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There are of course major issues surrounding the epistemological status of what counts as a "review" and about what my Foucauldian friends have helped us recognize as the power/knowledge nexus underlying any construction of a field of knowledge and knowing (see, e.g., Popkewitz & Brennan, 1998). While these are important concerns, my interest here is not quite so abstract. I want to employ the production and results of a specific commodity-AERA's annual volume, the Review of Research in Education-as an example of some of the ways reviews have specific politics both in how they construct their world and how they are received in determinate fields of power. In the space and time available I can only suggest some issues, the first of which will perhaps be more familiar conceptually to some of you, while the second may ask you to think more structurally about the "uses" of the products of reviews than you might be used to.
I served as editor of two volumes, 21 and 22, of the Review of Research in Education (Apple, 1995; 1997). In creating the plans for these two volumes of the Review of Research in Education, the entire editorial board had major discussions of what it meant to "synthesize" and "review" an area, especially contentious and politicized areas that were subject to conflicting ideological and epistemological commitments and understandings. With an understanding that the epistemological issues surrounding "what the data say" are quite complex, we sought for ways of demonstrating this complexity to the larger audience. The key to this was finding a mechanism that would enable readers of these books who may not have had either an interest or background in the epistemological debates to sense the issues and to see how they operated in real life. Thus, the editorial board and I chose one specific strategic intervention. We asked scholars with different "takes" on the conceptual and political tensions and tendencies in an area to review similar material. The area was a broad one, "Discourse and Education."
The results were more than a little interesting. One author, well-known for her analyses of the relationship between classroom discourse and learning, stressed internalist issues (Hicks, 1995). The other, someone also internationally wellknown, who had written extensively in the connections...