Book Review: The Psychosocial and Organization Studies: Affect at Work
it theorizes the existence and influence of not yet recognized collectives, being therefore always exposed to be denounced as a plain conspiracy theory. The elegant solution to this problem developed in the last decades by Boltanski and co authors, but also by Actor Network theorists such as Latour (2005) displaced the role of the social researcher. Collectives (for instance, a new occupational category (Boltanski 1984) are not discovered by academic sociologists, but sociological research should focus on following the process in which actors themselves assemble, name or stabilize new collectives. However, Boltanski (perhaps like Latour (2013) with his Inquiry into Modes of Existence) is today setting some of the strongest challenge to his own previous work. As Boltanski's recent work seems to imply, the risk of 'sociology of critique' is that it can also empty sociology of its own 'critical capacity' The difficult task that Boltanski has set himself is to deal with this impasse and to equip sociology with conceptual tools and methods that can both be respectful of the actors' own accounts and ontological constructions, but also re gain the discipline's role in imaginatively testing the reality of social reality. Mysteries and Conspiracies is not an obvious read for readers of Organization. I think, however, there are several good reasons that make this a very recommendable book. I recommend it first for those interested in broadening their grasp of Boltanski's oeuvre. Luc Boltanski is a major contemporary social theorist, but, as he has recognized (Basaure 2011) the international influence of his work is limited to sometimes an oversimplified version of his ideas (i.e. organizations deal with multiple orders of worth or capitalism and critique are dialectically related) Particularly, this book is a good point of entry to Boltanski's ongoing project of rethinking critical sociology after the sociology of critique. Second, this book directly faces an issue that is at the core of organizational research, namely, the tension between methodological individualism and the recognition of more abstract but not necessarily accepted collective entities, such as global elites, capitalism or terrorist networks. This book does not provide a final answer, but, no doubt, poses a set of questions that are particularly timely these days (of National Security Agency (NSA) global espionage network, HSBC international tax evasion, ISIS in Syria and US drones in Pakistan) when the borders between conspiracy, science fiction and serious research seem to be constantly challenged. Finally, I recommend this book to all of us, social scientists who expect to write books about our work. What some contemporary writers of fiction, like for instance Don DeLillo, have done for the novel, Boltanski does by extending the possibilities of the academic book as a genre. Mysteries and Conspiracies is neither a traditional linear book nor a literary experiment. It is rather a crafted piece where reflexivity and the architecture of the text are made to work in order to put forward a complex, multi layered but enjoyable book of social science.