Talking Politics. by William A. GamsonReview by: Philo C. WasburnSocial Forces, Vol. 72, No. 3 (Mar., 1994), pp. 923-925Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2579802 .

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Book Reviews / 923

herself. What is puzzling is the scant attention she gives to the applicability of strategies used by other groups of organizations, such as reformulation, returns to scale, merger, or the formation of holding companies.

Finally, the author offers a detailed case study of one congregation as source material for other "sociologists interested in cults, communes, and religious movements." Ebaugh presents interesting information about this group, but does not relate this to the history of relationships of Catholic orders within the church. These "churches with the church" have a history of being counter- cultural groups within the institution and going through such periods of boundary blurring and reformulation that Ebaugh documents with this group.

Reinventing an organization is risky, and some organizations that try it are too fragile to persist (as Hannan and Freeman have shown in Organizational Ecology); the group in this study may not persist. Other, even many, groups of Catholic Sisters may not continue to exist, but I do not believe that Ebaugh has made or could have made the case for the total demise of all such groups malign the framework of her current effort.

Talking Politics. By William A. Gamson. Cambridge University Press, 1992. 272 pp. Cloth, $49.50; paper, $15.95.

Reviewer: PHILOC.WASBURN, Purdue University

Talking Politics identifies the complex ways in which "working people," in their conversations with their friends and acquaintances, construct and negotiate shared meanings of political events. The subjects of this study, 188 office workers, bus drivers, firefighters, auto service workers, and the like, are far from being the dolts social scientists long have arrogantly assumed them to be. Gamson demonstrates that, in their conversations with their peers, they do quite well at making sense out of major issues of the day.

Gamson began his research by recruiting people at numerous public sites - ending up with participants from 35 neighborhoods in the Boston metropolitan area. People initially recruited in turn contacted friends and associates. In this manner, 37 peer conversation groups, averaging five members apiece, were formed. Participants were paid a modest sum for their involvement in the research. Most of the groups were run in people's homes, where a facilitator controlled the topics of conversation and an observer was present as a guest. The contexts in which people were to engage in "sociable public discourse" approximated natural settings.

Four major issues, which long have been subjects of public discourse, were the subjects of their conversations: affirmative action, nuclear power, troubled American industry, and Arab-Israeli conflict. Facilitators initiated group conversations with open-ended questions for each of the topics. For example: "(One) issue in the news is nuclear power plants. There has been disagreement over how much we should rely on nuclear power plants as an energy source. When you think about the issue of nuclear power plants, what comes to mind?"

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924 / Social Forces 72:3, March 1994

Following discussion of the open-ended question on each issue, and before proceeding to another issue, the facilitator asked several follow-up questions to determine participants' perceptions of: the extent to which the issue affected their friends, relatives, or themselves personally; the groups in this country that might stand to gain or lose by various policies on each of the four issues; a set of editorial cartoons expressing a range of positions on each of the issues; what should be done about each of the issues.

To assess the extent to which his subjects drew on media discourse when they talked politics, Gamson compared the prominence of media issue frames (determined from a sample of TV network newscasts, newsmagazines, editorial cartoons, and opinion columns that appeared during the relevant time period) with the prominence with which the issue frames appeared in the subject's conversations. Analysis showed that, while participants occasionally relied on media frames, they also drew on their own personal experiences and on popular wisdom as conversational resources. Three distinct resource strategies appeared in the conversations. Those exhibiting the cultural strategy relied on media discourse and popular wisdom in framing the issue, but did not integrate experiential knowledge in support of it. Discussions exhibiting the personal strategy relied on experiential knowledge and popular wisdom in framing the issue, but did not integrate media discourse in support of it. Integrated discussions relied on a full combination of resources, bringing together media discourse and experiential knowledge.

Resource strategies were found to be issue dependent. Integrated strategies were likely on affirmative action and troubled industry, but much less so on nuclear power and Arab-Israeli conflict. Conversations on the latter two issues overwhelmingly began with media discourse, while, in contrast, less than half of the groups began with this resource on troubled industry and less than a third on affirmative action. A substantial minority also drew on some relevant personal experience on these issues as well, but the predominant strategy was cultural.

Does the way in which working people talk about politics express a disinclination to participate actively in political life? To answer this question, Gamson looked for the use of collective action frames in their discourse. Frames that support participation in collective action have three components: a sense of moral indignation, a belief that it is possible to alter offending conditions or policies through collective action, and a sense of collective identity (a "we") confronting a well-defined adversary (a "they") who bears some responsibility for the conditions or policies. Gamson finds a strong, though complicated and indirect, overall relationship between the prominence of injustice frames in media and popular discourse. On affirmative action, when the injustice theme is most prominent, it is equally visible in the attempts of working people to make sense of the issue. On nuclear power and Arab-Israeli conflict where injustice frames are not conspicuous in media discourse, conversations rarely express moral indignation. Finding common use of collective action frames by working people challenges the notion of a media-induced "false consciousness," and suggests their potential for political mobilization in particular issue areas.

Since the publication of Robert Lane's classic Political Ideology, more than 30 years ago, remarkably few additional insights have been gained into why the

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Book Reviews / 925

American common man believes what he does. To the extent that the processes by which people come to their understanding of the political world influence their responses to it, political sociologists have been in a poor position to explain the dynamics of mass participation in politics, ranging from voter turnout to involvement in change-oriented political movements. Gamson's new book goes a long way toward improving this situation.

Power in the Workplace: The Politics of Production at AT&T. By Steven Peter Vallas. SUNY Press. 1993. 250 pp. Cloth, $49.50; paper, $16.95.

Reviewer: JAMES ZEICA

Power in the workplace addresses contested issues in the labor process debate through an historical examination of workplace developments at AT&T. The archival, interview, and survey data presented in the book are rich. While some of the arguments may provoke controversy, the book's insights into the processes involved in technological and organizational change are many and deep. Power in the Workplace is a major contribution to the literature.

Vallas begins his analysis with a discussion of the control structure governing the labor process at AT&T through World War II. He argues that the key component of management's control was the paternalistic system implemented at the firm level, a system replete with familial practices, benefit plans, and company unions. Vallas defines AT&Ts monopoly control over its market and its workers' lack of viable employment alternatives as contributing to this system's effectiveness. The decisive factor in this system's success however, was the social composition of AT&T's work force. Vallas argues that it was not the female gender of the work force that made it susceptible to paternalism, but its ethnic composition. AT&T hired white, native-born employees from 1900 to 1940, even when many of its centers were located in areas with large ethnic populations. The AT&T employees shared an ethnic heritage, as well as their prejudices, with their mangers. This, Vallas argues, made the work force susceptible to AT&T's paternalistic ideology. This regime persisted into the 1940s at AT&T, when it failed rather quickly in ethnically diverse firms like Ford.

For Vallas, a new control system was implemented after the demise of paternalistic control in the 1940s. The new system employed sophisticated process technologies to control the work process, technologies that deskilled and further alienated female workers at the switchboards and clerical occupations. This reproduced women's unequal position in the AT&T labor force and further enhanced the gendered division of labor that was in place there by World War I.

Because they displaced large numbers of nonskilled workers, the new technologies increased the proportion of the labor force employed in skilled maintenance positions. Vallas finds that the implementation of new technologies designed to transfer craft-based diagnostic and interpretive skills to compute algorithms had mixed effects on maintenance workers' skill levels. A pivotal occupation - the deskman - was replaced completely as a result of this technology. To make the technology work effectively, however, management was

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