nizations and social policy. Another appealing feature of this reader is thelimited amount of quantitative material. As such, students do not need statis-tical backgrounds in order to understand the book. Nevertheless, I feel thatthis reader is most appropriate for upper-level undergraduates or graduate-level students (although Gould and Lewis claim in the first article that thisbook is written for undergraduate students). I would argue that many of thereadings might be too dense, abstract and theoretical for lower-level under-graduates to fully grasp or relate to. I also believe that the book would beimproved with the addition of various teaching tools at the end of each of thefour major sections. Students can only benefit from things like learning out-comes, summaries, key terms, review questions, critical thinking questions,additional readings, weblinks, etc. If using this reader, teachers could supplystudents with a handful of critical thinking questions and review questions atthe end of each section. Teachers could then ask the students to: (1) debatesome of the more controversial questions; (2) write essay papers that respondto these questions; (3) answer these questions in the form of oral presenta-tions; (4) take tests or quizzes based on these questions; and/or (5) simply usethese questions to start lively class discussions.

In sum, Twenty Lessons in Environmental Sociology is well written andinsightful. It will be useful for instructors teaching a variety of courses, andstudents will enjoy reading and learning from this book. And in the end, Ibelieve this book will encourage students to think critically about environ-mental sociology.

Michael K. OstrowskySouthern Utah University

On TelevisionPierre Bourdieu, Polity: Cambridge, 1999, reprinted 2011, £9.99, 104pp.

This is a re-issue by Polity Press of a text published by The New Pressin the United States and Pluto Press in the United Kingdom in 1998 withthe title: On Television and Journalism. Both English publications are iden-tical. The translations were made by Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson who wrotea short ‘translator’s note’ and added some editorial notes to the originalfootnotes.

The English texts are based on the book with which, in December 1996,Bourdieu launched his personal publishing venture, at first called Liber edi-tions and, subsequently Liber-Raisons d’Agir. This publishing venture was asuccessor to the multi-lingual journal – Liber, Revue Européenne des livres –which Bourdieu edited from October 1989 until March 1998 (34 numbers)and which co-existed with Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales whichBourdieu edited from 1975 until his death in 2002. In publishing Sur la télé-vision, Bourdieu was making the opportunity to present in print the texts oftwo lectures which he had given on television on 18 March 1996, and which

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had been released as cassettes by the Collège de France in May of that year.To the transcripts of these two lectures, Bourdieu chose to offer as an appen-dix an article which he had contributed to Actes de la recherche en sciencessociales in March 1994, entitled ‘L’Emprise du journalisme’ [the power ofjournalism]. Bourdieu’s article had been the introductory piece for a wholeissue of Actes (101–2) devoted to journalism. The issue included, amongstothers, two articles by Patrick Champagne, one on audience measurementand the other on the journalistic transmission of medical information; anarticle by Remi Lenoir on the new legal press and the redefinition of thelegal professions; an article by Louis Pinto on philosophical journalism; aswell as another short piece by Bourdieu which he had written for the news-paper Libération on its 20th anniversary in 1988 but which had never beenpublished entitled: ‘Libé vingt ans après’. The English texts both commencewith a ‘Prologue’ – ‘Journalism and Politics’ – which, in fact, Bourdieu hadwritten in June 1997, reflecting on the reception of Sur la télévision. It waspublished in French as ‘La télévision, le journalisme et la politique’ in April,1998, in the first of the two Contre-feux collections published by Liber-Raisons d’Agir. This first collection was explicitly subtitled: ‘Propos pourserver à la résistance contre l’invasion néo-libérale’ [talks designed to con-tribute to resistance to the neo-liberal invasion]. The French text announcedthat it had already been published as a ‘postface’ to the English translation ofSur la télévision. This, presumably, was the reason why it was omitted fromthe translation of Contre-feux which was published by Polity Press and TheNew Press in 1998 as Acts of Resistance: Against the New Myths of our Time.Meanwhile, between Sur la télévision (1996) and Contre-feux (1998), Liber-Raisons d’Agir had issued three further publications, one of which – SergeHalimi’s untranslated Les nouveaux chiens de garde (1997) – explicitlyquoted from Paul Nizan to the effect that ‘we will not accept for ever that therespect accorded to the mask of the philosophers will in the end only profitthe power of the bankers’.

It is important to register these bibliographic details so as to characterizeproperly the relevance of On Television. It would be quite wrong to pigeon-hole this text as ‘Bourdieu’s contribution to media sociology’. Viewed in thisway, the book is undoubtedly naive or simplistic. It is much more importantto recognize that Bourdieu was simultaneously trying to analyse the processof intellectual degradation effected by the socially constructed constraintsof the ‘field’ of the media and to conduct that analysis within the media insuch a way as in practice to seek to insert the values of ‘science’ into mediadiscourse. This endeavour was consistent with what Bourdieu had firstattempted in Questions de Sociologie (1980), translated as Sociology inQuestion (1993). The shift in emphasis between the original title and thetranslated title here is significant. In Questions de Sociologie, Bourdieuoffered discussions of popular issues, such as fashion and sport, and offeredreferences to the scientific evidence provided by research undertaken byhimself and his team in the Centre de Sociologie européenne. Formally, he

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389© 2012 The Authors. The Sociological Review © 2012 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review

could be thought to be subscribing to a Weberian separation of the vocationsof science and politics, even though the collection contained an article suchas ‘Pour une sociologie des sociologues’ [for a sociology of the sociologists].Sociology in Question suggests rather that the legitimacy of sociologicalexplanation is in doubt. By the 1990s, Bourdieu had recognized that theproblem for sociology was no longer how to apply to social action the find-ings generated within protected spaces dedicated to the cultivation of socio-logical knowledge, but rather how to advance a sociological perspectivewithin social action and community politics. The problem of the validity ofsocial science, or of the tension between science and its ‘popular’ dissemi-nation generally within a mass democracy, was, of course, one to which Bour-dieu returned in his last course of lectures at the Collège de France,published as Science de la science et réflexivité (2001) [Science of Science andReflexivity (2004)].

In recent months we have been accustomed to the obsession of the mediawith its own malpractices and inadequate moral sense and we have wit-nessed the attempt of politicians to reinstate themselves as moral guardians.Much of what Bourdieu says in On Television resonates with our reactions towhat we have experienced, but the relevance of the book now is that itforces us to realize that we have to re-scrutinize the scientific claims of socialscience. It demonstrates that social science has to justify itself intellectually– and its institutional existence – by recognizing that its ‘impact’ has to beenacted immanently within a dialectical relationship between thought andaction.

Derek RobbinsUniversity of East London

Wealth and the Wealthy: Exploring and Tackling Inequalities between Rich andPoorKaren Rowlingson and Stephen McKay, Policy Press, Bristol, 2011, £24.99,255pp.

The issue of economic inequality is a very topical one in austerity Britain fora range of well-known reasons, many of which have been highlighted byprotest movements such as UK Uncut and Occupy London. During thecurrent recession public attention has focused on the MPs’ expenses scandal (afew of whom were jailed whilst many simply repaid varying amounts), pay andbonuses in excess of £1 million paid to bankers, tax evasion by corporationsand billionaire individuals, the use of offshore tax havens by the seriously rich,and senior public sector workers who are paid through companies owned bytheir families which allows them to dodge paying high tax rates. Theseexamples of avarice contrast markedly with the reduced living standards expe-rienced by those at the bottom of the class structure whose benefits are cutand/or capped, and those in the middle who are squeezed by a combination of

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390 © 2012 The Authors. The Sociological Review © 2012 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review