The Courteous Power: Japan and Southeast Asia in the Indo-Pacific Era

vidual level, can help reproduce patterns of socioeconomic disadvantage in the aggregate’’ (p. 226), yet the book rarely engages with contemporary classics such as Boltanski and Chiapello’s New Spirit of Capitalism (2005) or Sennett’s Culture of the New Capitalism (2007), the former of which directly addresses the relation between capitalism and discourses of ‘‘passion,’’ ‘‘expression,’’ and ‘‘participation’’ that mask precarity and exploitation. My sense is that The Trouble with Passion might have pushed sociological theory further had Cech established a clear dialogue with contemporary theories of neoliberal subjectivities. Instead, Cech mostly chooses to remain close to her data— perhaps too close and too anchored to sociology’s classical canon. She does reference research by Fleming and Sturdy (2011) on how invitations to express function as a mode of controlling labor, as well as McRobbie’s analysis of ‘‘creativity’’ discourse at work (2016). Focusing on themes as they emerge from her data in conjunction with Weber and Marx, Cech shows how the ‘‘Passion Principle’’ influences hiring decisions, but I cannot help but wonder how much further Cech’s analysis might have gone had she engaged with more relevant theorizations of neoliberalism’s cultural dimension. Taking the above into consideration, Cech provides sociologists of work and labor as well as sociologists of education and stratification with much-needed analysis of passion as a neoliberal discourse that reproduces and obscures structural inequality. Effectively, The Trouble with Passion demonstrates the ubiquity of this ‘‘new’’ spirit of capitalism in the United States. Now more than ever, sociologists, our students, and our publics need books like this one, books that show us the hidden troubles embedded in neoliberalism’s inviting promises of ‘‘passion’’ and ‘‘freedom.’’