College and Research Libraries 558 College & Research Libraries "women's work." High visibility for men often results in favoritism, especially from male professors or administrators. Men's opinions are acknowledged and lead to advancement in ways that women's opin- ions proffered in men's professions would be ignored or seen as unduly aggressive. To explain these phenomena, Williams turns to feminist psychoanalytic theory. Society defines masculinity as being su- perior to women, more powerful, phal- lic. Men, on the whole, are driven to do this by the conflicts and ambivalence en- tailed in breaking from their mothers and assuming male roles in a society where men are not nurturing. Williams espouses R. W. Connell's theory of hegemonic mas- culinity to explain men's compulsion to assert their difference from, and superi- ority to, women by often participating in the currently socially dominant ideal of masculinity (at present "physical strength and bravado, exclusive heterosexuality, stoicism, authority, and independence"). Thus, labor is always divided by gender to men's advantage. Williams quotes from interviews with men working in women's professions to illustrate her thesis. Al- though she found a few men exhibiting "alternative masculinities," she found no reformist "gender renegades." This chap- ter was often irritating for its failure to perceive the full array of motivations individual men have for pursuing ca- reers in women's professions, as Wil- liams's theories led her to read into in- terviews the desire for men to assert masculinity. Williams concludes by cautioning that increasing the presence of men in female professions is likely to worsen discrimi- nation against women in these fields. Before workplace equality can occur, so- ciety must cease devaluing female quali- ties (e.g., emotional expressiveness and empathy) in the workplace and must see them as valued job skills on a footing equal to masculine qualities. The organi- zational arrangements that give men privilege must be transformed, and the November 1995 psychological incentives that impel men to strive for differentiation and domi- nance over women must cease. Believing it will be easier for women than men to change, Williams sees positive social change and the goal of gender neutrality as more likely to occur if women infiltrate male professions. This is a provocative and timely book, particularly in the present climate of threatened affirmative action. Williams points to academic librarianship as one field in which women may have gained leadership clout thanks largely to affir- mative action. She challenges us to no- tice the often insidious influence of gen- der in job content, workplace behavior, and hiring/ promotion decisions. It is un- fortunate that she does not distinguish among different types of librarians, often generalizing based on school, public, or academic librarians as if they were iden- tical. The applicability of her research to librarianship would be enhanced with a sample larger than the twenty-nine librar- ians interviewed and if she paid greater heed to the individual gender orientation of her interviewees. Recent theories of masculinity and femininity evolved by gay, lesbian, and other gender-focused minorities seem to have eluded Williams's attention. One wonders, too, whether Williams's theories would hold up in such new female-dominated pro- fessions as paralegalism, which post- dates the Victorian era. Although merit- ing further inquiry, Williams's thoughts and conclusions stand up as challenging, highly readable, never dull, and worthy of debate.-Joseph W Barker, University of California, Berkeley. Gibbons, Michael, Camille Limoges, Helga Nowotny, Simon Schwartz- man, Peter Scott, and Martin Trow. The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Con- temporary Societies. London: Sage, 1994. 179p. $21.95, paper. (ISBN 0-8039- 7794-8). The thesis of this book, which was writ- ten by an international team of six social scientists, is that a new mode of knowl- edge production is evolving alongside the old one. Although it is unclear at this time whether this new mode, which the au- thors imaginatively label "Mode 2," will eventually displace "Mode 1," the book presents convincing arguments that the new mode is becoming increasingly prevalent. Most of the book is devoted to a discussion of the causes of this new mode of knowledge production and of its effects on research, institutions, and public policy. While the book occasion- ally makes assumptions that pertain more to Europe, most of the concepts presented are applicable to research con- ditions and conventions in North America. Mode 1 knowledge production seems to be characterized and conditioned pri- marily by a network of relatively clear and long-accepted boundaries: the dis- tinction between one discipline and an- other, the difference between pure and applied-or academic and industrial- research, the separation of research done in different countries. The primary char- acteristic of Mode 2 appears to be its dis- regard for such boundaries; the authors argue that increasing amounts of re- search-knowledge production-is col- laborative to a point that Mode 1 bound- aries pale or disappear altogether. Mode 2 is "transdisciplinary" in that it does not even recognize traditional disciplinary divisions, drawing information as needed from many disciplines. It is performed by groups, or groups of groups, that may or may not have direct connections to the academy. It is (like this book) the product of scholars who live and work in differ- ent countries-a condition made possible especially by the ubiquity of electronic communication. Mode 2 appears also to be much