Book Reviews

Abstract

New York, Springer, 2007, vii þ 326 pp., index, £144.00, ISBN 978-0-387-70959-8 (hardback), £67.99, ISBN 978-0-387-76580-8 (paperback) Type in 'Handbook of the Sociology of' into Google and its autocomplete feature offers up a bounty of options: morality, health, religion, education, gender, or finance, to start. Due to trends in academic publishing, the age of pricey handbooks intended to be definitive references in their field is upon us. Of course, this proliferation challenges the notion that any one is truly essential for institutional collections. At their worst, these doorstoppers contain 30-plus disconnected chapters of wildly uneven quality and uniformly slapdash editing. A time-pressed academic will skim the introduction and contents for a useful cite and move along to more rewarding reads.All of which is to ask, is the Handbook of Social Movements across Disciplines one of these groaners? I am delighted to report that this is a very different kind of handbook, and one that merits more attention than it seems to have gathered thus far (a quick search reveals few, if any, English-language reviews). Bert Klandermans and Conny Roggeband have assembled a tight collection of six essays on disciplinary approaches to the study of social movements. A chapter each is devoted to perspectives from political science, history, anthropology, and social psychology. Two chapters cover structural and cultural approaches within sociology.The chapters differ in style but are consistently thorough. Jackie Smith and Tina Fetner provide a comprehensive survey of structural approaches (I counted over 250 citations for this chapter alone), while James Jasper offers a lively account of cultural approaches and their shortcomings, beginning not in the expected 'cultural turn' of the social sciences, but in ancient Greek and Roman interest in rhetoric. Interestingly, the only chapter that does not provide an intellectual history is the one by Brian Dill and Ronald Aminzade on historical approaches. The authors, instead, sample 60 articles by historians on social movements over three decades, and analyze prevailing tendencies in this work-a choice that reveals much about the rhetorical proclivities of historians.Lengthy and exacting, the chapters read less as state-of-the-field pieces and more as exemplary field examinations penned by experts who are well versed in the intellectual ancestry of recent scholarship. According to Jasper, 'Each intellectual fashion inspires a backlash, in what looks like a repetitive cycle but is more of a spiral: we never quite return to the same place' (p. 61). Taken together, they produce a systematic understanding of the idiosyncratic and differentiated development processes of social movement research in the disciplines. David Meyer and Lindsey Lupo, for instance, argue that political science has