What is the relationship between private and public spheres of life, illness and health, modernity and postmodernity, between self and society? These questions are at the heart of this introduction to social science. The text takes as its starting point the growing “insecurity” of the discipline of social science: “an umbrella discipline which no longer deals confidently in ‘findings’, ‘results’ and ‘analyses’, but has now moved on” (p. 1). As its title suggests, the book sets out to explore questions such as these, to challenge our common‐sense, taken‐for‐granted understandings of gender, class, ethnicity, our “assumptions about ‘truth’ and about the certainty with which we can make judgements about human society” (p. 1). Thus, Exploring Self and Society does not attempt to offer definitive answers to these questions. Instead, it seeks to provide social science lenses through which to better understand them.
The central image in the book is the map. Social science, it is suggested, is like a series of maps, providing different, sometimes contradictory frameworks for understanding our social worlds. However, like any other maps, such theories only ever provide a partial view, emphasising certain aspects (those which the mapmaker finds interesting, helpful or revealing), and ignoring others (aspects which are seen as confounding, troublesome or simply irrelevant). And just as maps need revising and updating as our landscapes evolve and our map‐making tools develop, so too social theories are re‐examined in the light of our changing social contexts. On the one hand, then, this book is about maps ‐ about models and frameworks for understanding fundamental questions about truth and reality, self and society. At the same time it is about map‐making ‐ about the process of social inquiry, what can be known, how we come to know and who is involved in the process of knowing. Finally, it is about map reading ‐ the processes by which we come to make sense of social theories and, most importantly, the relationship between theory and everyday life. The significance of this relationship is illustrated not only through explicit discussion, but also through reference to a huge wealth of social science research, and most particularly to the authors’ own experiences, as women and as researchers. In my view, it is the interest in that space between theory and life that is one of the book’s real strengths.
The book has nine chapters. Chapters 1 through 3 introduce its central themes. The first takes a brief look at key sociological concepts, debates and perspectives, including the relationship between social structure and individual action, the grand narratives of modernism and the smaller‐scale, more localised theories that characterise post‐modern approaches. In particular, this chapter highlights the extent to which the social world, and any theory which seeks to explain it, must be seen as contested ground. Chapter 2 introduces significant psychological and sociological approaches to the self. Raising questions about many of our Western assumptions, the chapter considers the historical and cultural contexts within which notions of the self have emerged. It also reflects on the concept of “the other”: the implications of oppression and marginalisation for identity formation. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the self as dynamic and dialogic (Sampson, 1993), constructed and re‐constructed through interaction. Chapter 3 considers identity formation and the social transitions individuals make throughout their lifecourse, emphasising that emerging patterns must be seen as historically and culturally embedded. In addition, this chapter focuses on the social construction of “roles”: gender, old age, able‐bodiedness. Central to this discussion is the ongoing debate between social structure and individual agency, determinism and voluntarism.
The theme of the self as socially constituted is further developed, to include mind and body, in Chapters 4 and 5, which focus respectively on sexuality, and health and illness. These chapters look at the relationship between scientific knowledge and common sense,and the ways in which our understandings of these issues are constructed discursively. Significantly, they also highlight the implicit power relations which are embedded within these professional and lay discourses. However, these chapters are not just about the “maps” themselves. They are also about “map‐making”, about how these theories have come to be. In discussing various theoretical approaches to sexuality, and health and illness, the authors also illustrate the transition from a modernist to a postmodernist position. “The modernist ‘scientific’ concern to discover the ‘truth’ about sex … has given way, to some extent, to a more postmodernist position in which the concern is not the ‘reality’ behind experience, but rather the lived experience of social relationships themselves” (p. 110).
It is Chapter 6, “Doing and being at work”, which is potentially of greatest interest to the readers of this journal. This chapter focuses on how the self develops within the social organisation, and on the reciprocal relationships between personal identities and the organisations and institutions within which they are situated. Work, in this context, refers to the process by which social structures are maintained, and the relationship between this maintenance and the construction of social identities. In this sense people work not only at their jobs, but also at their marriages, families, school life, communities, etc. And here again, it is noted that power and control are central issues within these arenas. As regards paid employment, here, as in the rest of the book, gender emerges as a central theme. Indeed, the extent to which a gender analysis permeates the text is worth noting. There is now a substantial body of feminist social science literature, much of which focuses on the lives and experiences of women. However, when such a focus is absent, the gender analysis all too often disappears, or “the gender chapter” seems to be tacked on as a sort of added extra. In contrast, while Exploring Self and Society is deeply interested in the lives of women and men, its feminist perspective is fundamental. On a different note, given the focus of this journal it should be mentioned that, while those sections which deal explicitly with “work as paid employment” do raise interesting issues about work, organisation and identity, they do not consider managers or management, considering instead the experiences of individuals at the level of the shopfloor.
The final three chapters consider the relationship between the self and society in a wider context. Chapter 7 examines what it means to be “foreign”, notions of community, citizenship and nationality which, like the concept of “the other”, are integral to construction of individual identity. Chapter 8 moves beyond national boundaries to explore self and identity within a global framework. It is argued that life within a globalised society is not experienced as a “global village”, but at a much smaller, more local level. Indeed globalisation, far from homogenising the experiences of individuals, instead reveals their diversity. Finally, the last chapter re‐visits many of the issues raised at the outset, concluding with a brief note about the promises of postmodernism. “We feel excited in recognising the liberating potential of ‘little narratives’. The equally important promise of postmodernism is for us in the lesson of humility it can teach, and if we leave you with more questions than answers, this is in acknowledgement of an increasingly sophisticated awareness of complexity by late‐twentieth‐century persons” (p. 241).
As a project which explicitly seeks to ask questions, challenge assumptions and take a good, hard, critical look at those maps which social scientists use to make sense of the social landscape, this book is compelling. But what troubles me is that permeating the text are the authors’ own maps, which do not seem to be subject to this critical gaze. Instead, they appear to be taken as given. Their position, which seems to combine an ontological realism with an epistemological subjectivism, remains unexamined, as is their unproblematic use of Giddens’ (1984) notion of the duality of structure, of discourse as a Foucauldian concept, and of gender as a key explanatory variable in a person’s life experience. On a personal level, I like these perspectives, and have used very similar maps in my own research (Cohen et al., 1999; Cohen and Musson, 2000). But this is not the point. Rather, the point is that in a text devoted to asking questions, to critical, reflexive social science, the authors’ own perspectives also need to be explored.
This issue notwithstanding, though, taking everyday experience as its starting point, and asking readers to reflect on their own lives through the maps it introduces, Exploring Self and Society offers an approach to social science that is at once novel and stimulating. As a reader I enjoyed its transparent and personal style, and its imagery. The map metaphor, in particular, offers new ways of looking at the process of social science research, social theory, meaning‐making and, above all, ambiguity: “Perhaps, unfortunately, what is becoming increasingly clear is that we are, for the most part, stuck in the swamps. Social science has not been able to provide the kind of objective knowledge of the world that was first intended. The vantage points from which we try to map the world below are never as high, nor the ground as firm as we might like. A certain messiness therefore becomes inevitable when we tramp about in the swamps” (p. 9).
