Reviews for 'Race', Racism and Psychology: Towards a Reflexive History

The average rating for 'Race', Racism and Psychology: Towards a Reflexive History based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2021-02-11 00:00:00 Lisa Sommers I read this book for my dissertation - I have been using elements of Stebbins approach in my literature review both from his articles and this book, this Goodreads entry simply records how I have buckled down and read completely through it (yes, real scholars do skim). Stebbins is best known for his elucidation of the concept of serious leisure (on the hedgehog/fox axis, Stebbins is clearly a hedgehog). However, the "serious leisure" perspective now encapsulates a gamut between serious and casual, and includes a (fairly) new idea of "project-based leisure" His basic concepts are generally useful, although his partition between amateur and hobbyist remains unclear to me. I particularly like his concepts of the "leisure career" as well as the "durable benefits" of serious and project based leisure. Although I do not agree with all, or perhaps even as much as half of his characterizations and ideas, there is much grist for the mill for the scholar and serious amateur student interested in broad questions of leisure and craft. It really is a necessary read. However, I am not a big fan of this type of sociological work. Stebbins' approach is a very old-school way of doing sociology that resembles mid-twentieth century sociology of the Talcott Parsons/Robert Merton school. It is *extremely* schematic, and I think that this is a fundamental weakness. I have heard older sociologists talking about their graduate days consisting of whether or not - following Parsonian theory - a given thing was a "pattern variable" or not. I feel Stebbins and those who follow his approach can fall into the same trap. To me, underlying processes and forces are much more valuable than trying to categorize their outward expression. After all, many illnesses express similar symptoms, but are caused by different bacteria, viruses, or bodily breakdowns. Ancient doctors were restricted to categorizing by symptoms, but we now look at underlying causes. So, part of why I am unclear about the amateur/hobbyist distinction here is that I can't see these as entirely separate. All the different expressions of leisure are going to be like overlapping Venn diagrams rather than distinct pigeon-holes. As I understand it, the amateur is part of a public and the hobbyist is not. The amateur is more likely to be connected to a commercial aspect and the hobbyist is not. I just cannot agree. For instance, he rise of the Internet has simply made visible what has always been an aspect of hobbies, which is display. Even entirely private, non-remunerative hobbyists will display their latest work for a public of friends, acquaintances, and even strangers to admire. This is just one potential point I can use, but there are many more. I would much rather have the category of amateur as inherently potentially consisting of overlapping elements, and then ask when do publics become important and when is the partition between the professional and the amateur particularly thin? For this reason, I would use a lot less schema and MUCH more examples and case studies. While Stebbin's work is built on a huge amount of such studies, some his own, but many more by other people, these are used to exemplify the schema (deductively) rather than to establish it inductively. On the other hand, I am sure you can probably tell where my intellectual priorities lie. So, the work is very valuable as a way to inspire thought, but I cannot agree with it as a piece of social theory or even empirical observation as it is currently structured.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-12-28 00:00:00 Yoshio Takei An interesting (if sometimes dry) read on an interesting topic. It would be better if Stebbins didn't keep quoting himself, but at the same time, he is the primary researcher in the field..... This is an area that I'm interested in, and so I enjoyed being able to take a look at the perspective through this book. I'm going to have to look more into it in the near future!