| Book Review | Labour History, 93 | The History Cooperative

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Book Review

*Carol Wolkowitz, Bodies at Work,* Sage Publications, London, 2006. pp. vii + 213. £21.99 paper.**
The popularity of television programs focusing on famous bodies, fat bodies and cosmetically enhanced bodies indicates that the body is centre stage in popular culture. However, in recent years the body has become obscured or disappeared entirely from studies relating to work and labour. In her book, Bodies at Work, Carol Wolkowitz aims to encourage scholars writing about work to bring the body out of retirement, and, challenges those writing about the sociology of the body to turn their focus to 'bodies in and of labour' (p. 31).	1
At the heart of this book is a concern to highlight the agency of the body. As Wolkowitz argues, this is important because while everyone has a body, not everyone has the same relation to its economic and symbolic significance (p. 5). In short, as any editor of a fashion magazine will tell you, not all bodies are equal. Wolkowitz brings together ideas from Foucault, Bourdieu, and Goffman to explore how studying the 'social shaping of the body' (p. 18) offers a way into, and beyond, longstanding debates about structure and agency. This is one of the key strengths of this book, the way that it helps the reader to explore the connections between discourse and materiality through the body. For Wolkowitz it is Bourdieu's concept of 'habitus' that can best help us overcome the structure/agency problem. This concept of habitus puts the body at the centre of the negotiation of structure and agency, the social and the individual (p. 20).	. . .

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