| Review of: | Political Power and Social Theory: Volume 17 edited by Diane E. Davis |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Yves Laberge |
| Reviewed in: | Political Studies Review |
| Date accepted online: | 14/01/2008 |
| Published in print: | Volume 05, Issue 03, Pages 395-474 |
Book Reviews: Political Theory
This collection of eleven essays appears in an ongoing book series with a hardcover from the JAI Press. Individual chapters are like scholarly articles but the themes are not much related, ranging from history, ethnicity and the Ku Klux Klan (ch. 1) to the Seattle WTO protests (ch. 5). In the opening chapter, Rhomberg argues that the Ku Klux Klan was at one and the same time 'a racist and a civic movement' (p. 5). In the fourth chapter on 'Europe's Atlantic Empires', we get a fine account of how states were formed in Canada and America during the eighteenth century.
The second half of the book is a refreshing and timely critique of US capitalism in the twenty-first century, especially 'the myth of shareholder value', with a core text by Frank Dobbin and Dirk Zorn. The authors explain 'the change in the nature of executive misbehavior', guided by 'the new rhetoric of shareholder value' (p. 181). Institutional investors and markets want firms to raise their earnings every year, 'with the predictable consequence that executives would fib about profits' (p. 181). In some other cases, executives would withhold good corporate news until the right moment had come (p. 180). From a sociological perspective, Dobbin and Zorn argue that the image of the successful enterprise is now made by MBAs and CPAs, who redesign corporate efficiency with ever-appealing numbers that always 'beat the analysts' (p. 181). Another problem is 'the ideological power of these finance professionals', who can persuade almost everyone that remuneration of millions of dollars is necessary for 'good' managers; that idea still goes unchallenged, even at Harvard University, where 'endowment managers were paid 30+ million dollars each for a year's work' (p. 197).
The five following chapters are comments and additions that draw on economic sociology. Richard Swedberg questions the ethics of CEO pay, an overlooked issue that should be analyzed in stratification research: 'a topic for public sociology' (p. 203). Dobbin and Zorn conclude in chapter 11 with a concept that is central to political science: 'power shapes the social institutions, from antitrust regulations to portfolio strategy, that we come to take for granted as efficient and fair' (p. 232).
Given the diversity of the topics, this seventeenth volume of