College and Research Libraries


Anglophone West Africa, and South Af-
rica); the Western region (Western and 
Eastern Etiropean countries, Israel, and 
North America); and the Latin American 
region (Latin America, Brazil, and 
Mexico). Individual chapters vary in 
comprehensiveness based on the history 
and volume of poverty research in a 
country. Although adhering to a stan-
dardized format, each chapter stands 
alone as a description of the individuals 
and/ or institutions engaged in poverty 
research, their theories and methodolo-
gies, and the resulting research programs 
and data sets. Unfortunately, the chapter 
focusing on the U.S. and Canada foot-
notes the two leading national data col-
lection agencies rather than specifically 
identifying poverty research initiatives 
(with the exception of reports emanating 
from the University of Wisconsin-
Madison's Institute for Research on Pov-
erty and the University of Michigan's 
Survey Research Center's Panel Study of 
Income Dynamics). Although they allude 
to their results, specific reference to ma-
jor studies such as the Seattle/Denver 
Income Maintenance Experiments and 
the Survey of Income and Program Par-
ticipation would have been appropriate 
for a "handbook." 

Although the editors are to be com-
mended for assembling an internation-
ally representative panel of contributors, 
the predominance of sociologists and 
economists has limited the range of dis-
ciplinary perspectives and methodolo-
gies. An integrative, cross-national dis-
cussion of inequality, such as found in 
geographer David M. Smith's Where the 
Grass Is Greener: Living in an Unequal 
World (1979), as well as in his subsequent 
publications, would have added balance. 
So, too, would a thorough review of the 
contributions of applied anthropologists 
to our understanding of poverty through 
ethnographies undertaken in developed 
and developing countries, rather than re-
peatedly lamenting the paucity of quali-
tative work. Finally, the absence of any 

Book Reviews 485 

mention of some of the better-known left-
ist writers (from liberal to Marxist, e.g., 
Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox 
Piven to Ralph C. Gomes) suggests that 
some views are less well represented in 
the political debate over the causes of 
poverty. But then the Far Right is too of-
ten presented as conservative, leaving 
conservatives and centrists to share the 
label "liberal." 

Overall, Poverty: A Global View fills two 
gaps in the reference literature. First, it 
brings together in one volume summa-
ries of the major poverty research efforts 
and findings for regions and countries 
worldwide. Second, it conceptually and 
analytically integrates this information 
through introductory and closing chap-
ters. Furthermore, the detailed subject in-
dexing across all chapters readily enables 
comparisons across countries by topic 
(e.g., concepts, definitions, and measures 
of poverty, and construction of poverty 
lines; data sources; and the roles of vari-
ous international organizations) and by 
subpopulation (e.g., aged, children, 
women, rural/urban residents). Ironi-
cally, it is the quality of the indexing that 
revealed the paucity of specific attention 
given to the role of ethnic, racial, and 
political violence, as well as internal mi-
gration and immigration, in regard to the 
prevalence and persistence of poverty. 
Nevertheless, the strengths of the volume 
far outweigh its weaknesses, and it is 
hoped that the latter will be addressed 
in either regularly updated editions or 
separate topical monographs within the 
CROP series.-Gary McMillan, Howard 
University, Washington, D.C. 

Schiller, Herbert I. Information Inequal-
ity: The Deepening Social Crisis in 
America. New York: Routledge, 1966. 
149p. $55.00. (ISBN 0-415-90764-0.) LC 
95-46613. 

Herbert Schiller, professor emeritus of 
communication at the University of Cali-
fornia at San Diego, is sounding an alarm 
regarding a lurking social crisis that has 



486 College & Research Libraries 

grave implications for society. He states 
that the information crisis-"inequality 
of access and impoverished content of in-
formation"-is "deepening [an] already 
pervasive national social crisis." He con-
tinues: "The ability to understand, much 
less overcome, increasingly critical na-
tional problems is thwarted, either by a 
growing flood of mind-numbing trivia 
and sensationalist material or by an ab-
sence of basic, contextualized social in-
formation." Specifically, he asserts that 
the information crisis increases social in-
equality and intensifies other national 
social crises as well. 

Schiller is eminently qualified t.o 
make such an observation, having been 
professor of economics and communi-
cations at the University of Illinois, and 
preceding that, chair of the Department 
of Social Studies at the Pratt Institute, 
Brooklyn. He also has authored and ed-
ited numerous articles and books in the 
area of mass communication research, 
including: Mass Communications and the 
American Empire (1969, 1992); The Mind 
Managers (1973); Communication and Cul-
tural Domination (1976); Culture Inc.: The 
Corporate Takeover of Public Expression 
(1989); and The Ideology of International 
Communications (1992). · 

The primary source of the information 
crisis Schiller identifies in the book is the 
interaction of the "freewheeling corpo-
rate enterprise system" with the 
"unprecedentedly influential and pri-
vately-owned information apparatus." In 
the pivotal first chapter, Schiller explains 
key mechanisms and structural determi-
nants of the free market. Two important 
features of the free market are salient and 
play decisive roles in maintaining corpo-
rate control over the media/information 
sphere. First is the concentration of own-· 
ership of the cultural industry, which in-
cludes film, television, radio, music, edu-
cation, theme parks, publishing, and 
computerization. This concentration 
leads to vertical integration of the indus-
try, thereby linking these sectors and ere-

September 1996 

ating even greater power in the market-
place. As a result, products cluster 
around the center and the "space for a 
free marketplace of ideas narrows." The 
second significant feature is the selection 
and training process used for "culture in-
dustry managers." 

