Getting Your Way: Strategic Dilemmas in the Real World (review)

Consistent with a book entitled Getting Your Way, this volume is laced with prescriptive comments – for example the advice to individuals and organizations that "if you are likely lose where you are, a new venue is frequently worth a try."(154) Nevertheless, in the conclusion, James Jasper declares that the book is not primarily designed "to provide lessons for practitioner.s"(176) It's larger and far more ambitious goal is to offer a reconceptualization of all social behavior, a project that seems to parallel Talcott Parsons' The Social System. The book, a dramatic extension of Jasper's earlier work in the area of social movements (and filled with references and insights from those earlier works), is centered around what he calls the "strategic perspective," in which most (if not all) social life can be conceived in terms of "strategic action" – activities designed to "get others to do what we want."(5) The book works as a kind of geography of such action, sorting through the ways in which strategic action gets started, the goals people and organizations set for strategic action, the capacities needed to succeed, the ways in which audiences help to determine outcomes, and the various arenas in which strategic action takes place.

Jasper's soaring ambition for the book can be measured by his claims against existing perspectives, perhaps best summarized in his concluding comment that that "sociologists need to shake off their structural and situational biases, if they are to improve their explanations of the large areas of social life in which humans interact with purpose."(180) Considering that most sociology is written from either a structural or situational perspective, we can hardly be surprised by his list of "just a few fields that might benefit from a strategic approach:" social movements, political sociology, social problems, criminology, organizations, status attainment, and most of all, "the study of class."(179) In asserting this broad applicability, Jasper holds a special brief against analyses that rely on structure and/or power, both of which he believes can be better understood as the consequences of ongoing strategic action by key players in a social system.

The bulk of the book is devoted to demonstrating that a huge range of familiar social phenomena can be conceptualized as contests among two or more individuals, groups, organizations or whole societies; with the outcome resulting from the push and pull of these contending forces. This fresh perspective often yields worthwhile insights, such as his nicely made point that players (individuals or collectivities) "juggle a number of different projects at the same time" and therefore feel successful "when some moderate combination reach positive conclusions."(60) In fact, the book's greatest virtue lies in Jasper's apparently inexhaustible reservoir of such insights, spread across the chapters and appearing (often without warning) in the midst of larger, less arresting, discussions.

All these examples contribute nicely to the larger theme: that a large proportion of the phenomena that sociologists study – including the tiniest micro events (for example, whether a couple have sex on a particular night), and the largest macro structural phenomena (such as racial or gender discrimination) – are the results of strategic action; that is, the concerted (self conscious) efforts of individuals and/or collectivities to "get others to do what we want."

This larger theme is the most audacious and convincing extension of the recent concern for human agency that I have encountered; and it is also the symptom of the book's largest weaknesses. Most importantly, there is no sustained or even explicit argument built around this idea. It is asserted in one small example after another, but I found myself hungering for analytic tools that would allow me to tell when strategic action is operating and how to unpack its impact on observable phenomena.

The book is filled with examples, but never tells us in a more general way when the strategic action can be expected to be operating. And Jasper needs to demonstrate – with concrete evidence...