Social Research after the Cultural Turn aims to address fundamental questions facing those working in the social and human sciences today: How have the epistemological and political contexts of social research changed? Can we still define a distinct sphere of ‘the social’ to research? What distinguishes social research from cultural studies and the humanities? Donna Peach writes that the breadth of topics and depth of enquiry into epistemological and methodological assumptions makes this book a useful companion for academics in any area of the social sciences.

Social Research After the Cultural Turn. Sasha Roseneil & Stephen Frosh (eds.) Palgrave Macmillan. January 2012.

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The idiom ‘do not judge a book by its cover’ certainly applies to this book. The seemingly innocuous title, alongside the subtle hues of yellow thermometers hanging from blue helium-filled balloons against a grey background, suggests a restrained selection of content. The need for a more measured approach quickly becomes apparent though, as Social Research after the Cultural Turn impressively traverses the multifaceted tensions and opportunities associated with the movement to make culture the focus of contemporary debates within the social sciences. Sasha Roseneil & Stephen Frosh provide a stimulating excursion illuminated by diverse perspectives that extend the socio-cultural arena and negotiate the current limits of its navigation. All but two of the contributors – Gordon Lynch (Kent) and Mike Savage (York) – are based at Birkbeck, University of London. Thus, this anchors them and presumably the majority of their readership, including myself, to a British strand of social research.

The 21^st century British social research perspective of the ‘cultural turn’ reflects the underpinning epistemological assumption that knowledge is not universally or quantitatively decreed. Each social research discipline and their location in time and place influence the emerging meaning or construction of what constitutes the ‘cultural turn’. Some critical social psychologists (see Hepburn) highlight Kenneth Ring’s formal challenge to the epistemological values of experimental methods as a turning point. However, recognition of a ‘cultural turn’ over the past 60 years should not assume a solely linear process. Indeed, as Roseneil & Frosh argue, the word ‘turn’ suggests a change in direction, which is complex and enriched by its cyclical and situated approach to the construction of knowledge (p.6).

As a proponent of the cultural turn I recognise that we all actively construct knowledge, and one reader’s understanding of the book may differ from the next. With this in mind, this review is based upon what a reader might gain from it whether or not they consider the cultural turn to have occurred. I am mindful that those who do not advocate the relevance of a cultural turn may not read this review or indeed this book. But on whichever side of the debate one is situated, not reading this book denies an opportunity to raise questions and challenge one’s own perceptions. Such questions are not solely about the existence of the cultural turn, but about the expanse and limitations of its relevance and usefulness.

The breadth of subject matter covered is extensive and includes sexuality, feminism, racialisation, identity, digital data, religion, law, development, food production/consumption, and psychoanalysis. The chapters divide into two broad themes, which debate whether or not the cultural turn has occurred. I recognise this distinction, but as a reviewer, I consider the book’s most valuable contribution to be its harvesting of the complexities and weaknesses that construct or denounce the cultural turn, thereby encapsulating the intricacies of divisions that occur even within broadly accepting disciplines.

In ‘Living with Two Cultural Turns: The Case of the Study of Religion’, Gordon Lynch discusses the scope for the cultural turn to contribute usefully across the social research spectrum, from individual subjectivity to understanding global events. Lynch argues that different research disciplines have developed distinctive relationships with culture, which require productive development if constructive progress is to occur. He explores the relationship between subjective reflexivity and the mediatisation of religion, and reminds us of C. Wright Mills’ The Sociological Imagination (p.86). This serves to incite an awareness of the influence of combined historical structures, cultural truths and subjective experience upon our social realities (p.87), leading Lynch to argue that future studies of religion should turn their lens towards our everyday realities in order to understand how they are experienced and socially structured (p.88).

In her chapter ‘The Gaze of Development after the Cultural Turn’, Karen Wells presents a less optimistic case for the cultural turn to mediate the historical structures and complex contemporary realities underpinning developmental studies (p. 111). Wells highlights the enduring tensions between theoretical knowledge and ‘real world’ needs, which can become the antithesis of progress (p.113). She explains that within the expansive field of development studies, the term ‘cultural’ is rooted in colonial, Anglophone histories which structure and constrain the space to turn. Wells proceeds to detail how the focus of development studies is further impeded by the governmental processes of policy-approved practice. This focus, Wells suggests, prevents development becoming a field of study in its own right; to have its own agency explored and heard. Wells cites a formative post-development text by James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine, which argues that despite all the “expertise” that goes into formulating development projects, they nonetheless often demonstrate a startling ignorance of the historical and political realities of the locale they propose to help.

