA 02148, USA on behalf of the LSE. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-4446.2008.00198.x

The British Journal of Sociology 2008 Volume 59 Issue 2

movements and democratization from a ‘global’ perspective. What the book lacks in origi-nality, resting as it does on existing published output, it more than makes up for in compre-hensiveness and definitely constitutes a benchmark in the field.

David Harvey’s contribution to the analysis of global capitalism is an updated andexpanded version of a series of lectures he gave to the Department of Geography at theUniversity of Heidelberg in 2004. It consists of three sections, on Neo-Liberalism and therestoration of class power, the theory of uneven geographical development, and the conceptof ‘space’. These are preceded by an introductory valedictory essay from Peter Meusburgerand Hans Gebhardt, which sets the scene for Harvey’s essays. Each of these essays coversground that is fairly familiar to those who know Harvey’s work, but they have the merit ofpulling together disparate material, and include both a synoptic analysis of the advances ofglobal capital (in the chapter on Neo-liberalism) and the more conceptual terrain of spaceand scale (in the other two chapters). The volume still reads like a series of lecture-essays;but they are trenchant, stimulating essays nevertheless.

Global Inequality, edited by David Held and Aye Kaya is a more focused book than theother books under review, in that its purpose is confined to the analysis of inequality at theglobal level. At the same time it is, arguably, more thorough than either of the other twobooks in that it does engage seriously with empirical evidence, which is disputed andconfirmed at different points. The collection developed out of the Ralph Miliband Lecturesat LSE in 2004–5, and includes a number of distinguished and informed authors: BobSutcliffe, Robert Wade, Graeme Thompson and Nancy Fraser among them. There is onestriking omission from the list of contributions, however, which contrasts with the Chase-Dunn and Babones, volume: there is nothing on the global environment. One wonders whythe editors wished to confine themselves to familiar territory. Had it not occurred to themthat the global environment is both a major source of inequality and a consequence ofinequality? At certain key points the chapters shouted out for a dimension that went beyondGini Coefficients, and actually grappled with the inequalities surrounding the way thatnature is divided up, and the distributive consequences of ‘managing’ the environment instandardized ways.

Global values imply some degree of agreement and convergence about what might betermed our ‘underlying social commitments’, or everyday practices, in the sense used byBourdieu (1977) discussed in Redclift (1996). These underlying commitments are aboutthe implications of our patterns of ‘getting and spending’ for global equality both betweengenerations (inter-generational) and, of course, within a given point in time (intra-generational). One of the most pressing issues, barely discussed in Held and Kaya butgiven more consideration in both Harvey and Chase-Dunn and Babones, is the increasingdrive to consume more, and to power this consumption by exploiting hydrocarbon sourcesof energy.

Global inequalities will need to be subjected to more interrogation during the nextcentury, as the essays by Jorgenson, Hornborg, and Buttell and Gould suggest in the volumeedited by Chase-Dunn and Babones. On the one hand the global economic system requiresmore uniformity in economic goals and, on the other, more competition to achieve them.Thepossibilities offered by a ‘third way’ between capitalism and communism have largelyevaporated after the demise of the Soviet Union. Protecting the environment, for developingcountries, comes with an increasing price tag attached to it. Among the volumes underdiscussion, only Harvey gives space to the post-Cold War accommodations and the way inwhich the Bretton Woods institutions have played a changed role under the ‘WashingtonConsensus’ and the inexorable march of neoliberalism.

However, many of the global environmental problems that confront us today, in bothdeveloped and developing countries, were not anticipated even a couple of decades ago.

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Environmental problems seem to exhibit a tendency to surprise; we are rarely able to predictwith any degree of accuracy the next challenge to sustainability. A new geopolitics is alsoemerging, in which the sources of our consumption (our ‘getting and spending’) assumeenormous strategic importance on the world stage. The Gulf War in the early 1990s and theinvasion of Iraq in 2003 were probably watersheds in this respect. Finally, increased inequal-ity will continue to underpin the progress of globalization in the south with, if you followWade (in Held and Kaya), only a marginal impact on poverty in real terms.

