Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2020 -

This fascinating book examines workplace practices in a new light. By examining incarcerated workers, workfare recipients, graduate students, and college athletes, Hatton (SUNY, Buffalo) probes how these groups experience and conceptualize work. By juxtaposing these disparate workers in a novel way, she reveals the stark reality that unites them, namely that regardless of their position in society, they all experience status coercion. Their bosses, or in some cases their coaches, can discharge them from a particular status and deprive them of rights, privileges, and future opportunities. Through a series of in-depth interviews, the author examines the contradictory ways in which workers understand their situations: some accept their status almost without question, while others who understand that they are being exploited rebel against it. Hatton's study excellently argues the importance of the concept of status coercion and its relevance to these workers, in turn expanding the understanding of the punitive aspects of work and the theoretical understanding of work to highlight its precarity.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.

The meaning of the word socialism is under debate in the present political environment, so Cook's book could not have come at a more opportune time. Her subject is religious thinkers and activists--the "spiritual socialists" of the title--who have dotted the religious landscape since the first half of the 20th century. The group includes not only such well-known persons as Dorothy Day, Sherwood Eddy, and Martin Luther King Jr. but also less-familiar figures, among them African American civil rights activist Pauli Murray (1910-85), political activist A. J. Muste (1885-1967), and US vice-president (under Franklin D. Roosevelt) Henry Wallace (1888-1965). Cook does a good job of delineating what socialism meant to each of them--it was not a monolithic understanding--and how they kept the spiritual dimension of their work in focus. She also illuminates the debate between Christian "realists" such as Reinhold Niebuhr and the spiritualists who refused to succumb to the political pessimism of realism. The book is rich in information, and Cook's analysis is critical albeit sympathetic. A must read for scholars of American religious history and those interested in what religion brings to the table in the present political climate.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

In this volume, Burawoy (Univ. of California, Berkeley) recounts his attempts to grapple with Bourdieu's perspective as it appears ubiquitously in sociological discourse. A self-described Marxist, the author found himself by definition at odds with Bourdieu, engaging three strategies as he encountered the theorist. First, he ignored Bourdieu's arguments; then, when compelled to confront, he deconstructed and "demolished" Bourdieu's positions for ignoring the realities revealed by Marxist theory. Finally, he acknowledged, addressed, and expanded Bourdieu's stance, assessing it from Marxist perspectives. Burawoy pits Bourdieu against Parsons, Marx, Gramsci, Fanon, Freire, Beauvoir, Mill, and himself before relating what might have been an internal dialogue for Bourdieu in finding contrast and application in theory. The approach provides an intriguing comparison of theory as Burawoy relates a highly influential theorist to a highly relevant theoretical paradigm, which seem to be eternally at odds. Readers are left with an important work that illuminates the space between valid and applicable theories, how that space can be navigated, and whether it is necessary or advisable to do so. This succinct and cogent volume cuts through the extraneousness that often accompanies works of this sort.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; professionals.