Throughout this collection, the authors wrestle with the perceived constraints of the cultural turn, which can inhibit the dynamic construction of new knowledge within established structures. Many of the authors describe how they have experienced the cultural turn. In particular, Lynne Segal notes that in some quarters it remains subject to academic ridicule (p.53); views endorsed by recent Government policies and rhetoric. As a collective, the authors define the multiplicity of the cultural turn and its illuminative value. However, they have equally chorused the weaknesses and constraints that the cultural turn has constructed. There is a consensus that the complexity of the cultural turn impedes a sole discipline gaining a comprehensive perception. Indeed, Savage asserts that the cultural turn is not the end of progress as there remains much to achieve (p. 180).

In conclusion, this book is a must read. The breadth of topics and depth of enquiry into epistemological and methodological assumptions makes it a useful companion for a wide range of academics. As a reader, I reflect that to denounce another’s experience, another’s truth, is to undermine your own truth. Despite its weaknesses, the cultural turn has made an extensive contribution to our understanding of our social world. If this is to continue, your voice, my voice, our voices, need to collaborate within this vital debate.

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Donna Peach is a PhD student in psychology at the University of Huddersfield. She has a broad interest in social psychology and promotes a narrative which encourages less extreme perceptions of relativist positions. Her proposed thesis is entitled ‘The dialogic experience of adoptive relationships: A pluralistic perspective’. She tweets at @donna_peach. Read more reviews by Donna.

Dickens and Race offers a unique contextualisation of Dickens’s fictional engagements with race in relation to his lesser-known journalism, with wider nineteenth-century debates about differences between humans, with issues of empire, and with the race shows of London. A potentially invaluable resource for students interested in Charles Dickens, Victorian studies, racial difference and empire, and childhood, writes Steven Harkins.

Dickens and Race. Laura Peters. Manchester University Press. January 2013.

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Did the social critic, ‘champion of the oppressed’, and celebrated Victorian novelist Charles Dickens advocate genocide on behalf of the British Empire? This is one of the questions tackled by Laura Peters in her new book Dickens and Race, published to coincide with the bicentenary of one of the best known literary figures from the Victorian era.

Peters is a specialist in nineteenth-century literature and this book examines literature, journalism, and letters written by Charles Dickens in order to produce a thoroughgoing, sharp, and surprising examination of his often controversial views on the subject of racial difference. The book examines how Dickens’ early views on the subject of race are shaped by his voyages in the ‘paper boats’ of boyhood African adventure stories, alongside other narratives from his childhood like the Tales of the Arabian Nights and Robinson Crusoe. As an adult, Dickens was to become ‘attracted to the increasingly influential narrative of science’ in order to gain a better understanding of racial difference. Although Dickens’ views on race were to change over time, Peters argues that his thoughts were consistently shaped by the two influential ideas of the ‘exotic of fancy’ and the ‘scientific narrative of racial thinking’.

In chapter 3, Peters examines Dickens’ 1853 essay on The Noble Savage, arguing that it represents ‘part of a continuum of thinking about race that spans over 12 years’. This runs contrary to the view of Grace Moore, a fellow scholar of Dickens, who argues that the piece is at odds with the author’s wider body of work. Peters does an excellent job of contextualising The Noble Savage by examining the practice of holding exhibitions of different races; she also highlights the ongoing debates about slavery and Dickens’ own visit to America in 1842. Dickens sees a dichotomous relationship between civilisation and savagery to which race is central. He rejects the concept of nobility in other races because he understands them to be ‘biologically inferior’. One of Dickens’ most controversial quotations from The Noble Savage comes when he asserts; ‘I call a savage something highly desirable to be civilised off the face of the earth’. Scholars like Bernth Lindfors have argued that Dickens was calling for ‘cultural, not literal genocide’. However, in the following chapter, Peters is able to cast doubt over this view.

Chapter 4 focuses on Dickens’ response to the ‘Indian Mutiny’ of 1857, an event described in India as their ‘First War of Independence’. News coverage of the incident at the time focused on false allegations of enforced cannibalism which ‘served to mobilise the society around a discourse of extermination’. In a letter written in October of the same year Dickens argues that:

‘I wish I were Commander in Chief in India. The first thing I would do to strike that Oriental race…should be to proclaim to them, in their language,…that I should do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested;…to blot it out of mankind and raze it off the face of the Earth.

