In this volume, Nikolas Coupland collects contributions from twenty sociolinguists and brackets them with an introductory and concluding chapter of his own, as well as reflective chapters on the development and state of the art from the perspective of the current editor of Journal of Sociolinguistics (Allan Bell) and a recent editor of Language in Society (Barbara Johnstone).

Coupland's introductory chapter establishes the book's general alignment between sociolinguistic practice and theory and anthropological practice and theory. This is reinforced by the choice of contributors: among the numerous affiliations that they have, there are six affiliations to linguistics (qua linguistics) and 18 to other subjects in the humanities. This is not an aspersion on the authors’ contributions to sociolinguistics, but noting this helps to understand what kinds of theory the book predominantly deals with and the rhetorical flavour one can expect.

The first part (Theorising social meaning) might equally well be called ‘Rediscovering Peirce’ since every chapter (Michael Silverstein – The ‘push’ of Lautgesetze, the ‘pull’ of enregisterment; Penelope Eckert – Variation, meaning and social change; Alexandra Jaffe – Indexicality, stance and fields in sociolinguistics; Susan Gal – Sociolinguistic differentiation) all refer to C.S. Peirce's work on signs. Part two (Language, markets and materiality) is anchored by Monica Heller and Alexandre Duchêne (Treating language as an economic resource: discourse, data and debate) and Helen Kelly-Holmes (Theorising the market in sociolinguistics). The content in Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall (Embodied sociolinguistics) sits oddly here. Part three (Sociolinguistics, place and mobility) is a particularly cohesive unit with Alistair Pennycook (Mobile times, mobile terms – the trans-super-poly-metro movement), David Britain (Sedentarism and nomadism in the sociolinguistics of dialect) and Jan Blommaert (From mobility to complexity in sociolinguistics theory and method). This section also succeeds particularly well in outlining substantive points of debate. Pennycook's and Britain's chapters offer critical self-reflection as well as critique of others. Part four (Power, mediation and critical sociolinguistics) explores language and society at different levels of scale, drawing instructive parallels between attitudes and power at the level of the individual and institutionalised attitudes and power. Sari Pietikäinen (Critical debates: discourse, boundaries and social change) considers the status of Sami in Finland; Jannis Androutsopoulos (Theorizing media, mediation and mediatization) considers personal and institutional points of connection with mediated language; and Ben Rampton (Foucault, Gumperz and governmentality: interaction, power and subjectivity in the twenty-first century) ranges from interpersonal code-switching to state surveillance. Part five (Sociolinguistics, contexts and impacts) consists of Lionel Wee (Are there zombies in language policy? Theoretical interventions and the continued vitality of (apparently) defunct concepts), Ceil Lucas and Robert Bayley (Quantitative sociolinguistics and sign languages: Implications for sociolinguistic theory) and Diana Eades (Theorising language in sociolinguistics and the law: (How) can sociolinguistics have an impact on inequality in the criminal justice system?). These chapters have disparate content, but actually work together well. All three successfully build reflective debate into the chapter – the authors present the merits and challenges of their approach and review problems associated with their work. Along with the earlier chapters by Pennycook and Britain, these are essential to the book's claim to present debate(s).

The first chapter in part six (The evolution of sociolinguistic theory) maintains this self-reflection. Allan Bell (Succeeding waves: Seeking sociolinguistic theory for the twenty-first century) eschews slogans and soapbox to provide a panoptic view of trends in the field. Balance and measure are central to this chapter – there is a measured review of what has pushed and pulled the field of sociolinguistics in different directions, and a balanced appraisal of its demonstrable achievements to date against that which may seem attractive simply by virtue of its novelty. Bell makes a case for slowing the swing of the pendulum from extremes which risk hobbling progress in the field. Barbara Johnstone (Language theory in contemporary sociolinguistics: beyond Dell Hymes?) is a useful review of the major research themes that emerged during the course of her editorship of the journal Hymes founded. Coupland's concluding chapter (Five Ms for sociolinguistic change) recapitulates his recent arguments for more consequential measures of the mutually constitutive dynamics linking language and society.

