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British Journal of Psychology (2016), 107, 199205

2016 The British Psychological Society
www.wileyonlinelibrary.com

Book reviews
Vital memory and affect: Living with a difficult past
By Steven Brown & Paula Reavey
New York, NY: Routledge, 2015. $49.95. ISBN 9780415684019

Steven D. Brown and Paula Reavey have established an original view on the kind of memories that
persons cannot live without. We all have vital memories, and we all live with some aspect of the past
that is difficult; however, some more than others find that difficult aspects of their past come to
define their capacities to act in the present. These are persons who find that the social viscosity of
their distressing experiences means that their memories get collected up more readily into the
dynamic currents of social relations. Brown and Reavey show that having experiences subject to
social remembering does not eradicate a persons agency; the vitality of memory lies in how people
learn to live well with a distressing past and turn the ambiguities of that past over into practices and
techniques of recollection that qualitatively extend relations and the social worlds the latter
compose.
In Chapter 1, we are introduced to the books central organizing metaphor, that of a river. Rivers
have the quality of appearing constant over time and space but, in following a broad tradition of
process philosophy, the same river is never identical on two occasions. The same, Brown and
Reavey suggest, is true of our experiences of the past: the most important aspect of recollecting vital
memories is setting specificity (p. 210). The authors follow observations from studies of river
geography to caution against linear understandings of environmental causality on experience and
memory. Rivers are constituted with tributaries and deltas (convergences and divergences);
nonetheless, over time the multiplicity of a river appears held together through persistence in a
singularity of form, expressed through the riverbed (or chreod, i.e., necessary pathway).
Similarly, over time, a rememberer may discover or invent ways to perform a memorial relation to a
difficult past that, in appearance, has the persistency of a chreod, but depends on the situational
resources and constraints made available in the present. The authors introduce the thematic
coordinates of their empirical work, noting seven themes: autobiography, agency, forgetting, ethics,
affect, space, and institutional practices.
Chapter 2 is epistemological in focus and deals with issues of method; more specifically, it
situates the authors approach to empiricism in contrast to a restricted view of psychological
experimentalism (citing, e.g., the work of Elizabeth Loftus). The authors trace a careful genealogy
that surveys their intellectual heritage through the psychological empiricism of Ebbinghaus, Tulving,
Conway, Nelson, Fivush, and Vygotsky, developments in discursive psychology, and, more recently,
distributed cognition. In Chapter 3, the authors clarify the ontological commitments that arise from
their river metaphor and epistemological stance. Brown and Reavey recall and combine ideas drawn
from the work of Gibson and Lewin to argue that experience is best understood in terms of situated
lifeworlds, that lifeworlds have relational and material elements that offer up invariant affordances
that enhance or constrain peoples capacities to act, or rather, their freedom to move upstream or
downstream in the flow of experience. The authors elaborate their view on lifeworlds with reference
to recent developments in affect theory. Lifeworlds are attended by atmospheres, emotions, bodily
200 Book reviews

capacities, and material affordances that pose themselves as propositions that have a lure to
transform, or affect, how a person stands in the flow of experience. It is this framework that Brown
and Reavey engage in Chapters 48 through discussion of empirical materials.
The empirical contexts explored are compelling; these are drawn from the lifeworlds of people
negotiating difficult settings including child sexual abuse (Chapter 4), adoptive parents (Chapter 5),
the 2005 London bombings (Chapter 6), forensic psychiatric units (Chapter 7), and a reminiscence
museum in a residential care home (Chapter 8). There is insufficient space here to fully address the
rich insights of each empirical domain, and I will therefore address the empirical chapters
thematically. The authors seven themes are apparent in each empirical study although some
become more prominent. For instance, in Chapters 5 and 7, the theme of institutions is important for
understanding how others participate in the management of a persons vital memories (the authors
refer to a managed accessibility to the past). Chapter 5 explores how adoptive parents carefully
manage access to objects that recall difficult pasts. Studying vital memories in this context demands
an expanded view on the social relations that shape vital memories in domestic lifeworlds,
including social service workers, birth, foster and adoptive parents, siblings, and schools. In Chapter
7, emotions and affects travel between boundaries in a medium security forensic mental health unit.
The authors observe an institutional regime of forgetting focussed on maintaining wellness (p.
169). For example, the innovation of administering medication through depot injections means that
relations of compliance are vested at a biomolecular level with the effect of institutionally forgetting
the autobiographical memorial qualities of life. Such innovations impact the kinds of affordances and
propositions that patients experience as boundaries, although porous, for forming social relations
within the mental health unit. Chapter 6 discusses interview data featuring survivor and bereaved
accounts of the 2005 London bombings. The authors focus is on how vital memories are recruited
into the collective fold of public discourse about the attacks. The authors note coping strategies; for
example, interviewees described how the bombings formed a kind of biographical watershed, even
formalizing the break as life 1 and life 2. What Brown and Reavey are sensitive to is how the logic of
media intrudes, hacks, or highjacks, the deeply personal life-space of recovering from trauma. The
authors refer to the torque of media when a survivor is called to speak to and on behalf of others;
meanwhile, journalists are looking to get a juicy story probe for life 1 details that they can make
relevant to the mnemonic work of shaping collective memories of the bombings.
What travels across Brown and Reaveys empirical sites is the figure of the person, a person that is
framed by various institutions as being with the memory of an irrevocable experience. As the
authors put it, [o]ne becomes the sort of person who is made over in the image of the institution (p.
165). If institutions participate in carving out a chreod-like version of persons with their difficult
past, it is through appeals to personhood that a life accesses the resources to transverse or, in
keeping with the authors metaphor, wade more freely against the upstream and downstream
currents in collective flows of experience. It follows that the authors ethical commitment lies at the
level of becoming persons, as personhood is evidently a valuable social resource for putting vital
memories in motion against the current of institutional memory management. Is this an adequately
expanded view on memory? Clearly it is for the empirical purposes of investigating how ordinary
people experience their pasts shaping their presents and futures. However, what would a
psychological view on vital memory and affect consist of if it were to be expanded beyond a
(predominantly Western) conception of personhood? The supreme appeal of Brown and Reaveys
conceptual and empirical work lies in how they afford ways for psychology to study memory beyond
the life-space of the person, to ask how person and environment, body and ecology, life and cosmos,
topologically fold and extend to shape and actualize possible worlds. And so the authors serve a
compelling account why vital memories challenge received methodological and ontological
certainties in psychology, and therefore matter for academic and clinical psychologists alike. Vital
memories disrupt and redistribute accessibilities to the past, and the legitimacies for so doing, and so
invariably carry consequences for advocates and activists. These memories confer and contort
power relations, meaning that service users and their psychiatrists, policymakers, and strategy
developers must question the efficacy and violence of their boundary objects, such as deficit and
extremity models of non-normative memory practices. The book provides a toolkit for enhancing
 Book reviews 201