In conclusion, I would argue that we need to address the issues of global equity andsocial change in the first decade of this century by paying close attention to the following:intergenerational justice; recognition of the rights of non-human species; the elevation ofuse values over commodity values; the acknowledgement of cultural diversity, in bio-systems and in human cultures. These critical issues receive very little attention in Harveyand still less in Held and Kaya. Global equity will indissolubly be linked to wider ques-tions of citizenship. Rather than thinking in terms of citizenship and the environment astwo separate categories, we may find that globalization alters the notion of citizenshipitself. Global environmental citizenship would be conferred and understood in much thesame way as national citizenship is today. None of these books really addresses thischallenge.

Michael RedcliftKing’s College London

Hook, D. Foucault, Psychology and the Analytics of Power Palgrave MacMillan 2007301 pp. £50.00 (hardback)

Foucault has been a huge influence for many critical psychologists as well as other socialscientists, and reading Hook’s book has reminded me of just why Foucault has been soimportant. In an age where arguably other critical theorists have superseded Foucault interms of scholarly attention (Zizek is perhaps an obvious example here), Hook’s contribu-tion is timely and welcome. The emphasis on the anti-psychological bent of Foucault’s workconsolidates and develops a key theme for critical psychologists, but also extends thework of Rose and others in interesting, thought-provoking ways. Hook’s enthusiasm forFoucaultian analysis is infectious, and we are treated to various empirical examples whichdemonstrate the application of Foucaultian themes to a range of topics from paedophilia toracism, a reach which will draw in a wide readership beyond psychology, including sociolo-gists, human geographers and political scientists. The breadth of the text is truly impressive;Hook not only clarifies concepts central to Foucault’s work, including some work which hasbeen relatively recently published (e.g. Psychiatric Power), but manages to breathe new lifeinto a complex interdisciplinary literature on Foucault so that even informed scholars willtake something different away.

The argument for historical, genealogical analysis is persuasively worked up throughdrawing on Foucault’s classic and later work on madness and sexuality.The meticulous studyof archival material pertaining both to the disciplining practices of dominant institutions andthe resistances offered by marginal voices is reiterated, and this methodological injunctiontowards history and plurality is refreshing when one considers the ahistorical and narrowanalyses provided by much contemporary social science research. Certainly, Hook makes apoint of critiquing discourse analytic research within social psychology on these grounds, andin particular makes a powerful link between discourse and materiality which some discourseanalysts continue to eschew. However, while several empirical examples are provided in thebook, Hook does not describe his methodology in much detail. In reporting the research on

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British Journal of Sociology 59(2) © London School of Economics and Political Science 2008

paedophilia presented in chapter 4, for example, we do not learn about which materials weresourced, how they were chosen or how the analysis proceeded. Another more generalquestion I was left with concerned the range of application of Foucaultian analysis – can weapply this form of analysis to any topic, or is it particularly suited to, say, ‘political’ topics.Some guidance on these matters would greatly help with an appreciation of the method-ological orientation being articulated within the text – and might encourage others to takeup the challenge of Foucaultian analysis.

None the less, the research examples deployed to demonstrate the application ofFoucaultian principles work very well for the most part. For example, chapter four providesa critical analysis of media articles relating to the social construction of paedophilia in SouthAfrica between 1944–78. This incisive analysis tracks the origins and development of thecategory ‘paedophile’ within medical, criminal justice and media contexts while attending tothe wider apartheid context which permeated the categorization and judgment of perpetra-tors and victims (black people were for a time disbarred from taking up the position ofperpetrator or victim for example). We see how explanations of paedophilia were variouslyinflected with biological, religious and psychiatric repertoires, how perpetrators also came tobe seen as victims of prior abuse, and how media representations became inflated withhysteria and paranoia. The dynamic, complex and contradictory discourses around paedo-philia within a specific national and historical context makes for fascinating reading. One isleft wondering, perhaps, whether first hand accounts provided by individuals and familiesaffected by child abuse would simply reproduce dominant institutional narratives – wouldthey be reduced to effects of discourse? The problem with relying exclusively on publicdocuments like media articles is that a rather abstract analysis inevitably follows. While it isto be expected that personal experience or accounts thereof are deconstructed withinFoucault’s anti-humanist paradigm, radical discourse-determinist analysis perhaps providesa rather impoverished take on subjectivity.

The final chapter, however, directly addresses the realm of subjectivity, and more specifi-cally the concept of ‘affective subjectivity’ whereby ideology penetrates the psychologicaldomain. Tellingly perhaps, it is at this point where Hook moves beyond Foucault to engagewith psychoanalytic concepts in order to offer insights into the emotional and irrationaldimensions of racism. The focus is largely on the government of subjectivity, workingthrough extracts from political discourse for example. By Hook’s admission, the self-management of affect is not emphasized here, which is a shame, since this topic is perhaps themost intriguing and difficult to analyse. Happily, Hook supplies references to some of hisother published papers on self-management, and his most recent work also draws moredirectly on the psychoanalytic canon, most notably Lacan and Zizek.

