Eve Spangler

Country lawyers : the impact of context on professional practice

Foreword Preface The Significance of the Rural Setting for the Practice of Law A Profile of the Rural Bar The Impact of Community Size on Professional Stratification Entrepreneurial Practice: A Tale of Two Settings Status within the Bar: The Rural Structure of Deference Lawyers and Communities: The Impact of Context on Role Social Values of Attorneys: A Comparison of Rural and Metropolitan Practitioners Clients, Colleagues and Community: Zealous Advocacy in Country Law Practice Conclusion: The Bar as an Externally Determined Social System Index

When Good Jobs Go Bad: Globalization, De-Unionization, and Declining Job Quality in the North American Auto Industry

modern reality ‘‘where nothing remains the same but nothing essentially changes’’ (p. 314). So, we live in a world of frenetic movement, but no real change. Rosa concludes with a discussion of how acceleration will unfold or end. He offers four possibilities. First, a ‘‘new form of institutional facilitation and stabilization of the acceleration process’’ (p. 320) will develop, with the result that there will be a new equilibrium, albeit with speed at a still higher level. Second is the abandonment of modernity and its attendant focus on speed. The third and very different possibility involves an attempt ‘‘to assert the modern aspiration to shape human affairs against the selfautonomizing forces of acceleration’’ (p. 321). The fourth and most likely alternative is the continuation of an unbridled process of acceleration, leading us to the abyss of frenetic standstill. Unhappy with these abysmal possibilities (final catastrophe, radical change), Rosa hopes that social theory can lead us to discover a fifth, as yet unknown end-state for the history of acceleration. It is hard to do justice to this dense and complex book in a brief review. While Rosa brings in many contemporary examples, this is primarily a work in highly abstract social theory drawing mainly on European social theory. It is a kind of theory reminiscent in the United States of the work of Talcott Parsons, especially after 1950, a kind of theory that is unfortunately little done, or read, in the United States today. Rosa’s thinking is both satisfying in itself and, interestingly, in its applicability to the contemporary social world. While Rosa could not have anticipated this, I found his ideas very apt for explaining the situation prior to the close of the 2016 presidential campaign. With Donald Trump threatening not to accept the result of the election and engaging in rabble-rousing to stir up his followers, we seemed to stand, as Rosa suggests, on the brink of ‘‘new forms of political collapse and the eruption of uncontrolled violence, which can be particularly expected where the masses excluded from the processes of acceleration and growth take a stand against the acceleration society’’ (p. 322). These disasters were averted, at least for a time, by the astounding upset that was Trump’s election. However, that success may only be short-lived unless Trump can deliver on his promise to bring greater economic prosperity to those who have been, or at least feel they have been, left behind, especially economically, by technological change and globalization. Since it seems unlikely, to put it mildly, that Trump can reverse the adverse effects of acceleration, technological change, and globalization, effects such as lost jobs and factories that have closed or moved offshore, the catastrophe described by Rosa may have only been postponed. It is a testimony to the strength of this abstract theoretical work that it can shed light on such a contemporary issue. However, Rosa identifies an even more generic problem caused by the fact that social acceleration is creating ‘‘slippery slopes’’ in all realms of life. As a critical theorist, Rosa clearly means by this that most of us are destined to experience a variety of disruptions that are going to cause us to slide down, undoubtedly quite rapidly, one or many of these slopes. With everything moving so quickly, it will be difficult to find anything to hold on to or to impede our slide into what may well be an abyss. Indeed, the abyss may be a world characterized by acceleration with little or nothing to hold onto.

Working in Class: Recognizing How Social Class Shapes Our Academic WorkWorking in Class: Recognizing How Social Class Shapes Our Academic Work, edited by HurstAllison L.NengaSandi Kawecka. New York: Rowan and Littlefield, 2016. 211 pp.

