Tumbleweed Society: Working and Caring in an Age of Insecurity - Hardcover

"Allison Pugh has written a thoughtful book on the realities of working and family life in the contemporary United States, and it is a wistful book without being nostalgic Pugh has provided a gripping, if depressing, portrayal of the ways the realities of work today affect our emotional lives and our family commitments. The book is only more relevant now that we are in the Trump era The Tumbleweed Society foregrounds the intimate-the work and family lives of women and men navigating this landscape-but Pugh's thoughtful analysis connects their stories and discourse to these broader concerns." --Contemporary Sociology "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

We live in a tumbleweed society, where job insecurity is rampant and widely seen as inevitable. Companies are transforming the way they organize work. While new working conditions offer gains for some workers, others lose out. Home life offers little respite: while diverse types of families are more accepted than ever before, stability is increasingly lacking in our intimate lives.

In The Tumbleweed Society, sociologist Allison Pugh examines the ways we navigate questions of commitment and flexibility at work and at home in a society where insecurity has become the norm. Drawing on 80 in-depth interviews with three groups of parents who vary in their experiences of job insecurity and family structure, Pugh explores how people are adapting to the new culture of insecurity and how these adaptations themselves affect what we can expect from each other.

Faced with perpetual insecurity both at work and at home, people construct stronger walls between the two, expecting little or nothing from their jobs and placing nearly all of their expectations for fulfilling connections on their intimate relationships. This trend, Pugh argues, often has the effect of making intimate lives even more fraught, reproducing the very tumbleweed dynamics they seek to check. Pugh shows that our experiences of insecurity shape the way we talk about obligations, how we interpret them as commitments we will or will not shoulder, how we conceive of what we owe each other―indeed, how we are able to weave the fabric of our connected lives.