"The water and the dunes, the open space, the seasons … I don't know.  You feel part of the outdoors up here.  More so than any place I've ever lived.  You feel like your life is not your home, the footprint of your house, your work.  You realize that it's bigger than that.  It’s a lot bigger than that.  Your life kind of expands.  It expands even into that old boat stored back in the woods …" 

Susan - Former Silicon Valley Software Company Executive - Speaking of the meaning of "place" since her relocation

"At a certain point in the corporation, you change your worth.  You trade in your career capital to benefit the company that you’re with.  You’re worth more to the company that you’ve been working for than you are on the street.  You get up to here [gestures a level with his hand near his face], but if you were to go looking for another job you don’t start there.  That’s just the way it works.  I think that corporate America takes advantage of that.  It’s the ‘golden handcuffs.’  And you have to have faith."

Jim - Former Southeastern Michigan Software Executive - Speaking of the meaning of "dependence"

"There was a great deal of pride. We were doing a great job. We had a really tight group ... it was a real team effort. And to watch that team fragment when [a project] was canceled ... it affects you to see that. [It] all started [when our division] was acquired [first by one company] and then by [another]. But back when [our company] started here we had a company campground up in the mountains. We had a park right adjacent to our plant. So if you're on a program, it was beer and pizza out in the recreational park. They had little merry-go-round's and mini-trains. So you had a relationship with co-workers beyond your project. It was like a real family situation for 30 years since the War and up until the late '80s. [Then] to see that go away ... the plant was sold, the park was closed and the campground sold ... just watching this crumble. It was hard. Now it’s the forces of business. It went from being really comfortable, you now, ‘I can make a career here and build good projects and meet good people’ to being like ... you feel adrift. Things that you depended on being there ... weren't. So do you allow yourself to be at the whim of whatever forces [are] at play ... or do you go do something about it?"

Mark - Former Engineer in the Defense Industry - Speaking about the end of an "implicit contract" between employer and employee

Changing Places: Life-style Migration, Refuge, and the Quest for Potential Selves in the Midwest's Post-industrial Middle Class

Feb 2000 - Dec 2002 ... Grand Traverse Region, Northwest Lower Peninsula of Michigan.

SUMMARY:  Middle-class families relocate to areas perceived to offer greater quality of life defined, in part, through enhanced sense of community, place, and opportunities for greater control over the circumstances of both work and family. A study of life-style migrants offers another perspective on contemporary strategies for renegotiating obligations of family, work, and community in the broader context of social and economic changes in America.

This ethnographic research project has involved in-depth interviewing, participant-observation of everyday life, and archival study in the communities of the Grand Traverse region.  The project ultimately included over 100 formal participants (defined as individuals with whom I had at least one 1.5 hour long interview).  While this number of participants allows me to assess the range of experiences, I worked most closely with a dozen or so families through on-going contact during the project.  These families form the more intimate core of this work.  It was primarily through my contact with these families in their homes and places of work that this story of life-style migration emerged and took shape.  It is within the range of life stories contained in my conversations with all project participants as a wider context and setting that these more detailed visions of life-style migrations unfold.

***

On a warm and breezy spring day a year following an afternoon spent conceiving this project at my desk back in Ann Arbor, I began chatting with a voluntary corporate refugee named Mark about becoming what some folks now know locally as "The Pie Guy." We are in his store across from the city fire department and on the main street that runs through Traverse City's historic downtown positioned at the bottom of Grand Traverse Bay. Mark smiles comfortably as he takes off his apron and emerges from behind the long counter. Beyond him several large racks are filled with cooling pies. Each shelf is labeled with appetizing names like "Old Mission Cherry," "Lakeshore Berry," "Farmer's Market Peach" and "Autumn Harvest Pecan."  His hands are dusted with flour as he presents me with a cup. While we sit sipping our locally roasted coffee and relax in the cozy, café-like corner within his busy pie shop, the bells on the door jingle in announcement of each customer's coming and going. We are surrounded by the rich smells of brewing coffee, baking fruit, and browning crust on this sunny afternoon which, after a lingering winter of cold and snow, seems full of the promise of long summer days. Basking in the warm glow, thoughtful expressions on our faces as we grip our steaming drinks, this life-style migrant begins to explain his story to me.

The story begins as a young man grows up in Michigan's state capital of Lansing in the 60s and 70s. In 1980 he graduates from Michigan State University in East Lansing looking to find a job in an economy now staggered by the Oil Crisis and the now wide reaching impact of accelerating deindustrialization and a more heavily globalized market. The city of Lansing lies in the swath of industrial areas that span south central Michigan from Detroit to Muskegon an area dominated by the big three auto manufacturers. It is part of a vast stretch of places across the northern tier of Midwest and Northeastern states that comprise what is referred to as the Rust Belt to conjure an image of a well-defined region undergoing decay and decline.

Although parts of these former industrial landscapes are attempting various forms of renaissance, in the early 1980s the harsh reality that former glory was now a bygone era was really just sinking in for most. As with all places in the Belt, Lansing is an area that has had to deal with post-industrial economic restructuring. Like many of his peers, he had anticipated work in the automobile industry which had defined Southern Lower Michigan when he began his studies twenty-five years ago at a time when the mid-seventies recession had only really just begun. Mark earns a degree in engineering. Thinking back to that time, he says:

"There was not much going on in the Midwest in terms of growth. The auto industry was down. Not a lot of opportunity. California was booming ... and I had a certain amount of just 'Hey, I lived twenty years here.' One of my friends went to work at Oldsmobile [based in Lansing]. Being an auto town, through the generations they just get into Olds and that's it. You're done. Man ... I couldn't think of that. I'm going to get into this job and that's the rest of my life, you know?

