Fieldwork::United States::Michigan -- Homepage of Brian A. Hoey, Ph.D., Anthropology

Before the abstractions of social science, there are people’s stories, the emotional worlds of disappointment and uncertainty, and the brave coping of everyday life. Established in 1998 with a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life fosters research and training to document the challenges of American working families. Working people, everyday lives explored in the tradition where ethnography and documentary come together (Tom Fricke, Director, Alfred P. Sloan Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life).

I conducted this research over a two-year tenure as post-doctoral fellow at the Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life. The Center is housed in the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. This is meant to serve as a basic overview. It should provide you with a better understanding of my work and interest.

This project emphasizes constructing a compelling narrative as a documentary work connecting gathered stories of participants and my observations with historical and contemporary trends in American social life. My interest lies more in the act of representation than in advancing any theoretical take. I want to remain as “close the ground” as possible in this work. This describes my approach not only to the treatment of collected information or data but also the manner I would like to conduct my research. Because this is an ethnography of everyday life, I would like to be not only an observer but also a participant in daily life. I do not mean to intrude on daily life by merely asking questions and taking up time. Rather, I mean to offer my own labor and insight thus contributing my time and energy as well. Ideally I would spend time first simply getting to know people through conversation. Over time, more time would be spent working with people in a variety of the settings that are a part of their everyday lives.

New Work

In the world of sports, a “free agent” is a player whose contract with a particular team has come to an end and who is now free to move about in a larger field of possibilities, specifically, they are free to sign with a team of their choosing. As with many such terms and ideas, free-agent jumped the fence of its original usage and roamed about, taking up new meaning in another sphere of social and cultural life. In the world of work, the term free-agent is now increasingly used to characterize the nearly 30 million Americans who are in some manner self-employed. In contrast to William Whyte’s (1956) “Organization Man” of two generations ago, this free-agent is a largely independent worker, whether small-business owner, temporary or contract worker, who is born of sweeping changes taking place in everyday life as the U.S. economy moves from the industrial/corporate job system that defined the working world for more than a century to a post-industrial order as yet only dimly understood in its full ramifications. Whether by default (downsizing being a regular part of the New Economy) or design (voluntarily opting-out of unsatisfactory corporate career paths) increasing numbers of U.S. workers are becoming free-agents.

Speaking of his Organization Man, Whyte explained that these devoted Post-War workers to which he referred not only worked for their companies, they “belonged” to them as well. For Whyte, they were “the ones of our middle class who have left home, spiritually as well as physically, to take the vows of organization life, and it is they who are the mind and soul of our great self-perpetuating institutions … [T]hey are the dominant members of our society … and it is their values which will set the American temper” (1956:1). Whyte’s Organization Man was white, middle-class and suburban with values, aspirations and lifestyles that defined the second half of the twentieth century and gave us the lasting Ozzie and Harriet vision of the American Dream. In contrast to this character’s predictability and sameness, among the free-agents we have what might be the making of a dramatic shift in the American temper toward unpredictability and diversity in work, family and community arrangements. In addition to the impact of economic changes already discussed, the influence of social forces such as the feminist movement and increasing numbers of women in the workforce over the past twenty to thirty years has encouraged all workers to actively redefine their identity and lifestyle. With the recent experience of women entering a male-dominated workplace, today’s free-agent New Worker has many inventive models (both successful and not) of how one might self-consciously negotiate obligations of work, family and self.