In sum, I thoroughly enjoyed this excursion into Foucault territory, and Hook makes fora perceptive and provocative guide. I think social scientists with an interest in the psycholo-gization of society, whether already versed in Foucault’s opus or not, will find something ofinterest here.

Brendan GoughNottingham Trent University

Illouz, E. Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism Polity Press 2007 134 pp.£12.99 (paperback)

This slim volume brings together three Adorno Lectures delivered by Eva Illouz inFrankfurt in 2004. At first glance, a book structured around a series of lectures looksunpromising, but this work succeeds in bringing a critical sociological eye to the pervasive

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shaping and reshaping of emotion in the marketplace at time when emotion is becomingmore mainstreamed in sociology and organizational studies.

For Illouz, emotional capitalism represents a distinctly twentieth century, cultural, pheno-menon where there is a ‘fusion of the market repertoires and languages of the self’ andwhere ‘emotions have become entities to be evaluated, inspected, discussed, bargained,quantified and commodified’ (p. 109). Illouz’s critical weapons draw on Weber, Habermas,Foucault, Bourdieu, Giddens, Goffman and Freud.

A leitmotif throughout is the pervasive role certain renditions of psychology have incapturing the moral and emotion high ground against which the self is marketed andconstructed. Illouz is intrigued as to how this ‘psychological persuasion’ has emerged and itssignificance in defining what is healthy, productive and good. In this respect, the book doesnot read as a psychology-bashing exercise; more an expression of awe about psychology’spotency in the lexicon of everyday affairs. A critical sociology, she argues, is best employedin exposing how cultural and emotional capital is accrued and valued in particular settings,counselling against preconceived positions that assume, for example, inevitable structures ofoppression, liberation or other political agendas. First let the actors speak. Illouz homes in onfeatures of modern life, such as the family, organizational management and Internetromance, where particular understandings and expressions of emotions are axiomatic to howsocial competency or intimacy is negotiated.

In the first chapter, Illouz charts how the language of psychotherapy, especially Freudianand Humanistic, has become embedded in the very essence of American (and one could addBritish) constructions of, and stories about, the self. This therapeutic, especially psychoana-lytical, ‘emotional style’ is evidenced in the popular advice industry in different facets ofmarketing and consumerism and can, in part, be traced to the work of Mayo et al. in GeneralElectric. Mayo’s ‘non-directive’ style of interviewing elicited the emotional ‘causes’ ‘behind’the female interviewees’ workplace problems. The language of emotions and personalityserved as a gentler, ‘feminized’, way of managing labour unrest whilst also promising moreprofit. Illouz counsels us not to see this as a new brand of managerial surveillance or covertcontrol but more a template for collaboration which has gradually morphed into an ethic of‘communication’ in the workplace and beyond. The chapter concludes with a convincingdemonstration of how therapy and feminism have rationalized emotions, a powerful dis-course aimed to ‘free’ the self from messy interpersonal relationships and reclaim one’s‘authenticity’ (viz. Jane Fonda). In Weberian terms, rationalization has served to makeinchoate emotion calculable and an external object of control, ‘a fact, we may claim, whichgoes against the volatile, transient, and contextual nature of emotions’ (p. 33).

Chapter two digs deeper into the hegemony and popularization of the therapeuticnarrative. ‘Growth’ psychology, à la Maslow and Rogers, has provided templates and tech-nologies to define a moral order of emotions: the self-realized and content (the societalgood) versus those struggling and in despair (the unhealthy, neurotic). The cultural captureof such narratives is exemplified in live shows of the Oprah Winfrey sort where a confes-sional cocktail of emotions (guilt, anger, fear, shame) is prompted or elicited for publicperformance to therapeutic ends. These shows often add gravitas to their rhetorical style byenlisting the services of a professional psychologist.The therapeutic narrative is, notes Illouz,a perfect commodity for circulation by therapists, consultants, magazines and talk show hostsbecause ‘it demands little economic investment – it demands only that the person allows usto peek into the dark corners of their psyche and that they be willing to tell a story’ (p. 56).

