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Jan Servaes (ed.). 2008. Communication for Development and Social Change. New Delhi, India: Sage. 428 pp. $ 53.95., paperback
Martin Scott JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN DEVELOPMENT 2010 5: 175 DOI: 10.1177/097317411000500110 The online version of this article can be found at: http://sad.sagepub.com/content/5/1/175

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How might we then account for the decline in child sex ratio in India and elsewhere? Perhaps, a lesser number of girl children being born in areas where a low child sex ratio is observed need an explanation in terms of the effects of a reduced fertility pattern of its inhabitants in the context of a small family size with some degree of son preference. This observation again is reinforced throughout the volume, including in the editors note. It is quite likely that the sex ratio decline might be caused by excess female child mortality and stopping behaviour of the couple in a reduced fertility regime. Tamil Nadu appears to be a good example where such a trend is apprehensible, but unfortunately is not discussed in the volume. While explaining decit of girls, social scientists need to pay attention to those families who now stop producing children when one or two sons are born, and take into account the post-liberalisation shift in family aspirations and the rise of consumerism to the point where girls rst puberty rites have become costly status demonstrations. Hence, the use of any single variable in explaining the decline in sex ratio is not without problems and a politics of representation. In short, what seem like shifts and dips may not always be sociologically or even at times statistically signicant. A discussion on these fresh possibilities is clearly absent in a book on the subject of such paramount signicance. Furthermore, this volume is made somewhat complex with the excessive use of statistics, repetitive sentences and claims without delivering it, histories and numbers, inconsistent referencing style, maudlin language and rhetoric, too many subheadings, grammatical mistakes and other such minor typographical errors. A little discretion on the part of the editor would have reduced the complexity of presentation of essays, some of which are too long and disconnected to uphold the readers casual interest on the subject. Nonetheless, the volume contains a lot of information and rich data, which if put in a relevant framework with a more rigorous analysis could be immensely useful for policymakers, demographers, sociologists, womens groups, and development actors including the state. The editor and contributors have to be commended for highlighting the issue from a variety of angles. Reviewed by Shahid Pervez, Durham University.

Jan Servaes (ed.). 2008. Communication for Development and Social Change. New Delhi, India: Sage. 428 pp. $ 53.95., paperback. DOI: 10.1177/097317411000500110 Communication for development and social change offers the most comprehensive introduction to and examination of the eld of development communication of the number of books that have been published in this area over the last few years
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(with the notable exception of the Communication for Social Change Anthology (A. Gumucio-Dagron & T. Tufte 2006). Although the arrangement of and links between the chapters does not always form a particularly coherent narrative or structure, the range of contributions over the ve sections of the book allows this volume to cover a wide variety of issues which are illustrated by a wealth of examples from various areas of the eld of development communication. These contributions range from a history of the eld and discussions of media globalisation, to a review of the communication policies and strategies of different organisations such as the FAO, Unesco and Unicef as well as specic case studies of HIV/AIDS communication campaigns, community media projects and the role of media in conict resolution. In the rst part of the book, Alfonso Gumucio-Dagron sets the scene for many of the later contributions by giving a typically well written and engaging introduction to participatory communication with reference to a range of case studies. The three other contributions in this section also help to prepare the ground for the rest of the volume by discussing broader issues such as how media globalisation and localisation has challenged traditional frameworks of analysis (Jan Servaes and Rico Lie), by reviewing recent developments in the concepts of human rights, development and culture (Jan Servaes and Chris Verschooten) and by giving an overview of how communications interventions have been guided by different conceptualisations of poverty (Pradip Thomas). The second part of the volume offers a conventional discussion of the history and current contours of the eld of development communication. Robert Huesca focuses on participatory communication and gives a standard overview of its emergence, its varied application and concludes with an outline of the variety of directions for future research and practice. In his contribution to this section Roy Colle traces seven threads that have contributed to the eld of development communication including development support communication, extension, community participation, population and health communication, social marketing, institution building and ICT. Colles approach in this particular chapter offers a refreshing change to the well rehearsed discussions of the history of the eld offered by many of the other chapters and exemplied by Jan Servaes and Patchanee Malikhaos contribution. In their chapter, Servaes and Malikhao revisit the debates about key concepts in the eld such as the diffusion and participatory models and the application of modernisation theory and dependency theory. The contributions to the third section of the book take a more applied approach to making the case for a participatory and multidimensional approach to development communication by evaluating the different uses of communication by various organisations such as Unicef, the FAO and Unesco. Gary Coldevin charts the changing nature of FAO communication projects from those based on the principle of information dissemination in the 1970s and 1980s to the evolution and application of a participatory model in the 1990s. He concludes by identifying

