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Book Review: Hans Joas and Wolfgang Knöbl Social Theory: Twenty Introductory Lectures, transl. Alex Skinner Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, £65.00 hbk (ISBN: 9780521870634), £25.99 pbk (ISBN: 9780521690881), 560pp

then being pursued by analysts operating at a more concrete level’ (p. 9). The next section comprises four different contributions in which work is mainly discussed through the lens of economics (Steve Machin), analysis of work (Geoffrey Hodgson), economic sociology (Thomas Beamish and Nicole Woolsey Biggart) and organizational studies (Heather Haveman and Mukti Khaire). These strongly economics-shaped contributions are followed by four papers that engage with work more widely and take up current debates in the social sciences and humanities. This is represented by a chapter on ethics and work (Karen Legge), technology and work (Jacques Belanger), professional work (Keith Macdonald) and a discussion of globalization, followed by an engagement with the concept of identity in the context of work (Robin Leidner). Some concluding remarks by Peter Cappelli on ‘Change at Work and the Opportunities for Theory’ round up the book. Although the book is making a valuable contribution to social theory on work, it could have benefited from including contributions that shed light on work outside the narrow fields of mainstream sociology and economics. To some extent, in particular in the last section, the editors try to take up current theoretical and research agendas. Karen Legge’s contribution on ethics therefore needs to be emphasized as a refreshing exception in an, although academically excellent, rather rigid edition in its dealing with the topic. All in all, the scope of the book seems narrow and there is no real attempt to reach beyond the merely disciplinary boundaries of the hardcore social sciences. This might also be indicative of the places within which work issues have been predominantly theorized in recent years. As much as discourses around organizations and human resource management reflect the changing surroundings of the working world during recent decades, these strongly economics-driven discourses and a new terminology in the wider theorizing of work issues in sociology and the social sciences cannot be seen in separation from the contemporaneous developments in Higher Education. The increasing outsourcing of industrial relations and the sociology of work from sociology departments into business schools and the marginalization of the topic of work in many sociology departments over the last 20 years seem to have made their mark in that they also altered the way ‘work’ has been theorized. In conclusion, what could advance workplace studies is a more interdisciplinary engagement with the theme of work, reaching out to such fields as cultural studies and the humanities more generally.