Work, Family, and Leisure: Uncertainty in a Risk Society

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Work, Family, and Leisure explores the plans and aspirations of twenty-something law and MBA students for work, family, and leisure. Through in-depth interviews, Robert Orrange captures the hopes, dreams, anxieties, and fears that these professional-school students have about their own personal futures. By placing the study in the context of major late 20th century social transformations, Orrange illuminates the complexity and uncertainty of the life planning process in today's risk society. These future professionals expect to achieve solid success in their careers, but are wary of the demands and uncertainties associated with the big-time. However, the men and women also seem to hold asymmetrical views about equality in marriage, and some of the women envision that they may end up relying upon friends as a family support system. In spite of these uncertainties, most of these future lawyers and business professionals hope to derive satisfaction and meaning through their families, and they anticipate integrating leisure time with spouses and children as opposed to colleagues and clients. Their privatized images of the good life define a life politics that seemingly eschews commitments to the larger societal community-a stance that may prove unsustainable in light of the growing economic risks confronting the middle class today. In the end, Orrange argues that the professional middle class may have to emerge from their private havens and champion the cause of a good society for all if they are to preserve their own cherished way of life.

Reviews

Robert Orrange has written an extremely useful and insightful book about how young professionals-to-be view the interaction of work and family in their futures in a society characterized by increasing uncertainly in both of those facets of life. His qualitative interview materials nicely complement the large body of quantitative evidence on work-family relations, and he interprets the evidence with an unusual degree of theoretical sophistication. -- Norval Glenn
A strategically focused contribution to life course research.... Work, Family, and Leisure is a solid step on the way to addressing these big (and often elided) questions about risk and the life course. * American Journal of Sociology *
Goal-oriented, cautious, and adaptive, the young professional couples Orrange describes try to build private fortresses of certainty in an increasingly high risk society. Unwittingly they reveal the enormous emotional cost of adapting to a shaky neo-liberal dream instead of collectively reforming it. A quietly disturbing portrait of life in the new middle class. -- Arlie Russell Hochschild, author of The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work

Author Bio

Robert M. Orrange is an associate professor of sociology at Eastern Michigan University. He was formerly a postdoctoral associate at the Cornell Employment and Family Careers Institute. Prior to entering academia, he was an operations manager for a Fortune 500 company. He is currently at work on the forthcoming Individuals and Organizations: A Pragmatist-Weberian Synthesis.