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clear that this is the exception, not the rule.

As Thompson writes, ‘‘at some point in later life, most old men’s transformed habitus has largely discarded the ‘taste’ for the gendered practices of their youth and embraced instead the dominant masculinities that organize the fields of later and late life’’

(p. 85, emphasis in original). A strength of the book is how clearly this important insight, which challenges ageist theories and beliefs regarding masculinity, comes through.

A related strength is Thompson’s ability to show how men tend to adopt more relational identities as they age. Although masculinities among younger and midlife men often demand that they be autonomous and fully independent, the aging masculinities that many old men embrace allow them to be in close relationships with others and to define themselves in part through these relationships and the obligations they engender.

For instance, most married old men define themselves as part of a unit, rather than as individuals; and as a result, they often take up caregiving duties without even thinking twice. In addition, old men themselves are often surprised to see how important being a grandfather is to them, and many provide regular care or even take custody of their grandchildren, leading them to define themselves partly by these relationships. For readers who see masculinity only in terms of the age-less masculinity that Thompson critiques, the relational identities that old men embrace will likely come as a heart- warming surprise.

Another strength of the book is Thomp- son’s unwavering focus on diversity within aging masculinities. Taking an intersectional approach, he explores how race, class, and especially sexuality shape the fields of aging masculinity old men participate in and the ways they practice gender. Rather than reproducing a monolithic, one-size-fits-all conception of masculinity, like the age-less conception of masculinity that he so effec- tively challenges, Thompson carefully attends to the multiple masculinities that are performed among old men.

Because it focuses primarily on surveying the existing literature, the book offers few new arguments or conclusions. And despite

its attention to old men’s relational identities, the book may be insufficiently relational for some readers. Indeed, on average, old men still receive more care and support from the women in their lives than they provide, but this is scarcely mentioned throughout the book. This oversight is particularly glaring in the chapter on old men’s caregiving.

Still, in offering a thorough and theoreti- cally grounded overview of the literature on old men’s beliefs and practices regarding gender, Men, Masculinities, and Aging more than achieves its goal. For scholars working in this area, it is sure to become a go-to resource. It provides clear guidance on where the literature has been and where it needs to go moving forward. And for those who are unfamiliar with this literature, the book offers a well-written, accessible chal- lenge to many ageist stereotypes, presenting old men as gendered, agentic, sexually active, caring, and relational. As such, the book, or excerpts of it, may be useful in the classroom, especially in undergraduate classes on aging and the life course and/or sex and gender.

Dynamics of Class and Stratification in Poland, by Irina Tomescu-Dubrow, Kazimierz M.

S1omczyn´ski, Henryk Doman´ski, Joshua Kjerulf Dubrow, Zbigniew Sawin´ski,and Dariusz Przybysz. New York: Central European University Press, 2018. 296 pp. $70.00 cloth. ISBN: 9789633861554.

M

IKOL^/AJ

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AWLAK University of Warsaw mikolajpawlak@uw.edu.pl

The book Dynamics of Class and Stratification in Poland was written by core members of a research team from the Polish Academy of Sciences conducting longitudinal studies of social stratification. In Dynamics, Irina Tomescu-Dubrow, Kazimierz M. S1omc- zyn´ski, Henryk Doman´ski, Joshua Kjerulf Dubrow, Zbigniew Sawin´ski, and Dariusz Przybysz attempt to summarize the most significant findings of the ‘‘Warsaw School of studying class and stratification,’’ which started operating in the 1970s. The book con- sists of a preface, introduction, ten chapters, 92 Reviews

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and a conclusion. The chapters are grouped into four parts. They discuss class and stratification, mobility and attainment, occupational differentiation, and class analysis, respectively. The unifying theme is social structure and inequality in Polish society.

One of the first things that strikes you when reading Dynamics is that, in their auto-identification, the authors strongly highlight the element of belonging to a school of thought. The authors thus resort to a category that is less used to describe the current organization of the academic research. They proudly declare themselves members of the Warsaw School of studying class and stratification, a school that they see as based on the principle that ‘‘social class and social stratification should always be treated as analytically distinct, though related, phenomena’’ (p. 2).

What do ‘‘social class’’ and ‘‘social stratification’’ mean? The authors define social classes as ‘‘groups that control various aspects and varying amounts of social resources that are important for the functioning of the capital market, the labor market, and the con- sumption market’’ (p. 40). These do not always form a hierarchy per se. In comparison, social stratification is hierarchical because it is a ‘‘structured inequality among persons with respect to generally desired goods’’ (p. 41). On the one hand, social stratification depends on formal education, occupational rank, and job income. On the other hand, it influences housing conditions, pos- session of durable goods, and lifestyles.

Dynamics follows the changes and the sometimes surprising stability in Poland’s social structure since the 1970s. The empiri- cal base is impressive. Its core is constituted by the outcomes of the Polish Panel Survey POLPAN that was carried out starting in 1988 by a group of researchers led by Maciej K. S1omczyn´ski. The analysis uses data from six waves of POLPAN collected in 1988, 1993, 1998, 2003, 2008, and 2013. POLPAN is the most comprehensive, and currently the only, panel survey conducted in Poland.