The paths taken by today’s free-agents are manifold but their decisions begin at a common point of experience and understanding. People who I will call “New Workers,” in order to emphasize their place in emerging alternatives to traditional work arrangements, have become more pragmatic and more proactive in their approach as they feel the trust or faith they might have had in finding and keeping a meaningful job erode. This erosion progresses as the old contract between employer and employee, what Phyllis Moen (2001) refers to as an implicit understanding of “the often informal trade off of awarding security to workers with seniority in return for their commitment,” comes to an end. In today’s economic climate companies shed “excess” long-time employees from their payrolls while hiring younger, often part-time and thus less expensive staff instead of rewarding loyalty. These younger workers enter the field at an already insecure state with virtually no guarantee and little expectation of stability in their career. As free-agents, a new class of worker recognizes the need to take care of themselves. This represents a significant change in orientation, in expectations, in strategy and ultimately in priorities and values. As a term for an emerging segment of the U.S. population which cuts across economic classes, New Worker is meant to set apart a subset of this larger population of free-agents and affirm their role in actively creating a new world of work. Although being a free-agent in the emerging post-industrial economy is not something every worker who finds him or herself in this position would choose, the price paid by elevated uncertainty offers opportunity as well. While some free-agents may accept their status of uncertainty and adhere to a pattern of dependent work, others reject this relative passivity and struggle then to employ their free-agency in a deliberately self-fulfilling and creative way.

For this project, I focus on New Workers who I will describe as a different brand of entrepreneur. In the traditional sense, an entrepreneur was a business innovator who established a new commercial entity to offer a product or service into a new or existing market. The assumption was always that the entrepreneur was completely motivated by profit. In addition, they would necessarily have a basic trust or faith in market opportunity while also accepting high levels of risk on personal, professional and financial levels in order to pursue an economic reward. In the context of the emerging economic order of late-capitalism and as applied to New Workers, the term entrepreneur is intended differently from the common notion described above. The New Worker as entrepreneur is an innovator who ultimately works to offer a product or service but whose core motivation is non-pecuniary. Rather, they prioritize life-style and quality of life considerations as they strive to find meaning and purpose in and through their work while emphasizing such values as simplicity and cooperation. My focus on an entrepreneurial spirit is meant to bring me to the leading edge of new arrangements of work, of innovation in the face of the profound challenges of a world of work turned upside down by global economic restructuring. Cases explored at this “frontier” of New Work will vary in the extent to which they defy conventional wisdom and challenge the status quo.

Field Site

Places like Ypsilanti, Pontiac and Flint lie in a wide band of once booming industry which spans the south and central areas of the state from the shores of Lake Michigan at Muskegon in the west to Detroit in the east. Much of the region continues to be dominated by the “Big Three” auto manufacturers: Ford; Chrysler; and General Motors. This swath of places in Michigan is itself part of a broad archipelago of heavy industry scattered, for the better part of a century or more, across a tier of Midwest and Northeastern states. Collectively these places form the “Rust Belt” – a term that effectively conjures an image of a region now defined by a disfiguring process of decomposition and decay. Although cities and towns scattered throughout these industrial landscapes have attempted different forms of local renaissance by focusing on attracting and retaining young workers and families through initiatives aimed at improving overall quality of life (including recent efforts by Michigan Governor Granholm in the form of her “Cool Cities” initiative), the harsh reality that former economic glory ushered in by the Industrial Revolution was now a bygone era has become an almost overwhelming fact for many residents.

Despite often bleak economic conditions and poor prospects at least for the immediate future, the communities of Southeast Michigan are in many ways the perfect place to conduct research on the emergence of forms of New Work which stand in contrast to the dominant economic order of the Industrial Era. In an area where plant closings and, for those that remain, grim economic forecasts are commonplace, innovation which challenges conventional wisdom should not surprise us as this innovation is often born of necessity. Despite this place-based connection between necessity and innovation, the assumption might be that “alternative” approaches to work would be more easily found in areas already understood to harbor refugees from the mainstream of social and economic life, for example, pockets of in-migrants in the so-called liberal communities in states such as Vermont or Washington. In a state where the organizing of worker unions was pivotal in defining the terms for work on the busy shop floors of industry over the past century, the changes wrought by global economic restructuring and competition creates an exceptional opportunity for considering the possibilities for new arrangements of work in everyday life.

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Brian A. Hoey, Ph.D., Associate Professor
Department of Sociology & Anthropology