Working in Class is a book about a ghost, the one who is not in the conversation, the inequality that dares not speak its name. This edited volume is a collection of essays about the insidious ways we do not attend to differences of social class in our teaching, research, and service in the university. The essays are written by academics in a variety of disciplines, mostly teaching or having taught in southern universities. Most of the essays in the collection are grounded in the theoretical work of Pierre Bourdieu; most are by scholars in the social sciences and the humanities situating their essays in the theory of habitus, or the cultural experience of life in particular class locations. Their definitions of class draw on Bourdieu’s assertion that class is defined by the fact that each member ‘‘is more likely than any member of another class to have been confronted with the situations most frequent for the members of that class,’’ (p. 4). Throughout the book, this cultural-interactive definition of class prevails. It is only in the final section, focused on university administration, that a more structural and Marxist framework is used. The book is decidedly interdisciplinary and includes contributions from scholars in language, literature, religion, education, psychology, and sociology. Across these disciplines, the essays ask how class is present or, more often, absent in structuring all three domains of academic life. Class is misunderstood and under-analyzed in the research domain, for example, in the presumed classlessness of research subjects in experimental psychology (Irene López and Olivia Legan, pp. 23–34). Class is an awkward presence in the schoolroom as most of the authors in Section Two, scholars in the field of education, demonstrate. Even when educators are sensitive to and intentional about bridging class differences, they nevertheless reproduce them in their comfort with the standard ‘‘great book’’ texts, with their experience of international travel, and in handing out well-meant but impossible-to-follow career advice to the students they struggle to serve. Finally, in the section on university administration, Gretchen Braun’s work invites us to ‘‘think structurally and act collectively,’’ (p. 168ff). Here we get a systematic examination of the use and misuse of adjunct faculty in the university—an analysis that defines class as one’s position not in a system of cultural life, but in a system of production. While the book is rich in multi-disciplinary authors, the collection of essays is not highly intersectional and pays relatively less attention to class differences in communities of color. A notable exception is the work of Jessi Streib (p. 75), who reports in her essay on boundary-crossing that students and teachers of the same race are presumed to connect effortlessly because of racial identification, while social awkwardness between white teachers and black students arises both from racial and possibly from class differences, the latter often going undetected. There are two areas of discussion in which the book could have been strengthened. All the early and best-known work on intersectionality (e.g., Collins 1990) focuses on the ways that race, class, and gender interact and mutually co-define one another. The authors of these essays are mostly junior faculty, and hence they might have commented on age/career stage as yet another (largely underdeveloped) area of intersectionality research. Further, given their emphasis on class differences as a cultural script, they also might have paid more explicit attention to regional differences, specifically how southern ideas of culture and community form the background to most of their observations. Most of the essays in this collection employ the method of auto-ethnography to a greater or lesser extent. We read about young scholars discovering the lack of attention to class in their own circumstances, often with poignant anecdotes. Sara Appel refers to her sense of marginality that arises because 320 Reviews

35.00 paper. ISBN: 9781475822533.

When I wrote the first draft of Chapter 5, I ended the introduction by saying I would cover four time periods each of which, “(except perhaps the most recent one), ends in a conflagration, after which all three parties continue to pursue the same fixed ends without better prospects of achieving them.”

The Endless, Deceptive Peace Process

The history of the early national period in Israel, like the one before it, is shaped by the interactions of three parties: the Israelis, the Palestinians, and ambitious outside powers, each with constant and self-interested motives. As in the previous period, the conflicts of interest that arose among them ended in a war whose results brought great losses to the Palestinians and to some of the great or aspiring-to-be great powers and only a Pyrrhic victory to Israelis.

Establishing the State, Preparing Occupation

The Israeli military victory in the June, 1967 Six Day War created an entirely new geographic reality, with Israel in control of all the land of Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

Occupation and Resistance

In the following chapters, I provide a synoptic account of the history of Palestine and Israel in four periods:4 from the beginnings of Zionism in the mid-to-late 19th century to the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948; from the establishment of the state to its Occupation of the entire land of historic Palestine in 1967; from the Occupation to the first major challenge against it, a popular Palestinian uprising called the Intifada which began in 1987; and from the Intifada through the unending, fruitless and deceptive “peace process” to the present day.

