Doctoral Dissertation Research: Households and the Future of Work: The Rise of Industrious Households After the Decline of the Family Wage, 1970-2008.

Regents Of The University Of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor MI

Investigators

Abstract

As jobs become increasingly flexible, contingent, and automated, social research and governmental concern has centered on the future of work. Responding to these changes in the labor market since the 1970s, a growing number of American families pursued money outside of labor markets. In this project, three case studies will follow the rise of direct selling (Avon, Amway, Herbalife), leasing of accessory dwelling units within homes, and the rise of home equity extraction. Direct sellers in the 1980s and 1990s carefully balanced attempts to marketize kinship and social ties, without severing them irreparably, that provided housewives an avenue to pursue secondary incomes without fully abandoning the ideal of the breadwinner-homemaker model. Families who began leasing spare bedrooms and garages in the 1990s sought to avoid the stigma of immigrant informality by leasing “granny flats” and “in-law units,” portraying their marketization of the single-family home as a natural extension of the nuclear family. Extractions of home-equity in the early 2000s tapped into long-time associations between property ownership and landed independence, allowing homeowners to interpret equity loans as tapping into their wealth, rather than as taking on risky loans. These cases illustrate household strategies to generate resources outside standard wages—providing a lens into a rearrangement of household economic life since the 1970s. Findings will inform governmental policies, particularly those governing dwelling leasing and home equity extraction, to maximize their appropriate use balanced against risk. As American households faced uncertain returns to waged labor, its members grew likely to embrace three strategies of industriousness: (1) labor-intensive industriousness characterized by increases in the number of wage earners or the time devoted to wage work by a household; (2) distributive industriousness, characterized by entrepreneurial turns toward kinship and social networks in attempts to siphon small but regular access to cash resources; and (3) rentier industriousness, characterized by attempts at securing incomes from claims on household goods or assets. Because most social research on labor restructuring focuses on labor-intensive industriousness, the core of this project are case studies of the distributive and rentier household activity. Leveraging administrative and archival data from municipalities, federal regulators, congressional records, newspapers, and industry publications, each of the three case studies analyzes: (1) the motivations driving early industrious activity; (2) regulatory challenges and incorporation; and (3) trajectories of socio-economic, racial, and gendered diffusion across groups of households. This project suggests that at the root of recent expansions in economic informality are not new technology platforms, but rather changes in labor market organization dating back to the 1980s. The findings of this research illuminate sociological theories regarding the family and its intersection with the U.S. economy in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Findings will also provide insight into related changes as work continues to evolve in the United States and the world. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.