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"For a widely dreaded, mundane task, organizing one's possessions has taken a surprising hold on our cultural imagination. For those with enough means and/or desperation, there are people who can be hired to help declutter. Here Carrie M. Lane introduces us to the world of professional organizers and offers new insight into the domains of work and home, forever entangled--especially for women. Organizers choose their profession out of a need for creativity, flexibility, and opportunities for growth that are increasingly difficult to find in the modern workplace, and the stories they tell about work with clients are fascinating. In that sense, organizing is a good job in an era of bad jobs, one that can help us see more clearly the limitations and disadvantages of many of the other forms of work available to Americans today. In a world where unhappy workers outnumber happy ones by two to one, most professional organizers love their work. But while this system of hiring women to perform the previously unpaid labor of other women assuages some of the pains of contemporary life, it also distracts us from systemic problems around the way Americans are expected to work today, both in paid positions and in their unpaid labors for the household. Ultimately, More Than Pretty Boxes shows that the way we live and work today is not working, especially not for women. There is a palpable "too muchness" to everyday life that demands an unsustainable level of work and worry. Organizers aren't the answer to this crisis, but through their career choices and their work with clients, organizers can help us better understand both the nature of the problem and the sorts of solace, support, and solutions that might help ease it"--Provided by publisher.
About the author
Carrie M. Lane is professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton. For more than two decades, she has conducted ethnographic and historical research on the changing nature of work in contemporary America. She is the author of the award-winning book
A Company of One: Insecurity, Independence, and the New World of White-Collar Unemployment and coeditor of
Anthropologies of Unemployment: New Perspectives on Work and Its Absence.