more concerned with applica- tion, with responding to the need to solve specific problems, and it is generally more concerned about the social implications Book Reviews 559 of its work than is usually the case in Mode 1. By knowledge the authors mean prima- rily scientific and technical knowledge, although they do devote one of the best- written chapters in the book (pp. 90-110) to an heroic attempt to show how some aspects of Mode 2 are also evident in the humanities. Despite dutifully and re- spectfully referring to the likes of Baudelaire and Heidegger, however, the authors cannot conceal their sense that humanities scholarship, whose practitio- ners "stand a little aside, as quizzical com- mentators," is ultimately peripheral when viewed in relation to the produc- tion of scientific knowledge. Despite its brevity, this book does not exactly "move along": it is, in fact, a hard read. Its contents are repetitive, its discus- sion wanders, its focus blurs, and its style is distractingly uneven-perhaps the re- sult of joint authorship. (None of the chapters is attributed to any one author, and the authors are listed on the title page in alphabetical order.) Some of the lan- guage is impenetrably dense, and a few of the sentences read like inept, word-for- word translations from some other lan- guage. The citations also leave a great deal to be desired: getting from this book to related sources will not be an easy matter. One complicated, detailed chapter ("Reconfiguring Institutions," pp. 137 -54) is provided with only a single reference. Each chapter begins with a summary, and it is in the summaries that the poor- est editing will be found in this already poorly edited book. Consequently, some parts of the summaries border on the in- comprehensible. ("We distinguish be- tween three main phases, marking the transition of a policy for science towards science and policy and, during the 1980s, entering a policy for technological inno- vation phase" [p. 155].) Rather than serv- ing as surrogates for the chapters, there- fore, or helping the reader to make sense of the chapters, the summaries often have ----------------------------------------------------------------------- -- ----- 560 College & Research Libraries the opposite effect of forcing the reader to read through the chapters-in order to make sense of the summaries. Although few academic librarians will want to read through this book, it is nev- ertheless well worth reading. My advice is first to read carefully through the short glossary (pp. 167-68), and then to read the "Introduction" (pp. 1-16), which pre- sents all of the key ideas. Depending upon one's interest or purpose, one can then read selectively from the remaining chap- ters. Of special interest to academic librar- ians will be the discussion of the shift of knowledge production away from the academy. While the research university remains the primary center for research even in Mode 2 (p. 82), knowledge pro- duction is no longer the university's ex- clusive responsibility. New centers of knowledge production, such as small- technology businesses, are rapidly evolv- ing and contributing. One reason for this trend is the "massification" (i.e., massive growth) of higher education following World War II (pp. 70-89). This created, among other things, more people capable of knowledge production than there has been room for in the academy, so that such scholars are now finding work-and are producing university-quality knowl- Index to advertisers ALA Editions 470 Archival Products 485 BIOS IS 475 Blackwell cover 3 Bowker /Reed 476 Engineering Information 469 Greenwood Press 508 Library Technologies 496 Libraries Unlimited 546 Personal Biblio. Software 486 PAIS cover 2 Readmore 495,518 Todd Enterprises cover4 H. W. Wilson 563 November 1995 edge-in the private sector. There are also other issues raised in the book that will be of interest to anyone trying to under- stand how knowledge is produced and exchanged, as, for example, the useful distinction between tacit and codified knowledge (pp. 24-26), or the discus- sion of the increasing "density" of scientific communication (pp. 38-40). Also of special concern to some aca- demic librarians will be the examina- tions throughout the book (especially pp. 8, 31-34,65-69, and 152-54) of how the quality control of knowledge pro- duction (and therefore presumably publication) is affected by judgment and measures that are no longer lim- ited to the standard conventions of aca- demic peer review. Although a few brief case studies and other examples are presented, the content of this book is for the most part abstract: there is little detailed or extended discus- sion of how these new trends are affect- ing actual research now under way. Nor do the authors feel obliged to draw any general conclusions. The book ends some- what abruptly with a one-page list of some "future issues." While the main purpose of the book is presumably to identify and investigate the qualities of Mode 2, the real interest of the authors seems to be not so much in the nature of Mode 2 itself as in the socioeconomic im- plications of the shift from Mode 1 to Mode 2. As a result, Mode 2 is defined and made understandable primarily on the basis of its difference from, or oppo- sition to, Mode 1. In the end, therefore, this book is not so much an analysis of how research is done-or how knowl- edge is produced-as it is a rather rushed and somewhat disjointed commentary on currently changing social and economic values.-Ross Atkinson, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. Higher Education under Fire: Politics, Eco- nomics, and the Crisis of the Humanities. Eds. Michael Berube and Cary Nelson.