State Builders, Settlers, and Colonial Subjects

Every year for the last ten years I have visited Palestine/Israel, seven times leading a group of students who had spent a semester studying the conflict. Much can be learned from news reports, documentaries, and scholarly literature. But seeing Israel/Palestine in person creates the most vivid and compelling form of knowledge.

In Israel and Palestine

Wilma Dunaway has written an exhaustive, meticulously researched history of “the multiethnic majority of females who resided in the Mountain South between 1700 and 1860” (p. 1). She integrates information from a vast array of documentary sources: state archives, university collections, church records, diaries, etc. Her goal, she says, is to make the “invisible Appalachian women visible, in all their class, racial, ethnic and religious complexities” (p. 4). And this she does, detailing the differences in the lives of white working class women of diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds and between them and Cherokee women, black slave women and free black women. In so doing, she attempts not only to make the invisible visible, but also to disassemble the stereotypes of uniformly conservative rural women, quaint in their poke bonnets, and subservient to a patriarchal system and the demands of individual families. She is especially evocative, in Chapter One, in showing how even white working class women were divided by religion and ethnicity. Anglican English-speaking women looked down on German-speaking Lutheran communities and their distaste was returned in kind. The Scotch-Irish were described by one Anglican clergyman as “lazy, sluttish, heathenish, hellish” (p. 19). Even the Amish, Mennonites and Moravian Brethren were despised by others; “a vile, licentious pack” in the eyes of their neighbors (p. 36). What chance, then, did Cherokee or slave or free black women have of being accepted in mainstream society. Absolutely none, is the answer. Nor was there any basis for a feminist solidarity among women so deeply divided by race, class, religion, ethnicity and legal status. In this finding, Dunaway’s work is eerily reminiscent of the conclusions drawn by Martin Cherniak in his study of the Gauley Bridge, West Virginia mining disaster (The Hawk’s Nest Incident, 1986). In this study of the largest industrial fatality in United States history—the deaths of 600 or more mineworkers from acute silicosis over a three-month period—Cherniak shows how black workers were imported from all over the South into depression-era West Virgina, where they were viewed by local whites as little better than scabs. The mine owners (a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum, later found guilty of the much larger industrial disaster in Bhopal, India) carefully assembled work teams so that workers from the same towns were kept apart. In so doing, the company knew full well that workers were being exposed to lethal doses of silica dust. The owners expected workers to make their lonely way home to separate towns all over the south to die. Their only miscalculation was to underestimate the lethality of the silica dust and thus they had hundreds of fatalities on their hands, all in the same place and all in a very short time span. Apparently this kind of raceand ethnicity-based hostility within the working class, facilitating exploitation by mine and factory owners, has ancient roots in the region. In Chapter Two, the author details the way in which the larger white colonial system shaped the experiences of Cherokee women, whose role was to skin and prepare deer hides for the fur trade. Here Dunaway provides a compelling example of the commodification of indigenous economic practices, complete with “speed up”, “industrial hazards” and all of the degradation charcteristic of the most brutal and exploitative mill systems later to emerge in the north (see, for example, Mary Blewett’s work on the Lowell, Massachusetts mill girls). Further chapters examine the work life of slave communities and free blacks, each precarious in their own way. In the second half of the book, Dunaway is at pains to show the enormous gap between the cult of domesticity—which required a homemaker who did little work beyond supervising domestic servants and complet-

Women, Work, and Family in the Antebellum Mountain South:

A number of years ago several sociology and management faculty at Boston College came together to develop a joint executive education program with two main objectives: to promote social responsibility in business and to employ an action-learning pedagogy appropriate to adult, work-based learning. The integration of these two objectives occurred primarily through major projects undertaken by participants within their employing organizations. These projects had to define (when necessary), develop, and implement business practices that optimized both conventional economic returns and social returns for at least one of the sponsoring organization’s many stakeholders: employees, customers, suppliers, neighbors, or the environment. The program was initially called Leadership for the Common Good and later re-named Leadership for Change (LC).