Book Review: Matt Dawson, Late Modernity, Individualization and Socialism: An Associational Critique of Neoliberalism

From their place of residence, friends and family, and eating alone. Each of these fields allows for analyses that bring together the individual with wider structural conditions. In Part I, the authors question the impact of globalization on personal life, identify crosscultural variations in living alone, providing a tentative structural account to explain differences by country, while also examining the biographies of living alone. This leads to a discussion of the relationships between solo-living, partnering and parenting. In Part II, the discussion moves on to examine how people who live alone understand home and their consumption practices inside (and outside) the home. Part III explores the social networks of participants, connections, proximity and distance to friends and family, and their relationship to place and community. The book concludes with a final chapter that presents a forecast for future trends and analysis of living alone. My overall feeling is that this book is an ambitious project. The literature discussed was wide-ranging – drawn from sociology, geography, social anthropology and other related disciplines – and the cross-cultural considerations – an inclusion that is largely without precedent – that the authors draw on, in my opinion, make this book a major reference text for the study of housing and residence as well as living alone. Alongside this rigorous scholarly commitment, the book is insightful and balanced in its interpretation of the interview material. In-depth interviews collected in the homes of particular participants were presented with an almost ethnographic sensibility that transported the reader into participants’ homes. This presentation was also notable for its sensitivity to people’s stories. What really struck me was the skill with which the authors presented this material to portray complexity and diversity without feeling the need to overburden this with theory. Perhaps unsurprisingly, my main criticism of the book relates precisely to its ambition. In its attempt to engage in the debates about globalization, identity and belonging on a range of different scales, transitions between large sections devoted to discussion of existing work and empirical data lacked fluidity. At times, this undermined the overall coherence of the narrative, which needed to be more clearly marked up to the reader throughout the book. I also felt that while many of the chapters concluded with a discussion that highlighted that the experience of living alone was shaped by class and gender, a more sustained and developed discussion would have strengthened the overall contribution of the book. Finally, the conclusion, while fascinating – drawing out the problems of living alone in relation to climate change, and also advocating for possible forms of cohousing and cooperative living – seemed a little bit tangential to the main contribution of the book. Given the diverse topics engaged throughout the book, the conclusion could have been better put to use in summarizing the findings and reiterating the main argument.