sensibilities to the contingency and ethics of vital memories in institutional settings that will benefit
actors from a variety of backgrounds to better face the challenges of making lives affected by difficult
pasts more liveable and futures more desirable. For those of us less directly touched by this project,
Brown and Reavey deal a forceful reminder (p. 46) that not just memory but actively remembering is
integral to what kind of person we have been, are now and can be in the future.

MATTHEW J. ALLEN (School of Management, University of Leicester, UK)

The Oxford handbook of organizational climate and culture

By Benjamin Schneider & Karen M. Barbera (Eds.)
New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2014. $240.00. ISBN 9780199860715

This Oxford Handbook contains 35 chapters divided into seven parts, so it provides a broad range of
perspectives on climate and culture in organizations. Although many of the chapters have an
academic focus and are based on scholarly research, there are dedicated sections that focus on
practice how the concepts are applied in contemporary organizations. As such, the volume would
likely appeal most to academic researchers who study and/or teach topics related to organizational
climate and culture (and organizational behaviour or industrialorganizational psychology more
broadly), but it could also be a comprehensive evidence-based resource for practitioners. This book
would be an excellent resource for a graduate-level course as well.
In Part One, the Handbooks editors Benjamin Schneider and Karen M. Barbera open their
introduction by defining organizational climate and culture as distinct, but somewhat overlapping,
concepts that comprise how employees experience their work context. The culture aspects
include values, beliefs, and assumptions that are transmitted through stories, myths, rituals, and the
socialization process (i.e., how people come to learn the ropes in the workplace). Organizational
climate, on the other hand, involves the social and behavioural atmosphere in the workplace
including policies, practices, and even leaders behaviours and how people make sense or meaning
out of what is expected, rewarded, and supported at work. Schneider and Barbera provide concise
working definitions of both constructs, and also call for increasing integration of climate and culture
in future research.
Next, Part Two of the Handbook concentrates on theory and research about microprocesses
(i.e., focusing on the individual) in organizations, which is the largest segment of the book, totalling
ten chapters. There is a chapter dedicated to staffing, which, the authors argue, has largely been
neglected in literature on climate and culture (and vice versa) despite the critical importance of
phenomena such as personenvironment fit. Aspects of performance are explored through
chapters on orientation and training (as a means of transmitting culture and creating a positive
climate), motivation (to create and sustain a performance-enhancing climate and culture), and
leadership (which is instrumental in developing and solidifying climate and culture). A chapter on
communication provides a review of meaning-making and interpretation through talk, dialogue,
conversation, writing, and other processes. As the chapters author describes, there are many lenses
that communications scholars have used to understand culture (e.g., symbolic performance,
narrative and textual reproduction, power, and politics), and some argue that communication is
inextricably linked (perhaps even simultaneous) to organizational culture, whereas the climate is a
consequence of communication practices. Later chapters in this section discuss the affective, or
emotional, side of culture (e.g., both positive and negative), and how climate and culture relate to
both productive and counterproductive behaviours at work (e.g., citizenship versus deviance), and
to employee stress and well-being (e.g., by exacerbating stressors or being a source of resilience).
Lastly, a chapter on understanding culture through big data provides a different perspective that
combines research and consulting, with in-depth case studies of three organizations. The authors
also observe a critical say-do gap between how organizational attributes are presented (such as on
websites or in leaders speeches) versus the lived reality of the practices that occur within the