Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Pages: 272
Trim: 6¼ x 9
978-0-7425-4791-9 • Paperback • March 2007 • $51.00 • (£39.00)
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.
Chapter 1 Introduction: How Do We Manage the Uncertainty of It All?
Chapter 2 The Social Context: Mapping the Terrain of Our Transformed Social Landscape
Chapter 3 Work: The 'Big Time' Isn't All It's Cracked Up to Be
Chapter 4 Family: The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same
Chapter 5 Leisure: It's 'All in the Family'
Chapter 6 Finding Meaning: Keep the Home Fires Burning
Chapter 7 Conclusions: Risk Society Meets the Life Politics of Neoliberalism
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, May 2008
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