The Tumbleweed Society: Working and Caring in an Insecure Age - Softcover

The Tumbleweed Society offers a subtle, brilliant look at how people craft a sense of ethical purpose in an era of laissez-faire institutions, where the community has little to offer and financial security can vanish overnight. It's also a riveting read, rich with fascinating human stories. (Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Bright-Sided and Nickel and Dimed)

The Tumbleweed Society provides a fascinating and original account of the ways that work insecurity seeps into the family lives of the millions of Americans who can no longer count on stable employment. (Andrew Cherlin, Professor of Sociology and Public Policy, Johns Hopkins University)

Does the end of the lifelong, one-company career in America just affect work? Or does it, as Allison Pugh asks in this brilliantly illuminating book, influence how we address the possibility of grievous disappointment in intimate life too? Do we hedge our bets in love and work, or trustingly sacrifice in one or both realms, and risk feeling betrayed when a contract turns out to be 'unrequited'? The reader will find eye-opening answers on this central issue of our age. (Arlie Hochschild, author of The Outsourced Self and So How's the Family?)

The rise in precarious work during the past three decades has produced dramatic changes in both work and family life. But people have adapted to insecurity differently, depending on whether they are stably employed, have been laid off, or had to relocate. The Tumbleweed Society vividly describes the diversity of experiences that characterize the new era of precarity through the voices of those who have experienced a variety of work arrangements and family formations. (Arne L. Kalleberg, Kenan Distinguished Professor of Sociology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

Sociologist Pugh tries to connect the "two whirlwinds" of job insecurity and marital insecurity. She interviewed 88 parents of teenagers, mostly women, representing highly educated job changers, moderately educated job losers, and the moderately educated stably employed. Those at the top have the privilege of choice, riding the fluid economy for better opportunities. At the same time, they build a "moral wall" of stability around their marriages. (Choice)

Pugh challenges her readers to consider the implications of precarity beyond the workplace, that is, also in our home lives. Pugh successfully weaves together short quotes and stories, creating an intimate connection between the reader and her participants, and since she has 80 interviews, there is rich variation.One of the remarkable strengths of the book lies in Pugh's ability to consider a complex set of interlinking characteristics of her interviewees and generalize from them. (Beth Ann Hart, University of California, Davis, Social Service Review)

In The Tumbleweed Society, Allison Pugh offers a moving exploration of sacrifice, betrayal, defiance, and resignation, as people cope in a society where relationships and jobs seem to change constantly. Based on eighty in-depth interviews with parents who have varied experiences of job insecurity and socio-economic status, Pugh finds most seem to accept job insecurity as inevitable but still try to bar that insecurity from infiltrating their home lives. Rigid expectations for enduring connections and uncompromising loyalty in their intimate relationships, however, can put intolerable strain on them, often sparking instability in the very social ties they yearn to protect. By shining a light on how we prepare ourselves and our children for an uncertain environment, Pugh gives us a detailed portrait of how we compel ourselves to adapt emotionally to a churning economy, and what commitment and obligation mean in an insecure age.