Description
Book SynopsisExplores the life plans of advanced law and MBA students for work, family, and leisure. This study contextualizes four ongoing social transformations, which include the individualism, the gender revolution, the rise of dual-career couples, and growing employment uncertainty.
Trade ReviewRobert 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
Table of ContentsChapter 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
