PerssonActaSociologicaJune2011

Acta Sociologica http://asj.sagepub.com/

Book Review: Christena Nippert-Eng Islands of Privacy Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2010, 404 pp Marcus Persson Acta Sociologica 2011 54: 206 DOI: 10.1177/00016993110540020702 The online version of this article can be found at: http://asj.sagepub.com/content/54/2/206.citation

Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com

On behalf of:

Nordic Sociological Association

Additional services and information for Acta Sociologica can be found at: Email Alerts: http://asj.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://asj.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

Downloaded from asj.sagepub.com at UNIV OF CHICAGO on June 15, 2011

206

Acta Sociologica 54(2)

Aspers’ main contribution is the way he clarifies and extends Harrison White’s theory of markets. In the Whitean model, a market is an interface that connects suppliers ‘upstream’ and customers ‘downstream’. White focuses on a specific type of markets, however, so-called ‘production markets’, where competition is limited to a handful of competitors that observe each other and generally ignore hard-to-grasp and unpredictable customers. Following this line of research, Aspers defines a market ‘as a social structure for the exchange of rights in which offers are evaluated and priced, and compete with one another’ (p. 11). He then explains that ‘at least three actors are needed for a market to exist’ (p. 11). Building on this definition of markets, he suggests a fruitful distinction between ‘status markets’ and ‘standard markets’. Status markets are similar to White’s production markets and are ordered along status hierarchies, from the most prestigious producers at the top to the least prestigious at the bottom. Standard markets, on the other hand, are ‘ordered by the value, namely the price/quality/delivery contract’ (p. 123). In standard markets, manufacturers offer commoditized products and are interchangeable, regardless of their geographic location, be it India, Turkey or any other low-cost country.

Another important contribution of Aspers’ book is the development of a finely grained theory of identities in markets. Aspers defines four types of identity. The first is the collective identity shared by all market participants (e.g. the identity shared by all BGRs vs. high fashion labels). The second type, ‘discrete identity’, depends on the evaluation of market participants by a specific audience in a specific context. A given actor can have several distinct discrete identities. The third type, ‘unique identity’, is a set of discrete identities in a given market. The fourth and last type of identity, ‘reflexive identity’, refers to what a market participant aspires to be. In the case of BGRs, identities can be deployed through store design, advertising, editorial fashion and – more originally – from ‘ethical production’ (p. 85). The interplay of the four types of identity is intriguing, and Aspers could certainly have developed these insights further.

In terms of future research agenda, chapter 6 ‘Branded Garment Retailers in the Investment Market’ is the most promising chapter of the book. Here, Aspers courageously tries to connect the Social Studies of Finance perspective to the wider economic sociology framework, notably as expressed by Harrison White, Mark Granovetter or Richard Swedberg. While the idea that economic activities are embedded in social relations and networks are well understood nowadays, it is still not clear how this relates to the dynamics of financial markets.

Aspers’ contribution is original and constructive. He delivers what he promises: an empirically grounded understanding of how order emerges in markets. The book is carefully written, and the use of photographs, one of Aspers’ sociological signatures, makes it lively. The methodological and theoretical appendices are also welcome. The book’s target audience is academic, given Aspers’ ambitious theoretical aims and complex conceptual framework. However, fashion professionals and the general public might also be interested in Aspers’ rich examples and illustrations gathered from the field.

Christena Nippert-Eng Islands of Privacy Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2010, 404 pp.

Reviewed by: Marcus Persson, Ericsson ConsumerLab, Sweden

In popular media, ‘private’ and ‘public’ are often treated as two polarized and absolute concepts – you are either in private (at home) or in public (at work or at least out of the home). But, in fact, work-life-related research in recent decades indicates that the borders between home and work have become harder to distinguish. People work and are public at home, and manage private issues at work and in public. The home is no longer a sanctuary of privacy.

In Islands of Privacy, Christena Nippert-Eng, a sociologist, explores the meaning of privacy – the skills and strategies people develop to create personal place and time. The study is set in the USA; the main actors are a group of middle-class individuals; and the story is about how they struggle for privacy in their everyday lives. The aim of the book is best explained in her own metaphor:

Downloaded from asj.sagepub.com at UNIV OF CHICAGO on June 15, 2011

Book Reviews

207

The ocean has risen, shrinking our islands of privacy and even submerging many of them altogether. Like Atlantis, perhaps, some private spaces and times and matters are fading into the realm of folklore . . . What interest me, however, are not so much these islands or this ocean, or their relative proportion over time. Rather, what fascinates me is what happens on the beach – the place where islands and oceans most obviously meet. (pp. 3ff.)

Building on the insights of Goffman and Simmel, Nippert-Eng investigates the dramaturgy of ‘the personal beach’ of individuals. This is done with the help of 74 formal interviews, analyses of over 52,500 newspaper articles on privacy and ethnographic work in various homes, workplaces and public spaces. NippertEng’s kinship with Goffman includes her writing style. Through keen observations and colourful empirical illustrations she creates an intriguing and animated story. One successful ‘trick of the trade’ is her continually changing the fictive names of the interviewees. The reader does not get to know the interviewees as individuals – as commonly favoured by qualitative scholars – instead, the many voices are transformed into one voice giving various and rich illustrations from everyday life in all its complexity.

Islands of Privacy consists of four extensive chapters, each describing the obvious and innovative strategies people adopt and create in order to shape temporarily pockets of privacy on their personal beach. ‘Boundary work’ and ‘boundary play’ are two important concepts in the analysis of the empirical material and for understanding the trade-offs people make in juggling family and work.

The concept of boundary work describes our intentional and strategic planning to make practical ends meet on a daily basis. Boundary play is the other side of the coin; this is the use of boundaries as a source of play and amusement.

