The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Political Action

526 Review Essays and Institutional Contradictions.’’ In The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Haedicke, Michael A. 2016. Organizing Organic: Conflict and Compromise in an Emerging Market. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Krippner, Greta R. 2007. ‘‘The Making of U.S. Monetary Policy: Central Bank Transparency and the Neoliberal Dilemma.’’ Theory and Soci- ety 36(6):477–513. Lamont, Miche`le. 2012. ‘‘Toward a Comparative Sociology of Valuation and Evaluation.’’ Annual Review of Sociology 38(1):201–221. doi:10.1146/annurev-soc-070308-120022. Lamont, Miche`le, Jessica S. Welburn, and Crystal M. Fleming. 2016. ‘‘Responses to Discrimina- tion and Social Resilience Under Neoliberal- ism.’’ Pp. 143–76 in New Perspectives on Resilience in Socio-Economic Spheres, edited by A. Maurer. Wiesbaden: Springer Fach- medien Wiesbaden. doi:10.1007/978-3-658- Meyer, John W., and Brian Rowan. 1977. ‘‘Institu- tionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony.’’ American Journal of Soci- ology 83(2):340–63. doi:10.1086/226550. Murray, Fiona. 2010. ‘‘The Oncomouse That Roared: Hybrid Exchange Strategies as a Source of Distinction at the Boundary of Overlapping Institutions.’’ American Journal of Sociology 116(2):341–88. doi:10.1086/653599. Stark, David. 2011. The Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. The´venot, Laurent. 2015. ‘‘Certifying the World: Power Infrastructures and Practices in Econo- mies of Conventional Forms.’’ Pp. 195–226 in Re-Imagining Economic Sociology, edited by P. Aspers and N. Dodd. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Weber, Max, Guenther Roth, and Claus Wittich. 1978. Economy and Society: An Outline of Inter- pretive Sociology. Berkeley: University of Cali- fornia Press. The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Political Action H EATHER A. H AVEMAN University of California-Berkeley haveman@berkeley.edu We all know about the very physical legacy of Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA): Dealey Plaza in Dallas, the Fort Peck dam in Montana, LaGuardia Airport in New York City, Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut, Midway Airport in Chicago, the River Walk in San Antonio, and over 100,000 roads and bridges, water- works, schools, libraries, hospitals, post offices, dormitories, auditoriums, stadiums, and recreational facilities in towns and cities across the nation. But most of us don’t know about the cultural legacy: the American Guides, a series of travel-cum-local-color books, one for each state, penned by unem- ployed writers around the country. It is this cultural legacy that Wendy Griswold investi- gates in American Guides: The Federal Writers’ Project and the Casting of American Culture. The arts project was the first one proposed by the WPA. It focused on finding employ- ment for creative people in four fields: art, music, drama, and writing. In the face of intense criticism and contestation among Contemporary Sociology 46, 5 American Guides: The Federal Writers’ Project and the Casting of American Culture, by Wendy Griswold. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. 361 pp. $35.00 paper. ISBN: 9780226357836. writers’ associations, the architects of the WPA’s writers’ project chose a seemingly innocuous task for writers to tackle: develop travel guides to the 48 states, two territories (Alaska and Puerto Rico), and several cities. To explain how this came about, Griswold guides us through a history of the WPA, put- ting it in context with other state and federal relief programs, and then dissects the seven- year (1936 to 1943) life of the writers’ project in particular. To ground these developments in their cultural context, she tours the history of guidebooks, starting with antiquity and continuing up to the twentieth century. She next explores the history of travel, tourism, and vacations.