Book Reviews 181

femininity’ at the same time as engaging in violent behaviour (including Tomb

Raider’s Lara Croft, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer). Thus, Messerschmidt’s assertion
that violence is a masculine gender practice drags him dangerously close to a static
and trait-based conceptualization of masculinity.
I also found Messerschmidt’s labelling of Kelly as a ‘third gender’ problematic
(p. 141). Kelly embodied a ‘masculine’ gender project and engaged in violence both
at school and on the street in retaliation to verbal abuse from girls (who labelled her
a ‘dyke’) and boys (who called her a ‘wimp’). Although her masculine behaviour
was accepted by the gang of ‘badass’ male youths with whom she socialized, her
female body was also a constraint on her behaviour since they did not allow her to
participate in all activities (such as burglaries). Kelly is an interesting case and clearly
shows that ‘“sex” is not a “natural” foundation of gender’ (p. 131). However, a ‘third
gender’ implies that there exists one masculinity and one femininity and that Kelly is
a rather extraordinary blend of the two. Such a conceptualization masks the fluidity
and multiplicity of gender.
Furthermore, Messerschmidt’s commitment to embodying gender/crime
focuses on how embodied interaction results in violence. Thus, the violent body
itself is startling absent. We hear that Perry ‘beat the shit out’ of a gay man (p. 80),
that Tina ‘started hitting [her stepfather] in the face’ (p. 87) and that one schoolboy
let Kelly ‘pound on his face’ (p. 99). Yet the sweating, panting, bleeding, aching,
bruised body is missing. Similarly, there is little mention of those embodied emo-
tions that fighting may stir, such as pleasure, satisfaction, euphoria or exhilaration.
Despite these criticisms, the richness of Messerschmidt’s data makes Flesh and
Blood an interesting and engaging read.

Wenda K. Bauchspies, Jennifer Croissant and Sal Revisto

Science,Technology, and Society: A Sociological Approach
Oxford: Blackwell, 2006, £14.99 pbk (ISBN: 0 631 23210 9), xiii+149 pp.
Reviewed by Joachim Allgaier, The Open University

Scientific knowledge is regarded as the most tested and therefore best knowledge
that we have in modern societies. Science subjects are also compulsory in schools in
many countries. It is not an exaggeration to say that science and technology influ-
ence and constitute modern societies. Therefore examinations of the relationships
between science, technology and society are also diagnoses of contemporary societies.
In their book, Wenda Bauchspies, Jennifer Croissant and Sal Restivo offer an intro-
duction to this topic, especially designed for students and readers new to the subject.
In the introduction the authors explain that they do not see their book as an
absolute alternative to other introductory texts on the subject, but rather one to be
read side by side with others. In this regard the book provides good service to the
reader and offers further readings at the end of each chapter as well as an eight-page
glossary of key terms and concepts in the field of study.

