Book reviews

Organization scholars are interested in the new spheres where organizations expand their presence as a cultural form of collective action (Bromley & Meyer, 2015). Yet, there are social worlds (Strauss, 1978) in which organizations were always present but they did not gain much attention from researchers. The domain remaining in the shadows in many societies is sex work. Moreover, the organizational aspect of sex work is also under-researched. Paid sex as an interaction between a client and sex worker often requires an organizational context and involvement of third parties. Prostitution is an object of – usually strongly negative – moral valuations and therefore in many states it is either penalized or present in the gray area of social activities. For social sciences, it is usually framed as a social problem or aspect of criminal activities. For this reason, it is taken up as a topic of studies by sociologists of deviance or criminologists. Izabela Ślęzak in her research monograph ‘The work of female sex workers in escort agencies’, written in Polish, applied the approach of grounded theory and decided to reconstruct the social definitions of prostitution used by sex workers and other participants of the sex industry, not the moral valuations of outsiders.1 In order to achieve this aim, Ślęzak conducted a qualitative study of ‘escort agencies’ [agencja towarzyska] in the Polish city of Łódź, in which she, over the course of four years, has been observing four organizations and conducted interviews with 77 informants (56 of whom were sex workers). The theoretical framework of the study was the grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006) and the tradition of symbolic interactionism (Blumer, 1969). Ślęzak looks from a micro-perspective at the day-to-day organization, watches the interactions between members of the organizations, listens to the organizational stories and relations about the organizational context. The book consists of nine chapters, the first three of which present the background: (i) the historical and legal context of prostitution; (ii) review of the literature on prostitution; (iii) and research design. The next six chapters outline the results of the study and each chapter is devoted to another aspect of the day-to-day organization: (iv) management of the escort agency; (v) interactions among sex workers; (vi) interactions between sex workers and clients in public zones of escort agencies; (vii) interactions between sex workers and clients in private zones of escort agencies; (viii) issues of security; and (ix) the process of getting involved in the work. Transparency of the methodology applied is a very strong aspect of Ślęzak’s work. The 29 pages long chapter presents methodological assumptions of the grounded theory, techniques of observation and interviewing, and the possible limitations of her data. In the case of shadow social worlds, 884036OSS0010.1177/0170840619884036Organization StudiesBook Reviews book-reviews2019