The British Journal of Sociology 2004 Volume 55 Issue 4 MacInnes (Centre d’Estudis Demografics, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona) (Corresponding author email: john.macinnes@ed.ac.uk) © London School of Economics and Political Science 2004 ISSN 0007-1315 print/1468-4446 online. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA on behalf of the LSE. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-4446.2004.00036.x The sociology of identity: social science or social comment? John MacInnes Robert W. Connell 2002 Gender Cambridge and Oxford: Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 184pp. £45.00 (hardback) £12.99 (paperback) Mary Daly and Katherine Rake 2003 Gender and the Welfare State: Care,Work and Welfare in Europe and the USA Cambridge and Oxford: Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 212pp. £50.00 (hardback) £17.99 (paperback) Mary Evans 2003 Gender and Social Theory Buckingham: Open University Press 138pp. £55.00 (hardback) £18.99 (paperback) Catherine Hakim 2003 Models of the Family in Modern Societies: Ideals and Realities Aldershot Ashgate Publishing Limited 280pp. £45.00 (hardback) £18.99 (paperback) Chris Haywood and Máirtín Mac An Ghaill 2003 Men and Masculinities Buckingham: Open University Press 190pp. £45.00 (hardback) £18.99 (paperback) Kath Woodward 2002 Understanding Identity London: Arnold 183pp. £46.00 (hardback) £15.01 (paperback) Although the style, subject matter and intended audience of these books are diverse, they share several concerns, such as how best to understand gender or how to conceptualize power, structure and inequality in multidimensional ways. Written by eminent scholars they all contain useful evidence and argu- ment. But they are also all testimony to some of the methodological and analytical confusion and weakness of contemporary sociology. The successive waves of postmodernism and the ‘cultural turn’ have eroded the discipline’s coherence, leaving the beach strewn with analytical flotsam and jetsam. One concept to survive the storm, however, which all these books deploy, is