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Julian’s study of refugee women in Australia showshow while many men, unemployed, ‘retreat into thehome and take refuge in each other’s support’, womengo out and tackle the institutions and bring home thebread. Julian suggests therefore ‘it would seem moreappropriate to conceptualize victim and agent as alter-natives within a framework of multiple, shifting subjectpositions’ (p. 208). There is much pain, humiliation andloss between the covers of this book, but women’s cour-age, imagination and energy is visible too.

Cynthia CockburnDepartment of Social and Human Sciences

City UniversityLondon

United Kingdom

PII S0277-5395(00)00100-X

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, by Louise Morley, viii 1 215 pages. Mac-millan Press, Basingstoke and London, 1999, £17.99 pa-per.

This book is about the ways that power is embedded ineveryday practices in the academy, to undermine andexclude women from access to resources, influence, ca-reer opportunities and academic authority. LouiseMorley details the minutiae of social relations–politicaland personal strategies for effecting or resistingchange–drawing on interviews with feminist academicsand post-graduate students in the UK, Sweden andGreece. It is Morley’s contention that feminists in theacademy are change agents who bring the micropoliticsof the academic organisation to light.

As part of her discussion Morley considers the poli-tics of enquiry, and what constitutes ‘knowledge’. Thisincludes the relationship between feminism and post-modernism; also a micropolitical issue. Morley charac-terises it as: ‘a homeopathic relationship, with smalldoses of postmodernism mobilising feminist antibodies.While it initially feels poisonous, it can be successful insharpening and strengthening our theory-building’ (p.14). She argues that both feminist and postmodern the-orising are concerned with reconceptualising ‘truth’and ‘knowledge’, with postmodernism enabling her tolook at the dispersed nature of power from a feministstandpoint. I’m not sure that the homeopathic analogyworks well. If, for example, one viewed postmoderntheory as a headache suffered by a feminist, then thefeminist would take a homeopathic remedy that con-tained postmodern theory, but the end result would bethat the headache/postmodern theory went away. Thisis not what happens to Morley. Nevertheless, feministswithin the academy, of whatever theoretical persua-sion, will find much of interest in her analysis; indeed,you will probably see your own experiences.

Morley enters into her unpacking of the micropoli-tics of the academy with a discussion of the macropolit-ical context in which this takes place. She overviews po-litical and organisational change in higher education,particularly focusing on the UK, pointing to the shift to

market driven mass expansion and new managerialism,and the implications for feminist academics and students.We are given a picture of quite a modernist contextwithin which postmodern dispersed power is exercised.

Morley then turns to considering the relationshipbetween feminism and equity work in the academy.Her overall contention is that equity discourses by andlarge are not theoretically informed by feminism anddo not operate as resistance to the relentless reproduc-tion of class, gender, racial and other privilege in theacademy. Equity policies merely enter into existing pat-terns and practices of inequality, generating new ine-qualities around old structures of social and hierarchi-cal relationships. The micropolitics of the academy’sorganisational culture–its atmosphere and ethos, net-works and coalitions, and so on–mean that it is difficultfor feminists to get situations defined as oppressive andunfair, and to effect change through equity policies.Thus, Morley argues, feminists often concentrate theirefforts on knowledge production and pedagogic inter-ventions, including through women’s studies courses.Nevertheless, as she elaborates through a critique ofempowerment, this political project is subject to its ownmicropolitical contradictions and tensions.

Throughout these discussions, Morley draws on ma-terial from her interviewees. Indeed, she essentiallytreats her interviewees as theorisers and knowers–in ef-fect, they are the analysts of the detailed constitution ofMorley’s micropolitical framework. Her two penulti-mate chapters focus on their experiences as, respec-tively, students and academics. We see the difficultiesof taking on a stigmatised identity as ‘feminist’ even forwomen’s studies students, and how feminist academicscan be sidelined, drained and devalued. But we also seehow feminism and women’s studies has transformativepotential and can be exhilarating. Morley shows theneed for feminists to evolve support systems, and thebenefits of these, but also the demands and exhaustionof supporting each other within the structures of theacademy. Interestingly, in these two chapters, while sheutilises the viewpoints of academics alongside those ofstudents to unpack and define the experience of being afeminist student, there is no reciprocal view from her stu-dent interviewees in her chapter on feminist academics.

Across the three diverse national locations in Mor-ley’s study, there are similar concerns around the sub-ordination of women in the academy. But Morley doesnot give–indeed, explicitly avoids–what she regards asrationalist recipes for intervention and change. This isbecause, as she sees it, a postmodern stance challengesany meta-narrative of change, while small scale changecan be reformative and ameliorative, retaining existingframeworks. Rather, Morley’s contribution is to high-light, and through this add to, the micropolitical compe-tencies that enable feminists to survive the headachesof the academy.

Rosalind EdwardsDepartment of Social Policy

South Bank UniversityLondon

United Kingdom

PII S0277-5395(00)00099-6