Schiller draws particular attention to 
the class-based educational system as the 
foundation for the culture industry's se-
lection process. Schooling generally 
"impart[s] outlooks and beliefs that sup-
port rather than challenge basic institu-
tions, [especially] the political process 
and the structure of the economy." These 
values, internalized in school, bear fruit 
later in life where successful candidates 
for promotion are "distinguished by a 
lifelong unquestioning goalongism," 
called consensus-building in today' s 
business parlance. The result is that the 
principal actors in the economy (as well 
as those librarians who take the corpo-
ration as a model for the nonprofit sec-
tor) are remarkably similar, quite homo-
geneous in thought, and can be counted 
on to act within the "commanding logic 
of corporate business." 

Schiller also points out that advertis-
ing is crucial to the operation of the 
corporate marketplace. It "reaffirms daily 
... that consumption is the definition of 
democracy." We have the freedom to 
choose any, or none, of the products of-
fered. Cultural production at this point is 
market-driven and the main purpose of 
the media/informational sphere be-
comes selling goods. Most important, 
Schiller emphasizes that cultural outputs 
must satisfy not only advertiser prefer-
ences for products that offer ideological 
comfort and support to the prevailing 
social order, but also stockholder de-
mands for higher and higher profits. 
Thus, cultural products that deal with 
social issues from a critical perspective 
are rarely promoted. 

In summation, Schiller demonstrates 
how the corporate domination of culture 
with its transnational character works to 



drown out any alternative voices striv-
ing for the attention of a larger national 
audience. The free market, .transformed 
by the demands of corporate business 
logic, does not operate for the public 
good: it breaks down the social fiber of 
community, and when the market be-
comes global, it breaks down the legiti-
mate authority of the state. 

This book, although not Schiller at his 
best, deserves a wide audience among 
academic librarians of all stripes, espe-
cially those in smaller, nonresearch li-
braries with limited budgets for collec-
tion development. He explains very well 
how the corporate free market and its 
particular ideology work to limit infor-
mation available for a national dis-
course. Schiller correctly identifies, as 
have Buchanan and Gingrich, that "Cul-
tural, media, and informational issues 
already are, and increasingly will be, 
centers of social dispute." Academic li-
brarians, as culture managers, can and 
must play a role in this social struggle if 
their libraries are to remain centers of true 
research and scholarship. 

Schiller's style and the book's organi-
zation are more typical of a series of in-
troductory lectures than a tightly struc-
tured argument. Consequently, the reader 
must work hard for clarity in certain ar-
eas. It is troubling that such an impor-
tant book has no bibliography and that 
the index is minimal, chiefly limited to 
proper nouns. Concepts such as "ideol-
ogy" and "hegemony" are used in the 
text without descriptions or even brief 
definitions. With a more thorough index, 
the reader could massage the text for a 
clearer understanding of such subjects. 

Schiller does provide sufficient docu-
mentation to support his arguments 
throughout. Endnotes follow each chap-
ter but, on occasion, are less than ideal. 
For example, note 11 in chapter 5 gives 
the reference "Gore speech." A close 
reading of the section surrounding the 
note gives clues to chase it down. (Notes 
like this, however, are one of the things 

Book Reviews 487 

that make being a reference librarian fun.) 
Still, despite these mechanical shortcom-
ings, the book is worth reading. Indeed, 
it is a welcome introduction to a crucial 
area in the sociology I anthropology of 
information.-Noei D. Young, Rehoboth, 
Massachusetts. 

Webster, Frank. Theories of the Informa-
tion Society. London: Routledge (Inter-
national Library of Sociology), 1995. 
257p. $17.95. (ISBN 0-415-10574-9.) LC 
94-49029. 

The central question in this book by a 
professor of sociology at Oxford Brookes 
University is whether the information 
society in which we now live is a new 
kind of society, different in character from 
any previous society, or whether it isba-
sically just an "informatized" version of 
a familiar old kind of society. This sounds 
as if it ought to matter to information pro-
fessionals, who could be expected to ben-
efit from occupying a strategic position 
in a novel kind of society. Webster's book 
will do nothing to encourage such hopes; 
he is skeptical of any claim of novelty for 
the information society. 

He begins by reviewing, and quickly 
dismissing, accounts of the transition to 
a new type of society that are expressed 
in terms of quantitative increases in in-
formation technology, information pro-
duction, information occupations, infor-
mation transfer, or exposure to media 
culture. He turns for illumination on the 
significance of information in modern 
society to a variety of social theories and 
theorists. Few of these are explicitly con-
cerned with the idea of an information 
society, but all are relevant in various 
ways. Daniel Bell's theory of a post-
industrial society gets sharply criticized. 
Herbert Schiller's critique of the domi-
nance of market criteria and corporate 
self-interest in information development, 
and of class inequalities in access to in-
formation, gets a very sympathetic ex-
position. So does Anthony Giddens's ac-
count of the nation-state's longstanding