Different professional and state institutions internalize and reproduce the value of ‘emo-tional competence’ because it is regarded as economically useful in some way. Illouz singlesout ‘emotional intelligence’ for special attention, suggesting that Daniel Goleman’s hugesuccess at popularizing it was due to established therapeutic zeitgeist in the USA. However,

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he added instrumental – business – value where more and less-productive people in theworkplace could be distinguished by their measured level of emotional intelligence, a shortstep from incorporating emotional intelligence into technologies of personnel recruitment,training and promotion. For Illouz, this is another example of psychologists as middle-classprofessionals creating emotional capital for their own social class. On the therapeutic turnmore generally, Illouz is sanguine. Eschewing Bordieu’s line that the significance of socialconstructions are all arbitrary, she makes a ‘pragmatic’, functionalist, case: the social con-structions that persist do so because they fix or address a significant personal or socialproblematic.As such, the therapeutic narrative derives its social capital from ‘addressing thevolatile nature of selfhood and social relationships in late modernity’ (p. 71).

Chapter three turns to the question of subjectivity and Internet dating sites, where the selfis disembodied and textual performance is all. Here, romantic love with its associatedfeelings of spontaneity, ‘heat’, ‘magnetism’ and ‘electricity’, is fundamentally rationalized. Incontrast to the embodied encounters of traditional dating, participants create a carefulvocabulary of self to transform into text and fixed photographic image, and then enter thestructure of the market where choice and competition is the rule. The chapter calls on caseaccounts to illustrate the way cultural scripts of desirable personality are recycled, ironicallystandardizing self-presentations that are supposed to convey the ‘unique you’. These set theconditions for disappointment, when actual encounters fail to match the expectationscreated by virtual texts. After Goffman, Illouz refers to the information that we ‘give off’ insmall bodily gestures, manifestations of the non-conscious self that virtual self-presentationsfail to convey, what Handy has called ‘touch trust’. Internet dating, for Illouz, favours thosewho are most proficient at articulating themselves in terms of a therapeutic language of‘authenticity’ – ‘the reigning language ideology of psychology’ (p. 107).

This book is well written, conceptually rich, and a welcome addition to the critical litera-ture on emotion. It stands in juxtaposition to the dominant psychological models of emotionthat have been unreflectively and uncritically reproduced, especially in organizationalbehaviour texts. Illouz’s purview, while broad in terms of critical theory, does neverthelessmiss relevant literatures in organizational studies which have tackled already, critically, thegrowth of emotional intelligence and the gendering of emotion, and, more recently, itsvirtualization. She is also curiously silent on the nature of power in the commodification ofemotion, which is merely implicit in her text. Her thesis on the infusion of ‘depth’ psychologyinto everyday life is persuasive, but one wonders whether we are on the cusp of a shift inpsychological persuasion as neo-behaviourism takes hold. In the USA ‘positive psychology’has begun to grip both the academic and popular imagination, and in the UK cognitivebehavioural therapy has been heavily promoted by government as the quick and economi-cally efficient answer to a range of psychological ills.

Stephen FinemanUniversity of Bath

Jabri, V. War and the Transformation of Global Politics Palgrave Macmillan 2007 230 pp.£47.00 (hardback)

Vivienne Jabri offers a theoretical reading of her subject from the point of view of criticalInternational Relations. Her starting points include the idea that war is a social activity, andtherefore transformative of social relations, a point she references to historical sociologistssuch as Charles Tilly, Michael Mann and Anthony Giddens; but she doesn’t make very muchof this intellectual tradition. More significant for her approach is a Foucaultian perspective,according to which the disciplines which study war are not outside of their subject. From this

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standpoint, Jabri offers a reading of contemporary world politics in which war is constitutive– thus she neatly suggests that we should reverse the Clausewitzian formula thus: ‘politics isa continuation of war through other means’ (p. 35). The implications of this formulation arepursued through a wide-ranging critical discourse, covering the politics of global war; warand peace in late modernity; war, the international and the human; and war and the politicsof cultural difference.

