As a long-time admirer of Sennett's work, I expected that this book would develop Sennett's earlier analysis of advanced capitalism that he proposed in The Corrosion of Character and elsewhere. Undoubtedly, this book has some merits, notably Sennett's use of social capital theory and his trademark vignettes of highly revealing personal stories and anecdotes. The book, however is a disappointment. If anyone wanted to see that three lectures do not amount to a book, this is a good example. The lectures delivered at Yale must have been provocative and maybe even inspirational. They do not add up to a book, however. The fragmentation that Sennett observes in capitalist organizations characterizes much of his writing that is discontinuous and at times sloppy and lazy (and more spelling mistakes than one would expect of this publisher). At times, his vignettes lose their life-like qualities and appear formulaic or produced on demand (not unlike those of management gurus). Sennett's scholarship is also highly eclectic (not to say lazy) and far from up-to-date (really, is Goffman and Debord the best that can be done in the way of analysing the effects of today's consumer culture?) Sennett appears to ignore vast areas of contemporary social theory on bureaucracy, consumer studies and cultural studies that might have helped him provide a deeper, more coherent and better informed analysis. As an example, he seeks to argue that the implosion of bureaucracy has decimated 'institutional knowledge' on which organizations relied to function properly. He might have looked in the extensive work on knowledge management and narrative knowledge as used by communities of practice (including managers, consultants, professionals and people in general) to appreciate that institutional knowledge has merely assumed different forms.
Sadly this book does not live up to the promise or the achievement of Sennett's earlier works. If you want to see appreciate true sociological imagination, visit his earlier Hidden Injuries of Class and The Corrosion of Character.
