The Meanings of Marital Equality - Edited by Scott R. Harris

The Meanings of Marital Equality. Scott R. Harris. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. 2006. 193 pp. ISBN 0-79146621-3. $61.50 (cloth). ISBN 0-7914-6622-1. $21.95 (paperback). In the opening pages of his book, The Meanings of Marital Equality, Scott R Harris, asserts that "there is not, nor has there ever been, a sociology of inequality. To be sure, there are innumerable sociological studies of inequality" conducted by sociologists who "assume that inequality is an objective reality and that it is their job ... to define, find, measure and explain 'it'" (p. x), but these studies have failed to cast inequality in general as a socially constructed interpretation. Using the literature on marital inequality as a case in point, Harris critiques the past 40 years of quantitative research, arguing that scholars have used contradictory definitions and measurement strategies with only tenuous connections to the ways that married persons define and measure equality in their marriages. Qualitative researchers, according to Harris, are somewhat more sensitive to respondents' point of view than their quantitatively oriented counterparts, but they too have tended to approach marital equality from a "conventional, objectivist perspective" (p. xii). They operate from the "assumption that inequality is an objective fact and that it is the researcher's prerogative to define, locate and explain it" (p. xii). As a result, they are limited by the confines of their own preconceptions and have an underdeveloped appreciation of the diversity of equality/inequality meanings and the interpretive processes that create them. Harris takes the position that his is a "radical" way of studying equality - an interactionist, interpretive approach (p. 1) emanating from the thesis that equality is not an independent, objective, or self-evident characteristic but is a socially constructed phenomenon. From this perspective, meanings are not inherent but are constructed through our interactions and our reflexive understandings and narrations of our experience. Nothing, according to Harris, is inherently equal or unequal. Notions of equality, then, should be the subject of rather than the basis of one's research (p. 3). Harris positions his book as a sociology of social problems as interpretive claims-making in which he aims to articulate a more comprehensive theoretical framework for studies of the interpretive practices by which people define situations as equal or unequal. Harris begins his work with a theoretical overview in which he ties his social constructionist perspective to the sociological and philosophical traditions of symbolic interactionism (Blumer), phenomenology (Schutz), ethnomethodology (Garfinckel), and pragmatism (Dewey). Chapters 2 and 3 focus on critiques of the existing literature including a discussion of the ways in which a constructionist methodology diverges from naturalist methods for sampling, interviewing, organizing, and presenting data. In all these processes, "naturalist" scholars rely partly on their own ability to locate egalitarianism and, contrary to Harris's constructionist perspective, only partly on participants' ability. As a result, researchers privilege some respondents as better informed than others and may, according to Harris, discount views they judge as inaccurate. In chapters 4 and 5, Harris presents excerpts from 9 out of 30 equality narratives generated by respondents to his own newspaper advertisements and fliers asking, "Do you have an equal marriage?" or "Do you have an unequal marriage?" Like most investigators, he makes a number of choices. For example, he interviews only married persons and he does not require both partners to participate. Unlike most investigators, he provides little rationale for his choices. He emphasizes that his own interests and conversational moves played a role in the structuring of the stories but offer little analysis beyond that acknowledgement. …