Jabri covers a lot of theoretical ground without, mostly, resting too long with any oneauthor or school – in this sense her reference to sociology is typical of the book, whichinvolves a kind of intellectual guerrilla (or should it be ‘new’?) war that avoids decisiveengagements. An example is the topic of ‘humanitarian’ military intervention, a major focusof the discussion: Jabri advances the idea that humanitarianism has become a discourse oflegitimation for war, but doesn’t pursue the critique towards the political-ideological con-clusions drawn by some radical scholars. Jabri’s standpoint is, indeed, closer to HannahArendt’s. In place of a ‘politics of peace’ as a ‘politics of emergency’, based on responding toemergent political-military crises, she offers ‘one based on critical engagement and solidaritywith those whose rights are violated both as routine and in the most extraordinary ofcircumstances’. (p. 173) She then redefines ‘solidarity’ from the point of view of EtienneBalibar’s analysis of universality.

For this reviewer, Jabri’s approach is both too abstract – she touches on concrete momentsof armed conflict only in so far as they figure in the discourses, without analysing them – andtoo discursive – we go through a very large number of authors without ever seeing a stronglydeveloped argument which would distinguish the author’s position clearly from those shediscusses. Jabri’s approach is too oblique, and although clear writing and avoidance of dogmaare in her favour, I wanted more material substance and a sharper definition of the problem.I wasn’t convinced that we can simply reverse Clausewitz’s iconic formula, and yet typically,this provocation was delivered without the kind of detailed engagement with Clausewitz thatmight have sustained it.

Martin ShawUniversity of Sussex

Lash, Scott and Lury, Celia Global Culture Industry Polity Press 2007 248 pp. £60.00(hardback) £17.99 (paperback)

Scott Lash and Celia Lury’s stated objective is to provide an update of Adorno andHorkheimer’s writings on culture industry for the age of globalization. This is an ambitiousproject and the authors set out its terms in their introductory chapter. Most immediately,they argue that it is not the case that Adorno and Horkheimer erred in their description ofculture industry, but rather that ‘we have moved on since the time at which Adorno andHorkheimer were writing’ (p. 3). Lash and Lury identify the emergence of a global frame forculture industry as the main way in which ‘we have moved on’ and outline seven rupturesthat globalization has produced with the ‘old’ ways in which culture industry operated.Theirtheses of change are put very forcefully, often in terms of transition from one polarity toanother. For example, Lash and Lury argue that in moving from ‘culture industry’ to ‘globalculture industry’ we have observed shifts from ‘identity to difference’ (p. 4), from the‘symbolic to the real’ (p. 9), and from ‘extensity to intensity’ (p. 13).

These are strong claims that require significant empirical substantiation, which theremainder of the book seeks to provide through case studies of seven cultural objectsranging from the Euro 1996 football championship to Nike shoes. Methodologically, Lashand Lury are influenced by Appadurai’s Social Life of Things (1986), Gell’s stress on

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biography and life-cycle in Art and Agency (1998), and sociological studies of science andtechnology (STS). As such, their case studies are built up from empirical tracings of the waytheir selected cultural objects move through and across contexts and undergo a series oftransformations and translations. Their empirical work is thorough and detailed, with eachchapter providing a rich description of the history, life, and geography of the cultural objectin question. This is no small achievement, given that Lash and Lury’s ‘global’ tracings oftennecessitated travels to diverse national contexts.

It is also, however, in the empirics that Lash and Lury’s project starts to come somewhatunstuck. This is mainly the result of the ambitious nature of their theoretical project. Thereare two main concerns. Firstly, while each of the substantive chapters provides a richdescription of the cultural object being examined, these read well as ‘biographies’ of thesecultural objects but are often not sufficient to substantiate the strong claims about the natureand dynamics of ‘global culture industry’ that are made in the opening and closing chapters.Secondly, there is a problem with the selection of the cultural objects for the case studies.Lash and Lury state that the seven cultural objects were selected for their ‘high visibility inthe contemporary landscape and their potentially long and varied trajectories’ (p. 16). Thesecriteria meant that from the outset ‘globality’ was going to be a feature of the biographies ofthe objects under study and, as such, ensured that Lash and Lury would be able to saysomething about ‘global culture industry’. However, in only selecting cultural objects whichfitted these criteria, Lash and Lury precluded any analysis of the extent to which ‘old’ cultureindustry exists alongside ‘global culture industry’. For example, an interesting phenomenabeing observed in more peripheral locations, such as Aoteaora/New Zealand, is the buildingof local brands, not always with a global ambition.

Despite these concerns, however, Lash and Lury’s Global Culture Industry makes a timelyand valuable contribution. Culture industry has moved on since Adorno and Horkheimer’sfirst treatise on the subject, and globalization has been, undoubtedly, a significant contributorto the change it has undergone. The assertions Lash and Lury make about the emergentdynamics of global culture industry are provocative, if not always empirically substantiated.As such, we might hope that their book generates debate and an interest in exploringempirically the shape, limits, and nature of global culture industry.