The audience for this book is quite specialised. Most chapters assume the reader has extensive familiarity with not just the history of and current trends in sociolinguistic research but also is able to make connections between highly abstract discussions of theory and existing bodies of research. Theory has multiple meanings in the OED, including: ‘abstract knowledge or the formulation of it’ and this is probably the most consistent sense in which different chapters of this book operationalise theory. Aside from the chapters by Jaffe, Heller & Duchêne, Androutsopoulos, Lucas & Bayley and Eades, there are no data or examples to ground the reader. Generally, in linguistics, theory is invoked in order to explain something that has been observed (whether the silences in a courtroom, the use of anomalous spellings on the internet or the lowering of a hand shape when signing know). It is a little unfortunate that such a lengthy consideration of theory in sociolinguistics might leave a reader with the impression that data and theory can be partitioned, when in fact, their relationship is another one that is ‘reflexive’ and ‘mutually constitutive’. The chapters most likely to be useful to general readers are those that are transparent cases of academic debate, that is, where there is an argument or discussion in which the case for (at least) two (apparently) incompatible points of view are weighed against each other (I noted these above).

The strong connections with anthropological theory provide one perspective on the provenance of and directions for sociolinguistics: one that is likely to sit well with readers of this journal. Of course, a grassroots critique of sociolinguistic theory might well have started from more fundamental questions, such as ‘What is (sociolinguistic) theory for? Why do we need it?’ It seems to me that in sociolinguistics we expect quite diverse things of theory and it might have been helpful to canvas this before opening the floor. Among other things, we seem to expect good theory: (i) To guide us in forming new questions which keep us moving forward (i.e. not just rehashing existing questions with new terminological apparatus); (ii) To give some precision to basic concepts (so arguments and differences don't become aridly at cross-purposes); (iii) To suggest falsifiable hypotheses about the relationship between language and society (and this may dispose us – and others – to treat sociolinguistics as a more rigorous or scientific enterprise); and (iv) To reflect the inherent interdisciplinarity of the field, so that it may open up new connections in service to (i)-(iii).

A number of meaty problems with sociolinguistic theory are raised in this book, and which readers are likely to revisit in their own work. Several chapters (from Coupland's introduction to Bell's synthetic review) note the turn from the 1980s to social relativism and to constructionist analytic approaches. Only Bell explicitly critiques what this might mean for the field – how the privileging of individual perspectives might be aligned with the laissez-faire, anti-structuralist philosophies that characterise neoliberalism. Pietikäinen's explication of carnival as a basis for analysis critiques not only the social facts but the kinds of voices sociolinguistics has traditionally prioritised or excluded.

Some theoretical gaps in the book must be intentional editorial decisions: only Eckert and Lucas & Bayley attempt to connect with formal linguistic theory. (Silverstein's chapter on the Neogrammarians is primarily a historical view of their role in the growth of sociolinguistics.) Bell observes that social facts are both free and fettered; but this is also true of the linguistic side of sociolinguistics. Linguistic forms are also both free (in a Saussurean sense), and fettered by virtue of being part of a system, so, for me, this was the single biggest loss in the book's coverage. Eckert's explication of how implicitness, underspecification and combinativeness underlie social meaning is an important foundation for further work on social meaning, and she also provides a particularly clear account of the mechanisms that link variation at the level of the individual and society. Other theory is even more marginal. Only four chapters (Silverstein, Eckert, Britain and Lucas & Bayley) reference Weinreich, Labov and Herzog's (Reference Weinreich, Labov, Herzog, Lehmann and Malkiel1968) classic work even though this is arguably the first manifesto for a theory of sociolinguistics. Connections between sociolinguistics and grammaticalisation theory are peripheral; Trudgill's recent work (e.g. Reference Trudgill2011) on sociolinguistic typology is not mentioned at all. The recent confederacies to emerge between sociolinguists and language evolution are likewise absent. So, too, are connections between sociolinguistics and theories about memory and attention.

Coupland's choice of authors is a principled one; it provides the reader with an extended argument in favour of the directions he believes it will be most productive for sociolinguistics to take in the future. The existential breadth of sociolinguistics (which as several contributions point out was apparent in the earliest works by both Labov and Hymes) clearly makes any attempts to shoehorn the field into one path or destiny untenable. I might wish for even more, but I can still celebrate the deep thought and manifest contribution that the authors in this book have so generously shared.