The inability of standard political science approaches to fully capture dramatic processes of social change has led to a flurry of articles and books attempting to explain the South African transformation. Authors who underline the surprising nature of this transformation most often miss the struggles and the incremental and monumental processes of change that had been taking place in communities across the country. In short, they focus on relatively static conceptions of institutions over more dynamic accounts of agency that capture the actions not only of elite political actors but also of ordinary South Africans.

Jamie Frueh avoids these pitfalls by focusing his analysis of transformation upon an investigation of the political identities of actors. Within this critical constructivist approach, popular understandings of identity and identity labels become the basis for investigating social change. This innovative approach offers the possibility for a more fluid and complex understanding of social change than that which an individualist or structuralist perspective can offer. While the author stresses the importance of context and the danger of universalist approaches, he does offer this study as an example of the promise of an identity label approach to investigating social change in other contexts.

In order to investigate shifts in identity, Frueh chooses three significant, contentious periods in South Africa's larger transformation process: the Soweto uprising in 1976, the mobilization in response to constitutional changes in 1983–84, and crime in postapartheid society. It is interesting that the author does not include a case study between 1990 and 1994, often narrowly defined as “the transition period”; although Frueh correctly notes that much has been written on this short period, he does not sufficiently explain why he excludes it from his analysis (except for a very cursory discussion of negotiations and violence on pp. 138–39) or consider how this exclusion may affect his conclusions.

For each of the three cases, Frueh investigates the struggle over the labeling of actors and their actions. In the case of Soweto 1976, the South African media describe riots occurring across the country, the apartheid government depicts a conspiracy led by a small group of insurgents, and the evolving antiapartheid movement defines a popular uprising. As the majority of South Africans, and increasingly outsiders as well, come to view these events as a popular uprising in response to very real and justified grievances, a heightened sense of activism, agency, and possibility for change is born. During the constitutional reform process, Frueh identifies media accounts that highlight increasing social divisions and debate, a government seeking to champion controlled reform, and a now-explicit antiapartheid movement promoting the concept of “people's power.” In the postapartheid period, he moves to investigate discourses on crime, using people's stories as a way of uncovering their understandings of their own identity and that of others. Here, once again, Frueh offers three perspectives: the media, which frame the discourses on crime; the government, which seeks to construct authority; and anticrime movements, which respond to the consistently high levels of criminal violence.

Frueh argues that the transformation of any social order is an “overwhelmingly complex phenomenon” (p. 169), which makes it impossible to study the transformation as a whole. This is certainly true. The question then becomes whether or not Frueh's work has offered new insights into this complex process. By investigating competing discourses during each period, he has effectively demonstrated how the rhetorical construction of identities changed from one period to the next, providing a new perspective on the breadth and depth of social change in South Africa. But, in designing his inquiry, the author has placed too much emphasis on some members of society over others, limiting the reader's understanding of some of the important contestations over identity that occurred within the majority of the population.

Across each of these cases, the third category is consistently too broad and becomes a catchall of sorts for widely varying forms of popular dissent. In the second case, for example, Frueh emphasizes the different perspectives within white communities (reflected in the media) concerning the new constitution, but not enough emphasis is placed upon conflicts occurring among competing actors claiming to represent the majority. Although he mentions the contrast between Black Consciousness and Charterist approaches and the presence of churches, labor unions, communists, the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), and Inkatha as claimants, he largely ignores the highly contentious interactions between these actors by simply concluding that Charterism won the day (pp. 126–27). In emphasizing the construction of new understandings and identities, the analysis unfortunately misses the great uncertainty of the time and the contingent nature of any shift in identities. This limits a fuller understanding of the shape of present-day society and the ongoing struggles over the future of the nation.

Despite these criticisms, Frueh offers an innovative and productive approach to the investigation of social change that is sure to promote fruitful debate. His very understanding of agency as residing in identity labels rather than actors is extremely provocative, and his argument that no one “is an agent all or even most of the time” (p. 171) leads the author of the book's forward, Nicholas Onuf, to clearly state his disagreement (p. xvii). Frueh's approach suggests that actors must have some legitimacy or social recognition to embody agency, but he does not fully address the crucial question: at what point does an actor become an agent? How do the powerless take on agency?

Although his conclusions concerning the South African case, where he sees a shift in identity labels and with them a shift “from race- to issue-centered politics” (p. 157) and a diffusion of power (p. 178), may be a bit optimistic, his analysis offers much to consider not only for specialists on South Africa but also those interested in processes of social change more broadly. In Political Identity and Social Change, Frueh has clearly and importantly demonstrated the power of identity labels, both in the ways they are constructed and reconstructed and in the ways in which these constructions then impact future actions or ideas as to which actions are appropriate or possible.