Eva NeitzertAuckland University of Technology

Phillips, Anne Multiculturalism Without Culture Princeton University Press 2007 216 pp.£17.95 (paperback)

Cultures,Anne Phillips argues, are profoundly problematic concepts. First, it is not clear thatthere are such things as cultures – at least, not if a culture is understood as something that is‘singular, unified and bounded’ (p. 53). Second, much of the explanatory power that is oftenattributed to cultures is chimerical: ‘cultures are produced by people, rather than beingthings that explain why they behave the way they do’ (p. 45). Third, appeals to culture areoften used to justify traditions that oppress women. Fourth, appeals to culture contribute tonegative stereotyping of members of minority groups, and in particular represent membersof minority groups as determined by culture and incapable of agency. However, Phillips doesnot want to dispense with the normative approach of multiculturalism. She argues that thecosmopolitan alternative is unacceptable since, philosophically, it tends to revert ‘to a ratherarrogant form of cultural imperialism’ (p. 69), and since, politically, rejecting multicultural-ism fuels the backlash which is often ‘a coded return to narrower and more exclusionarynotions of national identity’ (p. 72).

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What, then, to do? Phillips’ solution is the titular multiculturalism without culture. Thisapproach defends certain multicultural policies while abandoning others, and emphasises allthe time that individuals from all cultures should be considered as autonomous individualswho choose the extent of their participation in cultural forms. In many ways Phillips’ policyrecommendations mirror those of Will Kymlicka (Phillips notes that her proposals are ‘notespecially original’ (p. 34)): cultures should not have ‘regulatory authority’ over theirmembers (p. 169), but states should instigate ‘mechanisms for increasing the political rep-resentation of cultural or national groups’ (p. 167). Unlike Kymlicka, however, Phillipsdoes not think that cultural groups have legitimate claims to special ‘powers or resources’(p. 167).

The body of Phillips’ argument therefore lies elsewhere, in her critique of the concept ofculture. This critique comes from two directions. Phillips is unsympathetic to what might bethought of as the multicultural claim that cultures are significant and homogenous entitieswith intrinsic worth, such that cultural groups need protection as such. On the contrary,Phillips argues that cultures are important only in so far as they are important to individuals,and should be conceptualized as attributes of individuals rather than of groups (p. 164). Fromthe other direction, Phillips criticizes what might be thought of as a cosmopolitan or perhapscomprehensive liberal claim that cultures should be understood as things that limit theautonomy of their members. Phillips argues that this approach is wrong philosophically, for‘there are [not] many people so ground down by circumstances that they have entirelyinternalised its norms’ (p. 179). It is also wrong politically, for conceiving cultures as limita-tions to autonomy leads to unjustifiable policies. An example of a policy mechanism thatPhillips rejects as unjustifiable is the blanket ban on cultural practices, such as veiling, on thegrounds that some people would otherwise be forced into them. Such bans are wrong,Phillips argues, since they obscure the fact that those practices are in fact chosen by many(other) individuals.

The issue of choice and autonomy is crucial to Phillip’s thesis, then. Her general insis-tence is that individual agency must be central; however, she recognizes that agency issometimes limited since coercion can occur. The difficulty thus lies in ascertaining whenchoices are coerced and autonomy restricted. Phillips optimistically states that, in the casesof class and gender, it ‘has proved reasonably easy’ to theorize the interplay betweenchoice and constraint (p. 126). Indeed, she uses these examples to re-emphasize the impor-tance of agency, noting that there is ‘widespread distrust’ of the idea that either gender orclass make us unable to act otherwise than we do. However, these examples should givepause for thought: the wealth of feminist, liberal and poststructuralist work on the con-cepts of gender, autonomy and agency suggests that the relationship between these phe-nomena is in fact reasonably difficult to ascertain. Moreover, the fact that an individualfeels that her choices are autonomous does not indicate that they are not constrained. Aska Western man if he feels that the clothes that he wears are freely chosen and he is likelyto say ‘yes’; ask him if he ever considers wearing a skirt and he is likely to give a scornfullaugh.

