Simulating Societies: The Computer Simulation of Social Phenomena. by Nigel Gilbert; JimDoranReview by: Kenneth A. BollenSocial Forces, Vol. 74, No. 2 (Dec., 1995), pp. 745-746Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2580509 .

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Book Reviews / 745

process of constructive action. Taken together, these strands constitute Mead's pragmatist vision.

The serious student of Mead will find few new insights here, but the sociologist with a more casual understanding of Mead's work will gain a deeper sense of Mead's key ideas from this ably argued and straightforward presentation. En Cook's portrait of George Herbert Mead we find a morally engaged teacher and scholar whose intellectual life is inextricably bound to the betterment of his community. It is a model that sociologists, too often removed from the world they seek to understand, would do well to emulate.

Simulating Societies: The Computer Simulation of Social Phenomena. Edited by Nigel Gilbert and Jim Doran. UCL Press, 1994. 306 pp. Cloth, $59.95.

Reviewer: im.Thfl A. BoLLEN, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Simulating Societies grows out of an intemational symposium of the same name that was held in 1992 at the University of Surrey, Guildford, England. The book has 12 papers by 23 contributors. Doran and Gilbert's introductory chapter provides a definition and overview of simulation models. They use the collapse of Mayan society to illustrate some of the ideas. Despite the concrete example, the presentation tends to the abstract. S6ror's chapter provides an overview of different simulation strategies and their epistemological dimensions. Troitzsch's chapter is more concrete. He examines the evolution of hunting and gathering, agrarian and industrial technologies in fragmented populations. Nowak and Latan6 describe a simulation program that explains how the attitudes in a population can change due to the strength and immediacy of the attitudes and the number of people holding different or similar attitudes. The chapter by Penn and Dalton discusses urban traffic but has implications for the broader understanding of spatial factors on human behavior. The details and data of this chapter exceed those of the earlier ones. An ant colony simulation is the subject of Drogoul and Ferber's chapter. Of most relevance to sociologists is their discussion of a method where macro behavior is built from micro behavior.

A chapter by Bousquet et al. considers the interaction between people and environmental resources in a society of fishermen while Mithen's chapter simulates prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies. Mithen's review of the major simulation approaches to hunting and gathering societies is quite informative. The chapter by Doran, Palmer, Gilbert, and Mellars is a progress report on a large simulation for modeling upper Palaeolithic social change. Reynolds uses what he terms cultural algorithms to study the microlevel evolution of individual traits and macro-evolution- ary changes in beliefs. They use this approach to simulate the rise of cooperation among llama herders on the punas of Ayacucho, Peru.

Jos6 Castro Caldas and Helder Coelho have one of the most interesting chapters in the volume. They examine bounded rationality and oligopoly among economic agents in markets. I particularly liked their use of human experiments that they analyzed prior to replacing the human agents with simulation ones. Such an approach gives greater validity and realism than is typical in simulation models. Conte and Castelfranchi's concluding chapter is a critique of artificial intelligence models of social action. More specifically, they question the assumptions of agents' cooperation, full information, and rationality.

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746 / Social Forces 74:2, December 1995

The collection of chapters may be viewed as a social scientific sampler of simulation models. Much of the work comes from anthropology, social psychology, and economics. Though Doran, a coeditor, is a sociologist, the influences of these other social sciences far exceed those of sociology. This is more a reflection of the relative neglect of simulation research in sociology than a failing of the book. Indeed reading this collection of papers made me wonder why simulation techniques are not more widespread in sociology. Undoubtedly, the oversimplistic simulation mod- els from the 1960s and 1970s left many sociologists skeptical of such an enterprise. Also, the small percentage of sociologists trained in the mathematical and computer programming skills that are required for such efforts limits the pool of researchers capable of conducting such simulations. Nevertheless, several papers in the volume examine issues of intense current interests in our discipline - e.g., the construction of macro structures from the behavior of individuals, the intersection of sociology and economics, the linkages of society and environment. Perhaps it is time for sociologists to take another look at simulations. This edited volume is a reasonable starting point to sample projects from neighboring disciplines.

African Americans: Essential Perspectives. Edited by Wornie Reed. Aubum House, 1993. 160 pp. Clot, $49.95; paper, $16.95.

Reviewer: MARESE DUR, Wright State University

The four original essays in this book suggest that social, economic, political, and judicial issues in the African American life cycle require compacted analysis. An underlying theme is that small societal changes since the 1960s have recast African Americans' social status, but structural and economic changes may have slowed their further progress. A second cleverly veiled theme presents African American value orientations as by-products of our racial stratification system. The first two essays relate specific historical parallels to what the authors consider to be the current condition of African Americans - perseverance despite small-scale social change.

The third essay addresses structural changes within the economy, giving special emphasis to labor market reconstruction, which the authors contend is now managerially based. The critique implies that the transition in authority structure from capitalists to managers and policymakers marginalizes African American managers and policymakers, who mostly supervise the African American working class. This raises the questions of ways that African Americans can act independent- ly of the "public sector" helping positions that have historically been their role as public servants, and how they can gain admission to newer occupations.

Acknowledging that African American political participation was and is a search for power, the authors advise persistent use of traditional and nontraditional methods of dissent to realize the goal of social and political parity. The highlight for readers here is the speculation about the growing number of African American conservatives. The authors explicitly claim the presence of a strong liberal orienta- tion among African American conservatives, while subtly positing that this information might have been known to social science researchers had they made a systematic study of political attitudes for this social group.

The final essay underscores race as a significant factor in the examination of issues of justice. Discussing sentencing, capital punishment, juvenile justice, and

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