Jack Demaine and Harold Entwistle (eds.), Beyond Communitarianism: Citizenship, Politics and Education. London: Macmillan, 1996, £15.99 pbk, ix+216 pp. (ISBN 0-333-67744-7).

Stephen A. Gaetz, Looking Out for the Lads: Community Action and the Provision of Youth Services in an Urban Irish Parish. St John's, Newfoundland: Institute for Social and Economic Research, Memorial University, 1997, no price stated, paperback, xx+236 pp. (ISBN 0-919666-90-6).

Philip Nyden, Anne Figert, Mark Shibley and Darryl Burrows (eds.), Building Community: Social Science in Action, London: Pine Forge Press, 1997, £26.00 pbk, xiv+263 pp. (ISBN 0-8039-9093-6).

Chris Searle, Living Community, Living School. London: The Tufnell Press, 1997, £11.99, xvi+164 pp. (ISBN 1-872767-27-3).

What is ‘community’? This question exercises the four books which form the basis of this review essay and links a disparate collection together. Each text covers substantially different subjects in addressing the relevance of community in diverse settings. Beyond Communitarianism has twelve chapters which explore rights and citizenship in different domains. Living Community, Living School provides a set of sketches which examines how a school in Sheffield, England, draws on its local community to overcome social divisions found in its midst. Looking Out for the Lads contains a detailed case study of a housing estate near Cork in Ireland, which considers at length the difficulties that cause residents in a particular geographic location to feel alienated from those residing in neighbouring streets, despite concerted attempts to bring them together. Building Community illustrates through twenty-six specific examples how research need not be an ‘ivory tower’ activity orientated to the dispassionate pursuit of knowledge and of little use to people who are the subjects of academic study. Embedded within a politics of knowledge framework, it argues for a value-based remit fostering social justice for the social sciences.

David K. Dunaway and Willa K. Baum (eds.), Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology. Walnut Creek and London: Altamira, 1997, £39.00, paperback £18.95, 432 pp. (ISBN 0-7619-9188-3).

Rosanna Hertz (ed.), Reflexivity and Voice. Thousand Oaks and London: Sage, 1997, £38.00, paperback £17.95, xviii+1318 pp. (ISBN 0-7619-0383-6).

Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman (eds.), Memory, Identity, Com-munity: The Idea of Narrative in the Human Sciences. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997, $19.95 paperback, xxxii+1393 pp. (ISBN 0-7914-3323-4).

Deborah E. Reed-Danahay (ed.), Auto/Ethnography: Rewriting the Self and the Social. Oxford: Berg, 1997, £34.99, paperback £14.99, xi+1277 pp. (ISBN 1-85973-970-9).

Kim Marie Vaz (ed.), Oral Narrative Research with Black Women. Thousand Oaks and London: Sage, 1997, £38.00, paperback £17.95, x+1262 pp. (ISBN 0-8039-7428-0).

Whether or not you subscribe to the view that the grand narratives of history,modernity and enlightenment are passé, you cannot fail to notice the proliferation of smaller, local narratives. The literature of the social sciences is increasingly populated by a variety of lives, life-histories, auto/biographies, auto-ethnographies and other narratives. Sociologists, anthropologists and others, in increasing numbers, have been turning their attention to the collection and documentation of ‘lives’, including their own. The biographical has taken on a renewed currency, invested with methodological and ethical significance. There is a polyphony of ‘voices’ clamouring for attention. There is, of course, nothing absolutely novel in this. At one time, life-histories and similar documents of life were celebrated as a prime source of sociological data and insight, articulating the intersection between the personal and the social. The career or the life could thus be seen to capture some of the complex relationships between socialisation and social organisation, between process and social order, or between institutions and the person. Having for some time been eclipsed and all but excluded from the methodological canon, the biographical perspective has enjoyed a significant revival in recent years. There has been an upsurge of empirical, methodological and reflective writing on biographical approaches to social research. They have received fresh legitimation from a variety of contemporary standpoints — feminist, post-structuralist and postcolonialist among them. Indeed, the celebration of multiple ‘voices’ to be found in much of the literature parallels the multiplicity of epistemological ‘positions’ to be found in contemporary social research. The books under review — and many other in the same genre — reflect those different perspectives, illustrating at once the various opportunities and limitations of contemporary work in this area. In their diversity they also display the extent to which various sub-genres develop in mutual isolation, mirroring specific disciplinary, national and empirical preoccupations. Collectively they embody a number of unresolved tensions in the systematic exploration of social actors' lives, voices and identities.

Leslie Holmes, Post-Communism: An Introduction, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997, £45.00 (£14.95 pbk), 378 pp. (ISBN 0-7456-1312-8).

Katherine Verdery, What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996, £40.00 (£14.00 pbk), 298 pp. (ISBN 0-691-01132-X).

Joseph R. Blasi, Maya Kroumova and Douglas Kruse, Kremlin Capitalism: Privatising the Russian Economy, New York: Cornell University Press, 1997, $42.50 ($16.95 pbk), xix+190 pp. (ISBN 0-8014-8396-4).

Annika Thunborg, Public and Non-Profit Interaction: U.S. Assistance to Eastern European Media 1989-1995, Lund: Lund University Press, 1997, SKr 223 pbk, x+271 pp. (ISBN 911-7966-419-9).

The disintegration of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the state socialist system has put an end to a sub-discipline of political science (communist politics), to the study in sociology of an ‘alternative’ framework of industrial society and it has also led to philosophical speculation about the ‘end of history’. In its train the collapse has generated new sets of problems in the field of ‘transitology’. The distinctive features of the transformation of state socialism are that, unlike in the political movement from autocracy to polyarchy characterising southern European states such as Spain and Greece, the structural elite-induced changes under post-communism involve simultaneously transformations of the value system, forms of integration and legitimacy, types of political management and interest articulation and the economic mechanism, including the ownership of property.

Nadia Abu-Zahra, The Pure and the Powerful: Studies in Contemporary Muslim Society. Reading: Ithaca Press, 1997, £35.00, xx+1320 pp. (ISBN: 0-86372-179-6).

Akbar S. Ahmed, Jinnah, Pakistan and Islamic Identity: The Search for Saladin. London: Routledge, 1997, £12.99 paperback, xxix+1274 pp. (ISBN: 0-415-14966-5).

Louise Marlow, Hierarchy and Egalitarianism in Islamic Thought. ‘Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization’, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, £30.00, xv+1198 pp. (ISBN: 0-521-564301).

Sociological understanding of the contours and dynamic of Islamic social structureshas in the second half of the twentieth century been significantly influenced, at least inthe Anglo-Saxon academic world, by the political anthropology of the late ErnestGellner. This intellectual influence was often covert and grudging, but neverthelessreal and widespread. Building on his fieldwork in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, hiscentral ideas were ‘plainly stolen’ (Gellner 1981, p. vii) from Ibn Khaldun, David Hume, Robert Montagne and Edward Evans-Pritchard. On the basis of these stolen notions he created a brilliant, if frequently flawed, view of Islamic structures in Saints of the Atlas (1969), Muslim Society (1981), and Postmodernism, Reason and Religion (1992).