None the less it is undoubtedly important to reiterate, as Phillips does, that culture is notsomething that ‘they’ have and that ‘we’ don’t, and that it is deeply problematic to thinkof ‘others’ as determined by their culture while ‘we’ choose freely from ours. As the titlesuggests, Multiculturalism without Culture is a provocative book: Phillips intends thatneither multiculturalists nor cosmopolitans should have an easy ride. Both sets of theorists,however, will find things to agree with as well as to contest, making the book an intriguingchallenge to prevailing normative approaches to diversity. As a further strength, Multi-culturalism without Culture describes and discusses a wealth of difficult multiculturalissues, often in the form of specific legal cases from the UK and overseas. It therefore

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provides a good source for anyone wanting to know more about the current state ofmulticultural politics and law.

Clare ChambersUniversity of Cambridge

Souhami, A. Transforming Youth Justice: Occupational Identity and Cultural ChangeWillan Publishing 2007 221 pp. £42.00 (hardback)

New Labour’s 1997 election victory brought with it the promise of a radical overhaul ofyouth justice.The official assessment of the old system, which was based upon local authoritysocial services Youth Justice Teams, described it as characterized by waste, inefficiency andcomplacency; the then Home Secretary called it an ‘excuse culture’ in which practitionersand young offenders colluded. There was a determination to reconfigure the services andstructures of youth justice through the establishment of inter-agency Youth Offending Teams(YOTs) consisting of representatives of all the core agencies that worked with youngoffenders.This transformation led to a major upheaval in the youth justice system and for thepractitioners within it, a prolonged period of anxiety and disruption.

Rather than evaluating the implementation of the new youth justice measures themselves,Anna Souhami tracks these reforms from the perspective of the practitioners within thesystem through an ethnographic study of one particular YOT. She follows the original YouthJustice Team through its transition into a multi-agency organization and concentrates on theeffects of the transition on practitioners’ sense of occupational identity and culture. Inundertaking this task she draws on critical management literature as the basis of her analysisthroughout the book. But what makes the book compelling is the thick textured descriptionsof the process of transformation and the often anguished direct quotations of the practitio-ners caught up in unwelcome change.

Souhami’s observational research was conducted over a critical period from mid-1999,when the process of change had just begun, through to the first few months after the officiallaunch of the YOT in April 2000, during which time she had complete access to the offices,young offenders, and case files that were the everyday business of the staff (an interestingappendix describes some of the issues that arose from being ‘embedded’ in the organizationat a time of such uncertainty). Her observations are supplemented by interviews that ex-plore the expectations of practitioners and their anxieties about the changes they wereexperiencing.

The book is structured as a chronological account of the transition from the entirely ‘socialwork’ perspective of the Youth Justice Team to the broader focus of the YOT as new peoplefrom police, health, education, probation and other agencies progressively joined the ‘team’.The first chapter sets the research in the context of the government’s strategy for youthjustice and the kinds of reforms it was embarking on.The following chapters track the YOT’sdevelopment, describing first the nature of youth justice social work as it has been tradi-tionally conceived and then the gradual and painful transitions that accompanied the arrivalof staff from partner agencies. Souhami portrays in a nuanced fashion the difficulties en-countered in incorporating the cultures and attitudes of these other professionals and thechallenges to the dominant occupational identity that had prevailed unchallenged to thisdate. She pays particular attention to the effect of the arrival of the first of these newcomers,a police officer, who quickly became the focus of anxiety for the existing team who hadhitherto regarded police as the ‘other’. This anxiety prevailed to differing extents for eachnew staff member, each bringing with them their own occupational identity and eachthreatening the prevailing ethos.The book concludes with a discussion about why the effects

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of changes to the organization of youth justice were felt so intensely by the professional staffand what the implications are for wider issues around occupational culture and identity.Finally, Souhami explores the ways in which questions of culture and identity can help usunderstand the gap between policy and practice that is so often observed.

Souhami’s fascinating study of an organization in transition will have relevance wellbeyond the confines of youth justice. For the YOTs themselves, this account may be mainlyof historical relevance, though eight years on they continue to be the subject of more changeand continuing uncertainty, a situation likely to remain while youth justice remains such ahot political topic. But for the wider world of criminal justice and for all agencies strugglingwith reforms that question fundamental perceptions of identity and purpose this bookprovides a compelling case study.

Heather StrangAustralian National University

Weiss, Thomas G. Humanitarian Intervention: Ideas in Action Polity Press 2007 196 pp.£45.00 (hardback) £12.99 (paperback).