Peters describes the letter as advocating ‘genocide as a response to the Indian mutiny’; her close examination of the literature of this period concludes that ‘this extermination rhetoric continues throughout the 1850s and beyond, becoming more ominous until it arrives at the deadly eugenic rhetoric at the turn of the century’. The Indian uprising of 1857 also influenced one of Dickens’ most famous works, A Tale of Two Cities. The novel is set in the build up to and during the French Revolution and was published in 1859, just two years after the Indian rebellion. Dickens emphasises the racial difference of the French revolutionaries who are portrayed as ‘dusky’, and just as he had described the uprising in India this narrative portrays the French revolutionaries as ‘savages, murderous mobs and cannibals’ while the heroic characters are ‘primarily British’. This description of France sees the continuation of the colonial idea of civilisation in Britain juxtaposed with savagery overseas. By invoking concepts like cannibalism Dickens is still viewing the world through ‘the lens of the exotic’; although this type of thinking was to face a sustained challenge from the scientific discourses of the 1860s.

In chapter 5 Peters examines how Dickens’ views were challenged by the publication of On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin in 1859. This book ‘altered permanently’ the way that society was to think about race. These advancing scientific discourses led Dickens to experience a crisis in his lifelong engagement with fancy which had ‘lost some of its transformative power, replaced by rational knowledge.’ Herbert Spencer’s influence is notably absent from this final chapter, which provides an account of Dickens’ writing throughout the 1860s. Spencer coined the term ‘survival of the fittest’ in his 1864 book Principles of Biology and his arguments are very similar to those expressed by Dickens in his final years. The latter part of Dickens’ life saw him focus on ‘the clear linkage between neglected children, degeneration and savagery’. This is a period when Dickens writes about savagery in London, amongst the street-children of Covent Garden in his last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend. Peters’ research also highlights an unconventional way of understanding Dickens’ writing on the subject of poverty. She argues that Dickens understands the East End of London as ‘a site of a degenerating race of urban poor’. This type of thinking, linking evolutionary concepts to social issues, was propagated by Herbert Spencer and would later be understood as ‘Social Darwinism’.

This enlightening book offers an unconventional perspective on Charles Dickens’ thinking on race and how it was influenced by debates, discoveries and historical events. These events have been expertly placed within a social, political and historical context. This makes the book a potentially invaluable resource for students in a variety of disciplines. One of the most striking findings when reading this the book is that it highlights how little popular discourses on race and poverty have advanced since the era of Charles Dickens.

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Steven Harkins is an ESRC funded PhD candidate based in the in the Journalism Studies Department at the University of Sheffield. He is also a tutor and occasional lecturer in the same department. His PhD research focuses on reporting poverty and inequality in the UK press with a particular emphasis on the relationship between journalists and their sources. He holds a BA (Hons) in Journalism and Politics from the University of Stirling and an MSc with distinction in Media and Communication research from the University of Strathclyde. Read more reviews by Steven.

To mark our first birthday, the LSE Review of Books is holding an awards ceremony on 16 May 2013 to recognise the hard work of our contributors and to thank all parties involved in helping to support the initiative. Kathryn King, Marketing Manager at The Policy Press, continues our series of blog posts from academic publishers, covering more details about the award Policy Press is sponsoring and how integral the study of Sociology is to their publishing history.

Which books first inspired your own interest in books and the world of publishing?

I had wanted to work with books in publishing since I was young. A voracious reader as a teenager, I adored books like The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James and Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth. Nowadays I feel lucky in my current role at The Policy Press to combine my love of books and publishing with its not-for-profit status and ‘making a difference’ social mission. It is immensely satisfying to know that, in a small way, we contribute to improving people’s lives through our publications.

The Policy Press is sponsoring the Sociology and  Anthropology award at the forthcoming LSE Review of Books Awards. How important is this subject to The Policy Press’s history?

The Policy Press was set up in 1996 as a not for profit social science publisher, to try to improve social conditions via publications that would make a positive difference to learning and research, policy and practice. Many of our titles are multi- and/or interdisciplinary, spanning disciplines including social policy, social work, sociology and political science. Sociology is a key area for us; our focus is on applied social sciences, and our sociology and social theory books reflect this in that they must make a difference in a tangible way, whether it be informing a key policy or practice debate, or improving the education of students.

