Peter K. Manning

Book ReviewsCommunity Policing, Chicago Style. By Wesley G. Skogan and Susan M. Harnett. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. x+258.

but we are already inundated with critiques of modernity and the authors’ critique of postmodernity remains undeveloped. Instead, we are presented with a “success story” of the power of lay people to mobilize within a pluralist democracy, evidenced by instances of workplace adaptations, “fragrance free” seating in public places, and the recognition of the reality of MCS within popular culture. Kroll-Smith and Floyd fundamentally remain advocates for those whose stories they recount rather than analysts of them. Their aim is “to make the ‘other’ . . . familiar” (p. 13), and they are pleased to report that none of those interviewed for the study disagreed with their retelling. The “other” is indeed made familiar, even reassuring, in the book’s liberal conclusions—that in achieving social change, the most effective strategy is to adopt the rhetoric of the “center” (biomedical discourse and a legal discourse of rights and citizenship, utilizing the gains of the disability movement in the United States) and to move incrementally toward a more inclusive society. A less realist approach would have opened other, if less comforting, lines of analysis. Why is it possible, now, to speak of environmental illness and for us to experience our bodies as porous, as individual, as separate from ourselves? Kroll-Smith and Floyd reiterate their key point that MCS has upset our assumptions that environments are either safe or unsafe, but this point has already been made (to a sociological audience at least) by the writings of Ulrich Beck and others, in claims that uncertainty is a key feature of late modernity (in which we all face a multitude of risks), and where science is as likely to pose dangers as it is to provide solutions. Equally, there is little new in a questioning of the distinctions between “lay” and expert discourse. Accounts of illness are in rational and medicalized terms because this is what is possible to say and to hear. An equally plausible story would have been of MCS as having been made possible by the uncertainties of late modernity, rather than being disruptive of it. Neither the existence of MCS nor this analysis moves theory forward as much as was promised, but it is perhaps churlish to expect that as well as a detailed narrative account. What Kroll-Smith and Floyd have done, with both clarity and sensitivity, is provided considerable insight into an important arena of contemporary experience and rich data for the postmodern theorists to mull over.

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“obligatory scientific passage points”; (2) by discrediting scientific claimants with whom they disagreed; (3) by giving credit where credit was due and thereby gaining status as fair-minded and rigorous rather than extremist and sloppy participants in the debate; and most important, (4) by yoking together moral and scientific arguments by arguing that one standard goal of scientific research—the acquisition of generalizable claims from “pure” subjects—was in conflict with a second important goal—to assist patients. By implication, Epstein suggests that these professionals were also highly dependent upon AIDS activists to legitimize their claims to service to those who are ill. Just how far the democratization of science can proceed however, is not clear. Epstein dutifully reports that the white, gay, male AIDS activists who are his subjects had unusual amounts of cultural and economic capital, a strong tradition of activism, geographic proximity, and access to alternative media. It is not apparent whether these features explain most of why other AIDS activists, such as hemophiliacs, people of color, and women, gained neither scientific credibility nor even a fraction of the political successes of Epstein’s main subjects. It is also possible that the great overlap between the social characteristics of researchers and activists, AIDS activists’ direct actions, and/or the common goals of activists and researchers all played a part as well. What remains clear from Epstein’s superb book, however, is that the active, contentious participation of those with AIDS and their supporters—the “politics” of science that so many scientists lament—had the consequence of advancing the understanding of the origins, spread, and treatment of AIDS. Activists’ efforts benefited all Americans as well, by advancing genuine progress in the democratization of health care and biomedical research.

Book ReviewsThe Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA.By Diane Vaughan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Pp. xv+575.

What can we know? Any attempt to order mentally the occasioned nature of social experience is eroded by reflection on that very question. Even though reasoning is rare and perhaps often avoided, it possesses the power to undercut whatever certainty it might otherwise produce. It has become increasingly obvious in the latter part of this century that reasoning in the social sciences is not markedly different from everyday thought insofar as analysts are caught in the same traps, circumlocutions, ellipses, and unrecognized assumptions as those they study. Durkheim offers an ingenious method for analyzing what is taken to be known. He urges the careful consideration of social facts as things, collective representations or ideational forms that organize experience. Individual consciousness becomes secondary, an adjunct to differentiated interaction. Rodney Needham, in a singularly brilliant contribution to sociological analysis, asserts in his introduction to Durkheim and Mauss (1963) that the capacity of the human mind to learn to classify cannot be denied. The claimed causal link made by Durkheim between social classification systems and thought could well be reversed. It is the forms of symbolic thought that produce social structures; structures themselves are a result of modes of symbolic classification. Perhaps, Needham suggests, an examination of social facts in their diversity and complexity may reveal a constant ordering and classification of experience based on mental operations. From these analyses one might infer primary factors. In the seven understated, elegantly sparse, and stylized essays that constitute Against the Tranquility of Axioms, Needham readdresses the problem he first identified in Primitive Classification. Can comparative analysis reveal the symbolic bases of human experience and their manifestations in a range of known social structures? Yes, perhaps. Needham here assembles empirical materials about collective representations on the basis of which to ask philosophical questions and to question tranquilizing axioms in order to understand the limits of current knowledge of such social facts. No less than a comparative analysis of the forms of human experience is promised, and a formal explication is suggestively presented in more than one of the essays. This collec-