Few subjects are more difficult to get a handle on than humanitarian intervention. Mostpeople of good will presented with evidence of genocide, massacre or ethnic cleansing in aforeign country will instinctively think ‘something must be done’ – but when asked ‘whatexactly?’ and ‘by whom?’ and ‘on whose authority?’ everything becomes a lot morecomplicated. Intervention of any kind is an act of power, something the strong do to theweak(er), and it always involves the infliction of suffering on the innocent (and, lest readersthink there is an easy way out here, it should be said that the collateral damage caused bymilitary intervention is often less than that caused by apparently more peaceful methodssuch as economic sanctions).When the powerful act it is always for their own reasons (whichmay include a desire to alleviate a humanitarian disaster, but this is never the whole story –states don’t do pure altruism), and the kind of legitimacy that might come from a UNSecurity Council Resolution is rarely available, requiring as it would at least the passiveconsent of the Permanent Five veto-holders, the USA, Russia, China, the UK and France,two of whom (Russia and China) support a very strong doctrine of sovereignty and opposeoutside interventions in principle. Following the end of the Cold War, the West has some-times managed to get UN approval for interventions or has sometimes acted without formalapproval, but, overall, the record of those few humanitarian actions that have taken place hasnot been encouraging. For every success story, such as Sierra Leone after the British actionin 2000, there are many failures, or at best partial successes – East Timor and Kosovo areboth more peaceful now than they were before the interventions that took place in 1999, butin neither case has lasting stability been achieved. And, of course, the greatest source ofshame of the last twenty years was not a failed intervention but the international commu-nity’s inaction during the Rwanda genocide of 1994.

Faced with this dismal litany of unresolved problems and failures some will respond to thecry ‘something must be done’ with the answer ‘nothing can be done’. In the past such aposition was usually identified with the political right (and it still is, as the weekly columns ofSimon Jenkins in the Sunday Times frequently illustrate), but interestingly this is now aresponse to be heard equally from self-described progressives many of whom now describethe liberal interventionism espoused by, for example,Tony Blair, as simply a form of Westernimperialism. On the other hand and more positively, the UN in 2005 collectively accepted thedoctrine that sovereign statehood did not automatically gift national governments with theright to oppress their own people; the notion of a ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P) as

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promulgated by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty(ICISS) in its report in 2001 places a duty on the international community not to simply turnaway in the face of atrocity, and the fact that the UN General Assembly was prepared,however gingerly, to endorse this notion is not without significance.

Thomas Weiss, a distinguished political scientist at City University of New York, was theResearch Director for the ICISS, and the volume under review here is, quite simply, the bestshort account of the notion of humanitarian intervention currently available. In approxi-mately 150 pages and five chapters Weiss provides a short account of the concept ofsovereignty, its relationship to human rights, and the international legal framework providedby the UN; a series of brief sketches of humanitarian interventions past and present; a quickexamination of the ‘new wars’ of the modern age, where ethnic cleansing and massacre arenot incidental to, but the purpose of the conflicts; an authoritative account of the emergenceof the idea of R2P, and a realistic and sensible account of where we go from here.Weiss is noidealist; he is very well aware that mistakes associated with the Iraq War, and the War onTerror more generally, have undermined the international legitimacy of those states whoseoperational support for R2P is essential, most obviously the US, and he knows that rhetoricalflourishes along the lines of ‘never again’ are, as he puts it, more likely to be followed by ‘herewe go again’ than by actual action. Still, he does not despair; the basic moral position that itsimply cannot be right that the rest of the world adopts a bystander stance to atrocity infuseshis work and prevents him from falling into the passive stance of those on the right or the leftwho are prepared, however reluctantly, to abandon the wretched of the earth.

Serious students of humanitarian intervention from a number of disciplinary perspectives– international relations, politics, law and sociology – will want to dig deeper than Weiss canin these few pages, and will look to the theoretical and historical studies listed in a useful fourpage supplement on further reading, but they could do no better than to start with this book.For those who are not academically engaged with the subject matter, but who have at sometime or other in the past said to themselves or their friends ‘something must be done’ thiswork is quite simply invaluable – it will tell them precisely why doing something isn’t easy,but without lulling them into the belief that action is impossible. This is a book that deservesa very wide readership.

Chris BrownLondon School of Economics and Political Science

384 Book reviews


Documents

Multiculturalism Without Culture – By Anne Phillips