What initiatives has The Policy Press undertaken to cater for our changing reading habits?

While we have been selling our e-content since 2008, the last few years have seen a huge increase in demand for e-books and massive developments in the technology to read them, and we are developing our e-products to match.

Our monographs are available as EPDFs through Policy Press Scholarship Online (in partnership with Oxford University Press), which features over 300 digital titles across sociology, social work and public health and epidemiology. Digital publishing also gives us the opportunity to offer content in ways impossible in print, such as Policy Press Bytes. This format allows purchase of excerpts from books at a competitive price. Currently we have three Bytes for Danny Dorling’s Unequal Health available, each giving a flavour of three major themes: public health, social medicine, and inequality.

What are some of the big new releases from The Policy Press can readers look forward to in the next few months?

June sees the publication of Eisabetta Ruspini’s Diversity in Family Life and Linda Milbourne’s Voluntary Sector in Transition. Patsy Staddon’s Mental Health Service Users in Research will become available for the first time, and Eva Lloyd and Helen Penn’s Childcare Markets will be released in paperback. July is also an exciting month for new releases, with the publication of Global Social Policy in the Making by Bob Deacon and Money for Everyone by Malcolm Torry, as well as The Approaching Great Transformation by Joel Magnuson.

See our Events page for more information on the LSE Review of Books Awards 2013.

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Kathryn King is Marketing Manager at The Policy Press, a not-for-profit social science publisher at the University of Bristol. She has worked in academic publishing for over twenty years and enjoys the constant challenges of this fast-paced environment.

Barack Obama is widely considered one of the most powerful and charismatic speakers of our age. In Articulate While Black, two scholars of Black language address language and racial politics in the U.S. through an insightful examination of President Obama’s language use–and America’s response to it. Articulate While Black will be indispensible to anyone interested in Barack Obama’s politically raced relationship to language, writes Zalfa Feghali.

Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the U.S. H. Samy Alim and Geneva Smitherman. Oxford University Press. October 2012.

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If there was ever any doubt that the United States has not in fact entered its fabled golden “postracial” age, H. Samy Alim and Geneva Smitherman‘s outstanding Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the U.Sdemolishes it. In this book, Alim and Smitherman, both distinguished linguists and experts in Black language and culture, argue that Barack Obama’s linguistic style-shifting is indicative of the United States’ continued inability to comprehend Black culture. This is a truly relevant book, its analysis running until just short of the 2012 US presidential election.

Alim and Smitherman focus on key moments in Obama’s candidacy and presidency to structure this study, interspersing close analysis of speech acts and events before moving to broader discussion of the implications of these acts within the field of Black language and communication. But what is genuinely most compelling about this book is the style and ease in which Alim and Smitherman present their argument; they are able to seamlessly move between Black vernacular speech (“one sista from Philly”) and more scholarly, academic prose in order to drive home their points about Obama’s effectiveness and style-shifting.

Connecting a wide range of material, such as Obama’s monophthongization of diphthongs (“Nah, we straight”) with the policing of Black language and the apparently impressive idea (to many white Americans) of being “articulate while black,” as well as “The Race Speech” and Obama’s linguistic relationship to the jeremiad and rappers such as Jay-Z and Young Jeezy, this book is more than convincing; it changes the terms with which many scholars of US culture will engage with the legacy of Obama’s presidency.

Chapter 4, “The Fist Bump Heard ‘Round the World: How Black Communication Becomes Controversial,” begins by recalling the moments after Obama secured the 2008 Democratic nomination for president of the United States. Alim and Smitherman convincingly argue that the ‘pound’ (or as much of the US press incorrectly termed “fist bump”) that the world witnessed between Barack and Michelle Obama was once again a gross misunderstanding of what they call “Black Folks 2.0.” After a brief overview of the press frenzy that followed this now famous ‘pound’, Alim and Smitherman skilfully move to an analysis of Black communication in the public sphere more generally, focusing on how the pound and the high-five have “crossed over” in what they (and Cornel West) call the process of AfroAmericanisation. However, the authors rightly note that even though these two (very specific) forms of non-verbal communication have become ‘recognizable’ to non-Black participants, there remains a cultural-linguistic gap in the case of verbal communication, which show “that rather than ‘postracial,’ America was and is a hyperracial society.” As evidence of this, Alim and Smitherman focus on the examples of the controversial terms nigga and muthafucka. This section of the chapter is genuinely interesting and informative, as the authors present the histories of both these terms to deliberately show how their ‘controversial’ nature “becomes controversial only in a society that deprecates Blackness.” Indeed, they conclude “if people continually deny this racially discriminatory context, mutual respect will prove to be elusive as a muthafucka.”