Career was generation to generation and these guys would just go in on that line the ones that went to college really didn't so much but they'd go to work for the State of Michigan or they'd work for another fairly, you know, set company and that's it ..."

Defining oneself by way of a job was the model of the generation of Mark's father. Now there is neither a guarantee nor expectation for the durability of such a definition because the world of work upon which it had been based appears unstable and unpredictable, more fluid and boundless. These have become the very qualities that are valued in today's workers. They are asked to be forever learning, adaptable, and multi-tasking in a distinct departure from the ideal worker of the more standardized and regular industrial world of the past. Mark and his wife, Diane, choose to voluntarily drop out of the corporate lifestyle, despite a well paying job and benefits in sunny California, so that they could start their own small business in northern Michigan. Why would they do such a thing?

My research attempts to answer questions like this through an understanding of present-day social and structural transitions obtained by exploring the meaning of relocation for middle-class working families away from metropolitan areas to growing rural communities high in natural amenities. This relocation is a manner of negotiating building tension between personal experience with material demands in pursuit of a livelihood within the flexible, contingent new economy and cultural conventions for the good family and community life as the basis for defining individual character. My fieldwork considers how accounts of life-style migrants are part of a larger moral story of what constitutes the good life when basic social categories and cultural meanings are shifting. I argue that this migration is a continuation of long-standing American traditions of starting over rooted in a belief that we can remake ourselves through sheer force of will. At the same time, it is also a uniquely modern expression as people respond to the challenges and opportunities of a flexible economy based increasingly on contingent work. Their accounts are related to both narratives of travel and conversion where downshifting and displaced corporate workers pass through a period of critical liminality as they attempt to redefine themselves through relocation to places believed to provide necessary refuge and inspiration for the discovery of an inner, authentic self.

This research shows some of the ways that social and structural changes are impacting individuals, families, and communities and how people and places are reacting, devising new strategies for coping or for challenging. I have also connected the present with an understanding of significant historical trends in, for example, local and national patterns of migration. My approach has been to weave the level of the person with mid and macro-levels of social structure and analysis. I have explored the lives of individuals present, past, and imagined through careful observation and lively conversation in the contexts of home and work. Placing these lives in the mid-level is my intimate understanding of the local community as a place I have come to call home. At the macro-level are the social/cultural and economic/structural changes taking places that are a vital part of the context for both individual and community decision-making. It is particularly through looking at place and personal meaning of work life that we see how the individual level is intersected by broader changes that must be interpreted at that point. It is about locating and positioning lives in time and place and enriching our ability to interpret stories through recording and effectively conveying the details of context in the broadest sense.

***

The Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life at the University of Michigan sponsored this research. The Center is part of a research mandate made by the Sloan Foundation to better understand the needs of working families in America and to make the study of middle-class working families a normal part of research in the social sciences -- particularly those not based solely on survey methods.  The Sloan Foundation initiated a program in the late 90s to fund several centers dedicated to this mandate. Among these centers is the newly formed Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life. Thus, this project is one expression of a larger effort to improve our understanding of contemporary American society and culture and to contribute to improving our communities, our places of work, and our family lives.

PUBLICATIONS:

“Grey Suit or Brown Carhartt: Narrative Transition, Relocation and Reorientation in the Lives of Corporate Refugees,” Journal of Anthropological Research, Vol. 62(3), Fall  [View PDF]

ABSTRACT: This article examines relocation stories of people who leave behind corporate work culture, relocate from metropolitan areas to small towns and rural places, and attempt to reorient themselves to work and family obligations. Decisions to start over take place within the context of moral questions about what makes a life worth living and what does not through a process in which geography has a bearing. For these migrants, a choice about where to live is also one about how to live. Choices of how to live one’s life are made of more than simple economics, they are also moral. The restructuring and corporate downsizing that defines the contemporary workplace has led some workers and their families to challenge assumptions of the American Dream that promise future reward for loyalty to an employer, hard work, and self-sacrifice. These lifestyle migrants relocate in their attempt to find potential selves and idealized families in new places.

Key Words: Career change • Narrative analysis • Postindustrial economic restructuring • Urban-to-rural migration •  Work and family studies
 

“From Pi to Pie: Moral Narratives of Non-economic Migration and Starting Over in the Post-industrial Midwest,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 34(5), Oct  [View PDF]

ABSTRACT:  Research introduced here examines the impact of social and structural transitions during the past three decades on middle-class working families in the United States. Through the telling narrative of an especially iconic case of urban-to-rural migration and career change, this article explores the meaning of relocation away from metropolitan areas and corporate careers to growing ex-urban, small-town communities. The author interprets this life-style migration as a manner of personally negotiating tension between experience of material demands in pursuit of a livelihood within the flexible New Economy and prevailing cultural conventions for the good life that shape the moral narratives that define individual character. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research involving interview and observation of recent migrants to Northern Michigan, this article contributes to our understanding of noneconomic migration and its part in the changing moral meanings of work in postindustrial America.

Key Words: urban-to-rural migration • work and family studies • narrative analysis • liminality • moral theory • self-hood

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“American Dreaming: Refugees from Corporate Work Seek the Good Life” in Culture, Work, and Family Values: An Ethnographic Reader, Elizabeth Rudd & Lara Descartes, editors (2008, Lexington Books)

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