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Book Review
| Carol Wolkowitz, Bodies at Work, Sage Publications, London, 2006. pp. vii + 213. £21.99 paper.
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| 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). |
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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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Wolkowitz explains that it is primarily researchers of customer service work who have been at the forefront of re-focusing our attention on the body by drawing on Bourdieu to develop the concept of aesthetic labour. The book also provides an overview of feminist contributions that have highlighted the importance of a gendered habitus. Wolkowitz outlines the contribution of feminist philosophy of the body in both theoretical and practical terms. As readers of this journal will be only too aware the body has always been a central political concern of feminist campaigns (p. 23). |
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In Bodies at Work, Wolkowitz draws on a broad range of empirical studies, not simply as one off examples, but she weaves them through the narrative returning to them to draw together the theoretical threads running through the book. For example, in chapter three ('Industrial Bodies') we are introduced to Durand and Hatzfield's study of Peugeot, we return to this study in chapter five ('Vulnerable Bodies') to challenge narrow concepts of occupational health and safety, and again, in the final chapter to explore the notion of dual selves. This, I hope gives readers of this review a sense of the breadth of this book. This breadth extends to a concern to locate bodies historically. This is done to good effect in the provocatively titled chapter 'Will Any Body Do' which draws, in part, on historical studies to explore sex work as an aspect of embodied work. In chapter two, which will be of particular interest to labour historians, Wolkowitz analyses still photographic images to demonstrate the way that race, class and gender are inscribed in bodies. |
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Somewhat surprisingly given the book's invocation to bring the body out of retirement, ageing bodies are not discussed. Not even in the penultimate chapter of the book which is concerned with the growth in 'body work', that is, occupations that help us maintain, sustain and reframe our bodies, do ageing bodies appear. Given western culture's obsession with youth, studies that focus on the amount of 'body work' required by older workers to appear younger would be one way to heed Wolkowitz's call to bring bodies out of retirement. |
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Bodies at Work offers both undergraduate and postgraduate students a way into key sociological texts and broader debates around materiality and discourse, as well as introducing them to a broad range of empirical studies that help explain the changing construction of the body. Teachers of labour or business history could make good use of the images of bodies at work contained in the book to enliven and enrich their courses. The book will also be of great benefit to scholars wishing to refresh or refocus their research agenda. As Bodies at Work highlights, there are a raft of possible starting points including: the body and society, the body and self, the body and gender, the inter-subjective body, and, of course, the body throughout history. |
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| University of Sydney |
LEANNE CUTCHER | |
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