However, it is in chapter 6, “Change the Game: Language, Education, and the Cruel Fallout of Racism,” where Alim and Smitherman’s strongest contribution lies. Using their own fieldwork as evidence, they begin with the fairly uncontroversial premise that “[d]espite its grammatical complexity, the language of the Black child has been consistently viewed as something to eradicate, even by the most well-meaning teachers.” These teachers are primarily concerned with their students speaking “standard English” rather than “Black English,” which one teacher describes as “abrasive” and not “respectful.” Alim and Smitherman lament the fact that “despite the vitality of Black Language, teachers continue hearing what’s not said and missing what is” (reviewer’s emphasis). What becomes clear is that these teachers miss the stylistic flexibility that characterises Black language styles, which allow for a rich variety of verbal art games (for example). And what becomes painfully evident is that a fresh approach to teaching teachers the pedagogical potential of these “non-standard” language styles is urgently needed – an issue that could easily fill its own book, and is outside the remit of this one.

What follows instead is the authors’ own critical linguistic approach to language education, including exercises that allow students to develop an awareness of sociolinguistic variation through reflexive, ethnographic analyses. By providing high school students with the critical linguistic and ethnographic tools, Alim and Smitherman suggest that “we can stop apologizing for ‘the way things are’ and begin helping our students imagine the way things can be.” This allows students to think critically about “the relationships between language, racism, education, and power in society.” While this final chapter was certainly not short, and undoubtedly required the preceding chapters to be building blocks to synthesise, I found myself wishing this last chapter was its own book.

Articulate While Black will be indispensible to anyone interested in Barack Obama’s politically raced relationship to language, as well as those who may want to engage with a broader consideration of the relationship between language and race in the United States in recent years. It will certainly be on my ‘high-use’ bookshelf for the foreseeable future.

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Zalfa Feghali holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of Nottingham for a thesis on the relationship between contemporary American and Canadian poetry, citizenship, and civic acts of reading. Her current research considers the role of the reader in the crafting of 9/11 novels. She is editorial assistant at the Journal of American Studies, and is on the Editorial Committee of the Open Library of the Humanities (www.openlibhums.org). She is an avid ukulele player and can be followed on twitter @zalface.

The cheap mobile phone is arguably the most significant personal communications device in history. In India, where caste hierarchy has reinforced power for generations, the disruptive potential of the mobile phone is even more striking than elsewhere. The book probes the whole universe of the mobile phone from the contests of great capitalists and governments to control radio frequency spectrum to the ways ordinary people build the troublesome, addictive device into their daily lives. Matt Birkinshaw hopes the broad scope and rich empirical detail found in this book will prompt a range of further, narrower, investigations in its wake. 

The Great Indian Phone Book: How The Cheap Cell Phone Changes Business, Politics, and Daily Life. Robin Jeffrey and Assa Doron. Hurst & Company, London. February 2013.

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India had 4 million mobile phone connections in 2001; by 2013 there were said to be 990 million. In a country of 1.2 billion people this would make access to cell-phones far higher than access to sanitation. So how is the growth of this vast market transforming the world’s tenth-largest economy?

Jeffrey and Doron’s introduction to the rapid growth and social impacts of telecommunications in India combines a historian’s feel for the national narratives of politics, institutions and policies with an anthropologist’s eye for rich local context and individual stories. The authors offer a social history of mobile telephony for a popular audience that doubles as a broad snapshot of contemporary India. The prose is brisk and lively, packed with facts, interviews and ethnographic detail. Overall the book is informative, enjoyable, and very readable.

The original title—“Celling India”—is a stronger metaphor for the argument: the expansion of mobile phones as ‘selling’ the ideas and aspirations of ‘global capitalism’ to Indian retailers, workers and consumers, and training them in its practices (p.76-77).  “Celling India” not only divides the country into ‘cells’ of signal coverage (p.xxxii) but also references the networking and “individualising” effects of mobile phones (p.216).

