Disintegrating Democracy at Work: Labor Unions and the Future of Good Jobs in the Service Economy

tinctively American understanding. In keeping with Swatos’s call for comparative analysis, Moore illuminates what it is by pointing out what it is not. The volume concludes with a framing piece by John Simpson, who uses the model of biological evolution to think about sociocultural evolution. Simpson argues that ‘‘[e]verything is history’’ (p. 261): Everything comes from that which preceded it and it unfolds over time. Simpson’s observations provide a strong overarching framework for preceding case studies by Elijah Obinna, Pen-Hsuan Lin, and Nachman Ben-Yehuda that capture the socio-cultural evolutionary reality that no human arrangements appear de novo. Earlier conditions shape present arrangements. Obinna illustrates the continuing influence of long-standing indigenous institutions (e.g., kinship and social contract) in the villages of the Amasiri in Nigeria, even as colonial and post-colonial state structures sought to reshape social relations and the distribution of power. Obinna’s report is fascinating, though it barely alludes to religion per se. But it captures the notion of culture as memory lived through social arrangements. Lin’s contribution, which focuses on the regulation of religion in Taiwan, illustrates the legal tangle that follows when conditions change—for example, new religious groups emerge—and the law tries to adapt. Previous arrangements are powerful and cohesive, and attempts at change generate contradictions and unintended consequences. Lin’s contextual detail about the law provides the kind of rich understanding that Swatos seeks, but the chapter would benefit from a more clearly stated thesis at its outset: to what purpose has this detail been assembled? Ben-Yehuda explores tensions in the idea of a ‘‘Jewish democracy,’’ a principle of the 1948 establishment of Israel, and the development of increasingly strong orthodox resistance to a secular Jewish state. Resistance develops over time through demographic and cultural shifts that arise in a discernible sequence. Though they are less explicit or self-conscious about the nature of their methods or conceptual categories than are Eastwood or Moore, each case study alludes to contingency: that events are shaped by the particulars of what comes before. The volume’s most unexpected insight comes from Robert Prus’ study of On Man’s First Conception of the Gods (Dio Chrysostom, c. 40–120 AD). Bringing the lens of symbolic interactionism to this classical text, Prus finds an explicit awareness of the humanly constructed nature of religion, especially through art and other objects imbued with shared religious meaning. In this case, Prus finds continuity across almost two millennia of thinking on what religion is and how it works. This edited volume promises ideas for the sociology of religion and its foci are crosscutting and interrelated: history, time, meaning, and memory. Different chapters deliver on parts of that promise, and there are valuable insights about how sociology, particularly the sociology of religion, is enriched by more attention to context, sequential ordering, and the particulars. As with many edited volumes however, the contributions could be more explicitly tied to the text’s overall vision. Denison articulates some of this in her introduction, but the individual chapters, especially the empirical ones, often do not link themselves to the book’s larger concern. Finding those connections is instead a challenge left to the reader.