One chapter that I read with great interest was ‘Cell Phones and Email’. With the increasing use of mobile phones and ICT, integrity and privacy matters are fast becoming global issues raising new questions. One question is how to handle the increasing demand for personal accessibility, which in metaphorical terms means that there are more doors to our house than ever before and more people and different agents knocking at them. Managing others’ requests for access is a juggling act of deciding who and what to pay attention to and in what way. It is intricate work demanding the development of new communication strategies.

Accessibility has, in turn, changed the level of personal intimacy to technological devices. For example, the home phone was previously the most personal communication channel. In her study, Nippert-Eng reveals that nowadays this device is the communication channel with the slowest response rate. Kept close to hand, mobile phones have become the new personal device for communication and the fastest to respond to, and this makes it a fascinating communication device when dealing with strategies for coping with loss of boundaries.

Nippert-Eng states that the study is based entirely on the insights of well-off, middle-class, Americans, and that she makes no attempt to say anything about other groups or people in other parts of the world. However, I cannot help wondering how people in other groups and societies are ‘doing’ privacy. People with low resources and lack of power may not have the same possibility to juggle family and work in the same way as the Americans in the study. With flexible work hours and the sole responsibility to plan one’s own daily schedule, the problems of juggling might even be seen as a middle-class phenomenon.

Having said that, Nippert-Eng touches on something universal; she is not just studying middle-class Americans’ boundary work, but also the fundamental need of being part of, and being apart from, others in order to shape individual space, place and self. ‘Privacy is about nothing less than trying to live both as a member of a variety of social units – as a part of a number of larger wholes – and as an individual – a unique, individuated self’ (p. 6). In this way, Nippert-Eng connects private and public with the two most important concepts of sociology: individual (actor) and society (structure). The American middle-class struggle for keeping the balance between private and public can thus be seen as a cultural expression of all people’s struggle to balance the individual uniqueness and the need for group membership.

The theoretical notion of the relationship between actor and structure could have been made more explicit. So also could the relationship between gender and privacy; for example, how women and men struggle for privacy with the different resources to hand. Then again Nippert-Eng has written about it in her PhD

Downloaded from asj.sagepub.com at UNIV OF CHICAGO on June 15, 2011

208

Acta Sociologica 54(2)

thesis Home and Work. Negotiating Boundaries through Everyday Life (1996). So for anybody who wants to dig deeper into the dynamics of power relations from the perspective of boundary theory, Nippert-Eng’s earlier work is recommended as complementary reading.

Islands of Privacy is an original approach and a well-needed contribution to the growing body of research on surveillance and integrity, especially in regard to the increasing use of mobile phones and ICT. Shifting focus from technological and institutional aspects of integrity, such as policy-making, risk management and moral debating, Nippert-Eng’s ethnographic, action-oriented approach adds the social psychological insight and knowledge of the subjective, lived, meaning of integrity. Her approach is a fruitful way forward of addressing privacy issues in the ever increasing mobile society where place does not determine whether an action is private or public.

Ole Riis and Linda Woodhead A Sociology of Religious Emotion Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, 270 pp.

Reviewed by: James A. Beckford, University of Warwick, UK

It is arguable that the last 30 years or so have seen the publication of enough sociological studies of emotion to warrant talk – or at least rumours – of ‘an emotional turn’ in sociology. Certainly, the better known ‘cultural turn’ has done relatively little to raise the profile of emotion. But the number of books about the sociology of emotions is now growing rapidly, and attention to the emotional registers of social life is increasingly common in reports of empirical research. The landmark contributions in the English language

by Arlie Hochschild, Rom Harre´, Randall Collins, Thomas Scheff, Jack Barbalet and Gillian Bendelow, among others, have all helped to generate a host of general treatises and detailed investigations. A similar pattern of development is also evident in social and cultural anthropology as well as in psychology. Indeed, emotion lends itself not only to specific disciplinary approaches but also to inter- and cross-disciplinary study.

Nevertheless, religion has not figured prominently in many psychological, anthropological or sociological studies of emotion – leaving aside William James’s monumental and influential The Varieties of Religious Experience, which was first published in 1902, and Emile Durkheim’s equally path-breaking The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, which appeared first in French in 1912. Until recently, however, sociological understanding of religion has tended either to ignore emotion or to consign it to the realm of stage management and psychological manipulation. This situation is now changing rapidly in the wake of publications such as John Corrigan’s edited volume on Religion and Emotion (2004) and his Oxford Handbook of Religion and Emotion (2008). The book by Ole Riis and Linda Woodhead makes a welcome and highly distinctive contribution to this emerging field of study.

The distinctiveness of the Riis and Woodhead book owes much to its highly programmatic approach.

The first two chapters set out not merely to summarize the state of knowledge about religion and emotion but also to provide a rigorous framework for thinking about ‘religious emotion’ as an object of study in itself.

The conceptual and methodological apparatus they deploy for making religious emotion accessible for investigation is unremittingly sociological in the sense that it focuses on the social interactions, the social settings and the social relationships that shape — and are shaped by — the emotions associated with religion.

Indeed, the word ‘dialectics’ plays a major role in their arguments. But very little space is accorded to phenomenological approaches to emotion.

Another distinctive – and possibly surprising – feature of the Riis and Woodhead approach is the emphasis placed in chapter 3 and elsewhere on relations between persons and religiously charged symbols.

Indeed, their ‘general analytical scheme’ defines religious emotions as ‘simply those emotions that are integral to religious communities and their sacred symbols’ (p. 209). At first glance, this may seem to be an

Downloaded from asj.sagepub.com at UNIV OF CHICAGO on June 15, 2011