“Connecting,” the second part of the book focuses on the teachers and preachers of mobile telephony (missionaries) and the work and businesses that have grown up around production, maintenance and repair (mechanics).  The major corporations invested in marketing to create demand and linked with local retail for distribution. The networks provided technical and customer service training to educate consumers and build trust.   Sales became advocacy, for lifestyles and values as well as phones.

Cellphones are estimated to have generated four million jobs, and the strength of this section is the attention to this sector, particularly retail. Could phone sales and repair, as well as use, as the first step for many into India’s hi-tech boom? Here as in other areas, mobiles are a facet of wider trends. The shift in manufacturing from a predominantly male, unionised workforce to a new class of young, educated, female workers is not unique to phones. While, for consumers, mobiles involve a closer relationship with brands and suppliers than other utilities or technologies, in retail, many other outlets embody globalising India.

Jeffrey and Doron’s assessment of impact on cell-phones on business is more balanced.  Except for cellphone support, the introduction of mobiles has not created additional livelihoods or impacted on equity, and support for claims that mobiles allow producers to bypass middle-men is ‘patchy and inconsistent’. Net benefits are low as buyers, suppliers and competition soon catch up with adaptations. New technologies may actually increase inequality by as more powerful groups are likely to adopt sooner and more thoroughly.

The most interesting story in this chapter again concerns the use of retail networks. EKO, a phone-banking start-up launched in 2007 wanted to make banking as simple as topping-up credit.  70% of India’s population lives in 600,000 villages while the country’s 75,000 bank branches are concentrated in larger towns. Persuading local shop-keepers to offer their service EKO had built up to 170,000 account holders across three states by 2011.

The section on politics illustrates the impact of the decentralised information “revolution” with a study of the Bahujan Samaj Party’s successful campaign strategy in the Uttar Pradesh elections of 2007.  The success wasn’t attributable only to cell-phones, but wouldn’t have been possible without them. Mobiles allowed Dalit BSP activists to overcome cost, distance and status barriers to movement, bypass unsympathetic media, elaborate complex political messages, motivate supporters, and deter or document interference in voting. The ability of mobile connectivity to check abuses of power, such as vote-rigging and corruption, particularly through camera- and video-phones is a central element of the argument.  However, by 2012 other parties caught up with the BSP, equipping their ‘workers’ with phones too, and BSP was not able to repeat their electoral success. While illustrating the progressive possibilities of mobile technologies, Jeffrey and Doron caution against technological utopianism, reminding us that politics is about social power. It seems hard to disagree with their suggestion that while technology boosts previously existing organisation and ideas it is unlikely to deliver social and political change by itself.

The argument is that users shape the social impact of technologies, within hard-wired constraints.  The more interesting point that technology also shapes the way users function is, in this case, quite persuasive.  Jeffrey and Doron argue that mobile phones deliver increased autonomy and a ‘networked individualism’ (p.215) that alters social structures, although not in a clear direction; as easily facilitating parental oversight or lovers’ trysts, communal violence or active citizenship.  The stronger claim, though, that mobile phone subscriptions socialise people into the aspirations and practices of global consumer modernity (queuing, depersonalised interactions, contractual rights) and state ‘legibility’, I think has to be more provisional.

Jeffrey and Doron do stress a decline in the ‘grey market’ for mobile technology, and highlight potential spill-over effects, such as ideas of equality and motivations for literacy.   In closing they offer the tentative hope that these changes will be “more democratic” (p.224). While mobiles may contribute to an ‘individual’ identity outside the family unit, there is no evidence that cell phones have weakened group identities of gender, class, language or caste. Optimism has to be found in piecemeal changes: increased social connectivity, innovative social applications such as mobile- and SMS-friendly e-governance, and the use of video-phones to capture police brutality.

Ultimately, this book won’t offer easy answers. Hopefully the broad scope and rich empirical detail on this new area will prompt a range of further, narrower, investigations in its wake.  The book should be of interest to students of emerging markets, international development, sociology of technology, anthropology, South Asia, and bottom-of-pyramid models in business, marketing and social policy.

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Matt Birkinshaw is PhD candidate in Human Geography & Urban Studies at the London School of Economics. Matt researches governance and infrastructure in Indian cities with a focus on urban water and municipal reforms. Read more reviews by Matt.