Aronowitz, Stanley. The Last Good Job in America.

• Author: Matthews, Rick A.
• Position: Book Review

Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001. 273 pages. Cloth, $27.95.

In a recent editorial in the New York Times entitled "The Last Sociologist," Orlando Patterson takes sociology to task for many reasons, including the failure of sociologists to "think big." The movement of professional and academic sociologists away from the types of questions that motivated David Riesman to write The Lonely Crowd (which, Patterson argues, was the last great sociological commentary), and toward an uncritical acceptance and pursuit of the methodologies of the natural or "hard" sciences, has led to sociology's decline. Patterson notes that the days of Erving Goffman, C. Wright Mills, William F. Whyte, Peter Berger and other "big thinkers" are over, and that today's sociologists are, for the most part, concerned with causing the discipline to more closely resemble the natural sciences. The great irony, of course, is that many who were drawn to the discipline through the works of Goffman and others now do research that bears little resemblance to Mills' concept of the "sociological imagination."

If any contemporary sociologist does not fit Patterson's description of sociology, it is Stanley Aronowitz. In his latest book, The Last Good Job in America, Aronowitz, in the spirit of Mills and other "big thinkers," examines the current state of work and education. This collection of sixteen essays is loosely tied together by the themes of work, education, technology, and race. These essays are grouped in five parts, and stand on their own as easily as they can be read together.

Aronowitz's title begs the reader to consider what the last good job in America might be. He argues that he may be one of few people to have it a full professor at a major research institution who is relatively free to structure his work as he chooses. Aronowitz describes his job as one where the lines between "recreation" and "work" are often blurred. For example, he readily admits to engaging in a number of "recreational" readings in other disciplines (e.g., philosophy), which, in turn, inform his teaching and writing. No doubt there are many in academia, particularly among those who are fortunate enough to have "good" jobs, who do the same. Almost everyone in the academy, however, knows that these "good" jobs are becoming increasingly difficult to find. Aronowitz articulates the ways in which colleges and universities are being "restructured along the lines of global capitalism," and how...