Downloaded from soc.sagepub.com at LAURENTIAN UNIV LIBRARY on June 4, 2016

182 Sociology Volume 41 ❚ Number 1 ❚ February 2007

The text aims at the improvement of a sociological understanding of the

relationships between science, technology and society. Here, the core idea is that sci-
ence, scientific facts, technologies and scientific disciplines are socially constructed.
This notion has caused much unease among scientific and technological practition-
ers because they understood this formulation as being equal to their facts and find-
ings being ‘made up’. Therefore it is helpful that the authors explain at the
beginning: ‘It is not that facts and things are either socially constructed or true or
reliable, but that they are both socially constructed and true or reliable, or perhaps
false or flawed, depending on the circumstances’ (p. 3).
The first chapter examines science and technology as human activities. What
appear to be neat and ordered entities with clear boundaries become less clearly sep-
arated the closer one looks at their working processes and terms of production.
Therefore Bauchspies et al. introduce a second central concept of the book: techno-
science. This term, coined by the sociologist of science Bruno Latour, is applied to
stress the messiness of science and technology in practice, where it is often very dif-
ficult to distinguish the two. Whereas science and technology are seen as abstract
artefacts, the term technoscience serves to emphasize the ambiguity of these areas
that are defined by social communities of practice. These expert communities have
the means and power to label approaches or facts, for instance, as scientific.
Scientific facts, therefore, have histories and are embedded in professional practices.
A second chapter deals with the cultures of science, worldviews and the socio-
political construction of technology. It also introduces a feminist perspective on sci-
ence and a brief excursion in the sociology of mathematics, what the authors call
the ‘hardest’ of scientific cases, to underline that even highly formalized and abstract
disciplines reflect cultural values.
Chapter three treats technoscience as social institution. Things are a bit prob-
lematic where the authors choose to describe their views on ‘the dance of magic’
around science, religion and truth. Here the reader learns that ‘one of the truths that
we can still tell today in a way that Marx and others would recognize is that there
is no God’ (p. 63). The authors advocate the view that God cannot exist because
various sociological and anthropological thinkers have explained that God is
socially constructed. They go on to stress that the social and cultural sciences are
even better suited than the physical sciences to provide evidence that God does not
exist. The statement from chapter one that a social construction could also be true
seems to be forgotten here. We encounter an oversimplified picture of the complex
relationships between science, religion and truth, and the way the authors one-sid-
edly advantage sociological explanations compared to others is not convincing. But
it gets even more controversial: ‘Telling the truth about religion is the starting point
for telling the truth in general’ (p. 63): God is dead and religion serves the power-
ful. And to close the circle: ‘Postmodernism has not only taught us to be, at the very
least, cautious about “telling the truth,” it has also in a way made it possible to tell
the truth more realistically’ (p. 64).
Chapter four examines the relationship between science, technology and power,
an excursion on globalization, and sketches the thoughts of Karl Marx, Lewis
Mumford, Ivan Illich, Jacques Ellul, Langdon Winner and Donna Haraway. The last

Downloaded from soc.sagepub.com at LAURENTIAN UNIV LIBRARY on June 4, 2016

 Book Reviews 183

chapter might be especially helpful in teaching and for discussions since it provides two
very interesting and helpful case studies (on reproductive technologies and robots,
minds and societies) to relate the theoretical ideas in the text to practical cases.
Science, Technology and Society does a good job in acquainting novices to the
field with the socially constructed nature of science and technology and Latour’s
notion of technoscience. It is a comparatively easy read and adumbrates some of the
important theoretical conceptions from science and technology studies. However,
the reader might be well advised to supplement this text with readings of other,
maybe somewhat more complex, views on the subject, especially where it concerns
the manifold relationships between science(s) and religion(s).

Rosemary Crompton
Employment and the Family:The Reconfiguration of Work and
Family Life in Contemporary Societies
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, £45.00 hbk, £17.99 pbk (ISBN: 0
521 60075 8), viii+248 pp.
Reviewed by Sarah Evans, University of Kent

Employment and the Family provides a detailed and lively account of the factors
that continue to shape the reconciliation of paid employment and family life for
women and for men in the contemporary Western world. A central theme of the
book is the idea of work–life ‘balance’, or rather, as Crompton more realistically
puts it, work–life ‘conflict’, through which the impact of employment practices on
the home, domestic labour and family life are examined and reassessed. This central
concern is permeated with continued addresses to the effects of gender and class in
structuring and limiting employment experience, opportunity and familial relations.
Given the pervasiveness of theories emphasizing the centrality of ‘choice’ in the
‘individualized’ construction of the self in late modernity, Crompton’s interest for
the structurally embedded nature of ‘decisions’ about work and family is particu-
larly pertinent.
The introductory chapter provides historical and theoretical context, broadly
outlining the major changes to employment, women and the family in the late 19th
and 20th centuries. The main body of work makes use of both qualitative and quan-
titative data. The first three chapters draw mainly on qualitative data from the
Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) 2001–2002 study on ‘Organisations, Careers
and Caring’ and survey data from the BSA – therefore focusing on the British case.
An initial analysis of the class contingency of attitudes and behaviours with respect
to both domestic/care work and paid employment provides an illuminating starting
point. It emerges that while attitudes to women’s and mother’s employment has
been transformed across the spectrum (p. 60), ‘choices’ about the organization of
employment and care work within the family remain differentiated by class. Following
this backdrop, Crompton raises a number of concerns about the mismatch between

Downloaded from soc.sagepub.com at LAURENTIAN UNIV LIBRARY on June 4, 2016