It could be said that the research team working on POLPAN constitutes the core of the Warsaw School of studying class and stratification. It is the school’s institutional basis.

However, the data analyzed in the book are

not limited to POLPAN solely. The book includes other surveys as well, such as the Polish sample of the European Social Survey.

Yet the authors, quantitatively inclined as they are, do not present their findings in the context of qualitative studies of lifestyles, class relations, or class ideologies. Neither do they include the relational perspective on social structure informed by network approaches in social science.

Poland has experienced radical social transformations in terms of the reconfigura- tion of class relations, and this renders it an interesting case for longitudinal studies of social structure. The communist project installed in the country in 1945 aimed to build a classless society. The transformation that began in 1989, in comparison, projected a capitalist and democratic society in which the middle class was expected to play a prom- inent role. The period of industrialization and urbanization in the decades since World War II is associated with a breadth of short- term and long-term consequences, among which is an increase in size of the educated categories—those employed as specialists or in administration.

The strength of the framework proposed by the authors is also its weakness. The authors mostly see classes through the lenses of education and occupational status. They take occupational status as a combination of work complexity and control over the labor processes. The authors skillfully track the transformation of the classes from the pre- 1989 planned economy to the post-1989 free market economy. The category of non-manual workers, for instance, split into expert- professionals and office workers. Thus, they use a theoretical framework that allows them to capture and highlight important changes in society that were configured in recent decades. At the same time, however, this theoretical grid renders them vulnerable when it comes to other, equally relevant transformations. For instance, the authors frame social structure via the labor market.

Yet more than half the population in Poland is inactive in this respect. Likewise, the authors work with categories that do not seem to grasp differences in work stability so easily. Labor market segmentation cross- cuts previously established class divisions—

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a problem the authors appear to be well aware of. For instance, they see quite clearly that new class criteria are needed in order to grasp the growing precariousness of the secondary labor market (p. 63).

Another aspect worth discussing is the possible class-conditioned bias of the authors.

The authors are members of the intelligentsia that is currently located in the expert- professionals class. This may explain why they praise meritocracy, understood as the correlation of earnings and education (p. 58). It may also help to unpack the assumption that people make a rational cost-benefit analysis of their potential change in class situation (p. 70). Status attainment appears to be conditioned by middle- class ideology. Maybe for the other segments of the society, embeddedness in their social environment is a prevailing element. Ironical- ly, many members of the intelligentsia do not envisage class attainment in the form of becoming members of employers-entrepre- neurs or managers classes.

These couple of comments have a critical cast, for sure. They are, however, pale when measured against the great potential and achievements of the book. The work of the Warsaw School on studying class and stratification provides a solid ground for carrying out a debate about change and stability in social structure. The most striking outcomes of the analyses presented in the book concern the abilities of privileged social categories to appropriate the system of opportunities pro- vided by particular historical circumstances.

The authors show, for instance, that the nomenklatura of the 1970s (the class that was appointed to managerial positions by political decisions in communist Poland) was an educated elite. They explain how this class was able to take control over work processes in a state that, officially, was led by workers. The authors also con- centrate on reforms in the educational system. They indicate that subsequent to intro- ducing measures aiming at decreasing inequalities between public schools, it took only a couple of years for the schools to become horizontally diversified again. It thus occurs that even in a system of public education there are differences that produce better life chances for the children of parents

who, due to their cultural and financial capital, have the capacity to navigate through this system (p. 125).

Dynamics is a book relevant for at least two categories of scholars: the ones interested in the transformation of Polish society, and the ones with an intellectual and theoretical taste for processes of social structure transformation in general. Dynamics is a possible bridge in this regard as well as a launching ramp for further studies, those informed by other research paradigms included.

Radicalized Loyalties: Becoming Muslim in the West, by Fabien Truong, translated by Seth Ackerman. Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2018. 187 pp. $24.95 paper. ISBN:

9781509519354.

Z. F

AREEN

P

ARVEZ

University of Massachusetts at Amherst parvez@soc.umass.edu

Fabien Truong’s Radicalized Loyalties: Becom- ing Muslim in the West is an in-depth explora- tion of the lives of six young men from the stigmatized urban periphery of Paris. All racial minorities, either black or of North African background, they carry with them the marks, weight, and heritage of France’s postcolonial subjects. Framed by the after- math of the 2015–2017 major terrorist attacks in France as well as the departure of a number of French individuals for Syria, the book aims to piece together a puzzle depicting these men’s complex social and moral worlds. These contexts determine the life tra- jectories of such young men and create cer- tain pathways—some of which lead to a rig- orous practice of Islam and others that may lead to terrorist violence. One of the six men whom Truong includes in his investiga- tion is none other than Ame´dy Coulibaly, who killed four people at the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket in 2015. Truong never met Coulibaly but talked with his lawyer(s) and friends and, through this secondary work, put together a detailed and convincing portrait of the man who was once ‘‘a good guy . . . . A guy who helped his fellow man’’ (p. 30).

94 Reviews