Reviews 339 a point for political activism—overemphasizes the importance of the family frame. In other words, yes, these organizations and other advocacy groups have sought to define the immigration debate as a family issue. But others do not. Has the family as a political subject been adopted outside of the movement as the primary frame for understanding immigration? As a family scholar who studies immigration, I want to say yes. But every time I see a news story repeating erroneous claims about unauthorized immigrants— like Donald Trump’s assertion that Mexicans are sending criminals to the United States who don’t belong here—I cannot help but wonder why this family discourse has not seemed to penetrate public opinion and why the criminal and neoliberal subject continue to dominate. Second, I want to know more about the actors involved in pushing forth the family as a unifying political subject. Where does this discourse come from? Is it something that people in the movement sat down and talked about in meetings as a political strategy? Is the emphasis on family something that a few key actors determined was the best route and then were able to rally their members behind? Although there are places where I get the sense that someone made a strategic decision about who stands up at a rally, the U.S. citizen child or the unauthorized parent, for example, the book does not explain who made these determinations. Rather, the overall impression is one in which the family as a political subject mutated and evolved a life of its own, as a social actor, when it is really a political discourse that people and organizations employ. I want to know more about the different actors involved in the strategic manipulations and adaptations of the family as a political discourse. Finally, given that we still have not had any immigration reform, I cannot help but wonder—at the risk of revealing my growing cynicism—how successful the family strategy has been for immigrant advocacy. Do people really care about immigrant families? As a scholar, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the family is an accurate rallying point for political activism. I am convinced of the need for such a framing of the issue and have been inspired by so many activists
in the movement. But in the end, we should reflect on whether or not the strategy is an effective one.
Empty Labor: Idleness and Workplace Resistance, by Roland Paulsen. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 217 pp. $95.00 cloth. ISBN: 9781107066410.
CEDRIC DE LEON Providence College
[email protected] In this engaging book, Empty Labor, Roland Paulsen uses the phenomenon of workplace idleness to chart a course between sociological arguments that workers are slaves to the machine on the one hand, and managerial accounts that stress the irrationality and wastefulness of workers on the other hand. His alternative is to conceive of practices like coffee breaks, napping, and web surfing at work as acts of resistance. This move is anchored in a theory of the subject that does not assume the inevitable incorporation of people into the system, but on the contrary assumes, following Alain Touraine, that the subject has the will to become an actor or agent in one’s life. The empirical heart of the book, which is in Chapters Four through Six, lays out a typology of empty labor that turns on the variation in (1) work ethic or one’s sense of obligation to work and (2) potential output of a given job. Drawing on interviews with Swedish white- and pink-collar workers (e.g., lab assistants, florists, engineers, call center operators), Paulsen distinguishes among the different contexts in which workers engage in empty labor: enduring (strong work ethic, little to do), coping (strong work ethic, lots to do), slacking (weak work ethic, little to do), and soldiering (weak work ethic, lots to do). Some of these practices bear out what the existing literature anticipates, but soldiering in particular suggests something else: namely, the will of the subject to be an actor, a resistance not just to the boss or the company, but to the meaninglessness of work and to wage labor in general. The strengths of the book are many, but two are notable. First, the book is humorous, enjoyable, and accessible. As a mid-career Contemporary Sociology 45, 3
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340 Reviews scholar, I review a lot of books, and most of the time the work can be tedious because so few academic books are both well-written and smart (indeed, I do a ton of empty labor in this part of my job, mostly to cope with the boredom). Much of this virtue is due to the data. Anyone can relate to appropriating time on the job, and some of his examples are literally laugh-out-loud funny. In one example, supervisors and lab assistants collude to simulate absurdly intense labor when management tours their facility. Tearing themselves away from an hours-long coffee break, everyone dons a white coat and goggles, a technician monitors the beakers, another perseverates over bacteria cultures, and the supervisor pretends to be so absorbed with the microscope that he screams at the boss as he enters the lab to get the hell out. But second, this isn’t just a fun read. I found the book refreshing politically and intellectually (in this, the book gets better as you read on—he is on fire in the last three chapters). This is not so much about the data (as Paulsen himself admits, many before him have observed similar organizational misbehavior), but rather about his analysis. He sees the data in an original way and from them he extracts radical implications that question the very foundation of capitalism: wage labor. In doing so, he turns one after another orthodoxy on its head. You think work is colonizing our lives? Think again: workers resist work every day and everywhere, sometimes engaging in empty labor for most of the workday. Workers shirk because they are irrational and feckless creatures? Not so fast: the sheer pervasiveness of empty labor suggests that firms, states, and indeed capitalist society as a whole are monumentally inefficient and organized to simulate labor, giving rise to rampant existential meaninglessness in most people’s work lives. An intervention questioning the givenness of wage labor is urgent now more than ever as work disappears and as a growing percentage of the population will never know formal sector employment. In this sense, Paulsen’s book serves as a wake-up call. Overall, then, I think this is exactly where the sociology of work should be going, but I have two worries. To begin, I fear that his
incisive analysis of empty labor reveals too much and degrades the opacity of work that workers count on to conceal their empty labor. Paulsen insists that he has purposely withheld the nitty-gritty details of how workers succeed in business without really trying, but I’m afraid the clarity and accessibility of his writing—otherwise a strength of the book—will prompt greater ‘‘transparency’’ and undermine the very workplace resistance he champions. Moreover, I worry about what the ‘‘weapons of the weak’’ approach means for the future of mass movements. To be fair, Paulsen himself argues that empty labor is not an ultimately effective form of resistance but that it could be a prelude to something bigger—a general legitimation of the critique of wage labor. This compelling proviso notwithstanding, I could not help but ask myself whether his entire project is simply a symptom of the decline of organized labor. Perhaps I am not critiquing Paulsen here as much as I am concerned that the only hope left might be in everyday acts of resistance. None of this, however, should be taken as detracting from the overall quality of the book, which is high. Indeed, my worries suggest that Paulsen’s work is provocative, and not in a gratuitous made-for-TV way. I might go so far as to say that it puts the ‘‘critical’’ back into critical theory.
Renegade Dreams: Living through Injury in Gangland Chicago, by Laurence Ralph. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. 250 pp. $60.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780226032689.
MARILYN C. KROGH Loyola University Chicago
[email protected] Since the 1980s, a neighborhood on the west side of Chicago has been notorious as a hub of heroin distribution and a site of gang violence. As a graduate student interested in writing an ethnography, Laurence Ralph moved there in the summer of 2007 and stayed for three years. He developed friendships with residents and volunteered with a violence-reduction program and an afterschool program at a church. Watching young black men navigate the streets in
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