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the lessons that can be learned for projects that seek to use the internet in rural settings. In the following chapter, Neill McKee, Erma Manoncourt, Chin Saik Yoon and Rachel Carnegie outline the many theoretical frameworks of behaviour change and what we can learn from Unicef projects about the many processes and factors that facilitate such change. The purpose of this review of theory and empirical evidence is to argue for an integrated approach towards development. Their aim, as is the aim of many of the other contributions, is to stress the importance of building effective and responsive communication elements into all development programmes. They conclude that while communication on its own will not bring about change and development, neither will change happen without development communication (p. 274). The fourth part of the book makes a welcome contribution to the discussion of the role of development communication in addressing HIV/AIDS. Rico Lies chapter on rural HIV/AIDS communication/intervention serves as a useful introduction to this eld by tracing the shift in development communication thinking in which HIV/AIDS was understood primarily as a health problem, met with mainstream mass media campaigns directed at behaviour change, to seeing HIV/AIDS as a development problem, tackled through local community media whose focus is on social change. In the following chapter, Patchanee Malikhao then uses Thailand as a case study to illustrate this shift. In the nal chapter of this section, Thomas Tufte provides the only contribution to this volume based on entertainmenteducation. In an excellent analysis of the well-known South African multimedia health promotion project, Soul City, Tufte offers an enlightening discussion of how a development communication project based on entertainmenteducation can contribute to participatory development. He argues that edutainment can become an even more powerful instrument in combating HIV/AIDS if the edutainment strategy of Soul City is further elaborated and adapted to the issue of HIV/AIDS. The fth and nal section of the book deals with two issues that are frequently neglected in development communication, namely, community media and conict resolution. The contribution from Nico Carpentier, Rico Lie and Jan Servaes is particularly useful as it gives a comprehensive outline of four different approaches to dening the particularly problematic concept of community media. In the nal chapter of the volume, Georgios Terzis and Myria Vassiliadou outline a set of practical approaches for creating positive conict transformation environments, based on a series of case studies. In this volume, as in most literature on development communication, there are two underlying messages to policymakers and practitioners. First, that communication must be taken seriously as a vital element of all development initiatives and that communication elements should be built into development programmes right from the start. Alfonso Gumucio-Dagron argues in his chapter that communication was until very recently the fth wheel in the car of development (p. 70). This struggle for greater recognition is felt throughout this book. Indeed, one of the
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stated aims of this volume is to offer interesting insights and examples to prove that the eld of communication for development and social change is still alive and kicking (p. 27). Second, all of the contributions to this volume challenge the modernisation approach to development communication, which continues to inuence the policymaking of major actors, in which communication is seen largely as a tool for delivering information through the traditional one-way, vertical model of sender-message-channel-receiver. The contributors to this volume are at pains to stress an alternative view in which communication is seen as a means of facilitating dialogue and the sharing of knowledge. As Jan Servaes argues in the conclusion to the volume, communication for development and social change is a multifaceted, multidimensional and participatory process through which people are empowered to control their own destinies (p. 390). In summary, this volume not only provides a broad-based introduction to the eld of development communication but also adds rich empirical detail and important theoretical insight to this often undervalued eld. This volume will be of great use to all those with an interest in communication and development and particularly to the growing number of students in development communication.

REFERENCE
Gumucio-Dagron, A. and Tufte, T. (eds) (2006) Communication for Social Change Anthology: Historical and Contemporary Readings. Communication for Social Change Consortium.

Reviewed by Martin Scott, University of East Anglia, UK.

J.K. Tina Basi. 2009. Women, Identity and Indias Call Centre Industry. Abingdon, UK; USA & Canada: Routledge. 210 pp. $150 (HB). ISBN 978-0-415-48228-8; ebk, ISBN 978-0-203-88379-2. DOI: 10.1177/097317411000500111 Having just moved and negotiated various phone, insurance and utility contracts in often open and chatty conversations with young women in Indian call centres Yakshmi from the mobile phone company would love to visit the UK one day, maybe for her honeymoonI wanted to know more about the lives behind these transnational voices. What were their working conditions like? How did they view us in the UK? Were they as happy as they sounded? Ultimately, how real were they? In other words, to what extent did they have to alter their identities in order to interact with their customers?

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