Working Hard and Making Do
Surviving in Small Town America
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11097397 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Margaret Walsh (0000-0002-5320-8177), M Alexander Walsh (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2001 |
| Volume | 30 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 70 |
| Publication date | 2001-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | REVIEW |
| Review of | Working Hard and Making Do: Surviving in Small Town America, Nelson Smith, 1999 |
| Venue | Contemporary Sociology A Journal of Reviews (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0094-3061 • E-ISSN: 1939-8638 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.2307/2654358 |
| OpenAlex | W2064742004 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
The economic recovery of the 1990s brought with it a surge of new jobs, but the prospects for most working Americans improved little. Family income rose only slightly and the period witnessed a significant degradation of the quality of work as well as in what people could expect from their waged employment. In this book, Margaret K. Nelson and Joan Smith take a look inside the households of working-class Americans to consider how they are coping with large-scale structural changes in the economy, specifically how the downgrading of jobs has affected survival strategies, gender dynamics, and political attitudes. Drawing on both randomly distributed telephone surveys and in-depth interviews, Nelson and Smith explore the differences in the survival strategies of two groups of working-class households in a rural county: those in which at least one family member has been able to hold on to good work (a year-round, full-time job that carries benefits) and those in which nobody has been able to secure or retain steady employment. They find that households with good jobs are able to effectively use all of their labor power--they rely on two workers; they engage in on-the-side businesses; and they barter with friends and neighbors. In contrast, those living in families without at least one good job find themselves considerably less capable of deploying a complex, multi-faceted survival strategy. The authors further demonstrate that this difference between the two sets of households is accompanied by differences in the gender division of labor within the household and the manner in which individuals make sense of, and respond to, their employment
Geography · History · Rural development and sustainability · Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies
Understanding the Gender Gap in Small Business Success
Between Paid and Unpaid Work
Examining Husband-Wife Differences in the Meaning of Family Financial Support
Interrupting the Telos
The Significance of Employment for Chronic Stress and Psychological Distress among Rural Single Mothers
A Critical Review of Rural Poverty Literature
Care-ful Work
Underemployment in America
How pension system contributes to community participation in China
Sociology of Spatial Inequality, The
The Kids Still Come First
Diluting the Cesspool
Bend to Avoid Breaking
Coping with Rural Poverty
A Critical Evaluation of Romantic Depictions of the Informal Economy
A Critical Evaluation of Competing Conceptualizations of Informal Employment
A capabilities approach to austainable household livelihoods1With thanks to the Economic and Social Research Council for funding ‘Enterprising livelihoods in rural households
The Relationships between Mothers' Work Pathways and Physical and Mental Health
Beyond Market-Oriented Readings of Paid Informal Work
Childhood Adultification in Economically Disadvantaged Families
Evaluating the multifarious motives for acquiring goods and services from the informal sector in Central and Eastern Europe
Informality and survival in Ukraine's nuclear landscape
Work and Welfare Strategies among Single Mothers in Rural New England
Cultivating Community Self‐Help in Deprived Urban Neighborhoods
Evaluating the Cash-in-Hand Consumer Culture in the European Union
Beyond Marketization
The Workless Class? Economic Transformation, Informal Work and Male Working-Class Identity
Everybody knows him
Refiguring the nature of undeclared work
Re-thinking Monetary Exchange
Labor Force Participation Over the Life Course
Household, Gender, and Political Responses to Economic Downturn
Underemployment
Working Poverty across the Metro-Nonmetro Divide
Fostering community engagement and tackling undeclared work
Evaluating the Gender Variations in Off-the-Books Work
Spatial variations in the nature of undeclared work and its public policy implications
Declaring Welfare “Reform” a Success
Welfare and the Culture of Conservatism
Ongoing Challenges in the Understanding of Rural Poverty
The Double Register of History
The Challenge of Self-sufficiency
Accessing food resources
Bringing political economy into the debate on the obesity epidemic
Rural-urban variation in informal work activities in the United States
The low end of the gig economy
A Critical Evaluation of Public Policy Towards Undeclared Work in the European Union
Beyond the commodity economy
Exploring the Consequences of Gender Ideology—Work Discrepancies
Does Public Welfare Crowd Out Informal Safety Nets? Ethnographic Evidence from Rural Latin America
Because a Better World Is Possible
Participation in Household and Paid Labor
Tackling undeclared work in advanced economies
Families at Work
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |