Soybeans and Power: Genetically Modified Crops, Environmental Politics, and Social Movements in Argentina

view data presented that the authors obtained a surprising degree of honesty from relatively unguarded public-sector workers. But illustrating that even the most public of public-sector workplaces encounters a high degree of gatekeeping, some levels of access—and some interview topics—proved elusive or controversial. A union-organizing campaign within the Central Park Conservancy and suspicion about the authors’ intentions eventually led to the Parks Department instructing its employees to refrain from speaking with Krinsky and Simonet. But even with such obstacles, the authors marshal an impressive amount of qualitative data, enabling them to speak with great authority about the political, social, and organizational structure of parks-as-workplaces. The work is also strong theoretically. The chapters are organized around theoretically informed topics including labor markets, urban governance, and political economy. The authors’ focus is not so much on building new theory per se, but rather dialing macrolevel processes like neoliberalization and economic segmentation down to the micro level. The result is a book that is both highly intellectual and eminently readable. Researchers who work in these fields will find many moments of insight in the rich ethnographic data that Krinsky and Simonet so nicely analyze within their broader theoretical framing. In sum, Krinsky and Simonet’s Who Cleans the Park? is an important sociological work that should be read by scholars interested in urban governance, the changing dynamics of work, parks and public space, and New York City politics. Soybeans and Power: Genetically Modified Crops, Environmental Politics, and Social Movements in Argentina, by Pablo Lapegna. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. 227 pp. $27.95 paper. ISBN: 9780190215149.