The Changing Landscape of Work and Family in the American Middle Class: Reports from the Field

(Paperback)

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This collection explores the dynamics of the modern, middle-class American family and its near-constant state of transition. The editors introduce the book by situating it within the context of work, family, and ethnographic research on middle-class families in the United States. Emerging and established scholars contributed chapters based on their original field research, following each chapter with a personal reflection on doing field work. The volume concludes with an original essay by Kathryn Dudley, an anthropologist who has spent decades studying the intersections of work, family, and class in American culture. As a whole, the volume highlights how culture shapes family life amid shifting social and economic landscapes. The authors, working in the fields of anthropology and sociology, observed daily life at workplaces and in homes, interviewing people about their work, their children, and their ideas about what makes a good family. They report on their fieldwork in essays rich with the detail of everyday life, revealing the fascinating diversity of American middle-class families through chapters about gay co-father families, African American stay-at-home mothers, first-time fathers, rural refugees from corporate America, well-off white mothers, Taiwanese immigrant churches, the fetal ultrasound, and more. The Changing Landscape of Work and Family in the American Middle Class is an excellent text for classes in anthropology, sociology, American culture, family studies, work and family, and gender studies.

Reviews

In this beautifully rendered collection, we peer through so many different windows of American family life. Rural North Dakota parents reverently passing on farm values, if not the farm itself, to their children. Silicon Valley hi-tech family workers share long hours and high hopes in their electronic cottage. Affluent corporate executives and their stay-at-home wives still can't control influences beyond the gates to their communities. Refugees from corporate life set up a small town pie shop hoping to find a better way to mix work and family life. The superb studies gathered here reflect the many ways families are trying to build the American Dream on an ever more eroded and shifting landscape. -- Arlie Hochschild, author of The Commercialization of Intimate Life and The Time Bind
A fresh and engaging set of ethnographic accounts the reader is quickly immersed in a gallery of diverse and vivid portraits of everyday work and family life. I will be recommending this book to colleagues! -- Kerry Daly, professor and chair, department of family relations and applied nutrition, University of Guelph in Canada
The sheer variety of people and circumstances found in the 13 substantive chapters is striking. -- Robert Drago, Professor LSER & WS, Penn State
Useful for students....Recommended. * Choice Reviews *
This edited collection contributes to the under-researched social reality that middle class families are not monolithic. As a whole this collection of ethnographic studies provides rich portraits of the changing cultural landscape of work and family life.With employment in flux and family membership no longer conventional these authors offer us a fresh look at diversity in the middle of the social class structure. A terrific read this collection will make a wonderful supplement for social sciences work/family courses... -- Rosanna Hertz, Luella LaMer Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies and Chair of Women's Studies at Wellesley College

This edited collection contributes to the under-researched social reality that middle class families are not monolithic. As a whole this collection of ethnographic studies provides rich portraits of the changing cultural landscape of work and family life. With employment in flux and family membership no longer conventional these authors offer us a fresh look at diversity in the middle of the social class structure.
A terrific read this collection will make a wonderful supplement for social sciences work/family courses.

-- Rosanna Hertz, Luella LaMer Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies and Chair of Women's Studies at Wellesley College
The case studies examined here make this book an informative resource; it could be particularly useful as a course text since many chapters include brief but good scholarly and historical backgrounds, such as histories of working mothers in African American communities and shifting attitudes toward children and parenting in the United States. * Anthropology of Work Review *

Author Bio

Lara Descartes is assistant professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at the University of Connecticut. Elizabeth Rudd is a research affiliate of the Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life and research scientist at the University of Washington, Seattle.