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Anthropology and
the Workplace/Workforce Mismatch

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Charles N. Darrah
Department of Anthropology
San Jose State University

 

This paper is an expanded version of a paper presented at the Conference on Workplace/Workforce Mismatch: Work, Family, Health and Well-Being (Washington, D.C., June 16-18, 2003). The conference was sponsored by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Office of Behavioral and Social Science Research of the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute for Occupation Safety and Health of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Child Care Bureau of the Administration for Children and Families.


DRAFT: PLEASE DO NOT CITE WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION.

Introduction Implications
Study of the American Mainstream  Endnotes
The Mismatch References
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Introduction

The mismatch between workplace and workforce is manifested in ways both large and small.1 On the grand scale, we are familiar with a litany of new realities, such as changes in the nature of work and employment arrangements, new technologies that seemingly erode the limitations of space and time, increased participation of women in the workforce, and the often harsh dictates of global competition (Osterman, Kochan, Locke and Piore 2001: 6-9). These grand transformations become especially real for families when they alter the fabric of everyday life. Such alterations can seem trite or merely difficult to see, but they are redefining the familiar landmarks of daily life. We see these smaller scale changes not through social statistics, but when we examine the everyday lives of individual families.

Consider, for example, Humberto and Suzanne’s recently remodeled kitchen.2 Humberto is a fire captain who also responds to hazardous materials incidents and performs arson investigations for both his department and insurance companies. Suzanne is a job-sharing high tech marketer who also cares for two preschool daughters. Humberto proudly gestures to a blank wall and announces the plumbing and electrical “rough in” for his next kitchen remodeling concealed within it. The design was inspired by a kitchen he spotted while responding to a medical emergency in his capacity as firefighter. Later, he was able to look at the grateful homeowner’s blueprints.

The refrigerator sits against the opposite wall, a container for food and a billboard for the family calendar and its mission statement. The latter is also stored in Suzanne’s Palm Pilot, along with other information about work and family, such as schedules and telephone numbers. The idea for the statement was drawn from Steven Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, a publication that she found both useful and inspirational. She was part of an informal network of coworkers who discussed and followed Covey’s advice, and her employer provided support for seminars and materials. Spouse, coworkers, management guru and employer were thus implicated in defining the family as one with a specific mission. The statement was even prepared on a laptop computer purchased by Suzanne for work and then reimbursed by her employer.

Just as work penetrates the home through Suzanne’s actions, so too does family migrate to the workplace, where she manages her retirement portfolio, asssembled incrementally at previous employers, or gives and takes advice about parenting from a corporate listserv. Of course, she says, you must be careful about what advice to share: She would never reveal that her children have not been vaccinated, for the outcry could damage her reputation at work.

Humberto is a little skeptical about the mission statement, but he too integrates work into his life and his self in subtle ways. He has found most of the subcontractors for his home remodeling through the fire department and he organizes them using his department’s Incident Command System, or ICS. The system was developed in Los Angeles County to coordinate operations, planning, logistics and finances at wildfires and it has been adopted by many other fire departments. Humberto has internalized ICS into his identity and even defined himself in terms of operations, planning, logistics and finances during a recent job interview.

Suzanne and Humberto’s family is experiencing the mismatch between workplace and workforce in their own distinct way. They are but one among myriad other families and the constraints they operate within are undoubtedly distinct, even among job sharing, high tech marketer-fire captain couples. Each family has its own idiosyncratic saga, and collectively, those sagas provide the contexts within which any public or private policy experiments will be conducted. The challenge is to use these distinct family sagas to find ways to ameliorate the collective difficulties of meeting competing obligations under new realities. For example, while we have merely glimpsed Humberto and Suzanne’s situation, through them we can see the outlines of a broader social change. The interpenetration of work and family blurs the boundary between these familiar domains, turning each into a simultaneously exotic realm. Work, in the sense of clear and unambiguous tasks, is not merely moved around, but rather what constitutes work becomes ambiguous. The workplace, too, becomes a site for exploring family issues, and while it is sometimes a source of strain, it is also where the very resources used to cope with those strains can be found. Although the couple’s daily life is hectic and ordinary, through it they engage a larger moral universe, one that often fails to provide clear guideposts. Their mission statement, for example, is as contested as it is agreed upon, and it is also a way to work through conflicts between culturally shaped obligations and the exigencies of daily life. Although much about their lives is rationalized by the rubric of “efficiency,” they are also creating new stories and rituals that mediate the ambiguities of work and family. Finally, we see that as Suzanne and Humberto engage the mismatch, they also redefine the very category of the person and the desirable qualities of personal character. They live grounded in traditional religious faith, yet their daily lives compel them to ask, ‘Who are we and who should we be?’

Stories like those of Humberto and Suzanne remind us that the mismatch is not simply a case of trying fit together the wrong puzzle pieces. That metaphor suggests sharp, clear edges that fit snuggly together in unique, correct ways. It also implies an actor who moves the pieces into their proper locations. Such an image is atemporal, assuming as it does ultimate success or failure in fit. Instead, we are reminded that the very puzzle pieces of our lives are not so distinct, nor do they fit together in single correct ways. And those pieces themselves move and reconfigure themselves through their own agency, never quite fitting “correctly,” always trying to adjust to other pieces on the puzzle board. The mismatch thus entails understanding a broader set of changes of which the workplace-workforce mismatch is but a prominent manifestation. Understanding both the mismatch and the broader context within which it is significant is prelude to any experimentation through policy.

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Anthropology and the Study of the American Mainstream

Anthropology is popularly associated with studies of the exotic, and such studies arguably define the discipline for many of its practitioners. Nonetheless, the history of ethnographic and anthropological studies of the American “mainstream” is lengthy.3 Ethnography and anthropology are closely related, but they are worth distinguishing. Ethnography refers to a research methodology (Bernard 2002) characterized by extended fieldwork. It is constituted by a varied set of methods, such as participant observation, open and closed interviewing techniques, and systematic observation. Although it is most associated with cultural anthropology, its methods have long been used in sociology and, more recently, in fields such as education, health care, and organizational behavior. Anthropology refers to a discipline characterized by its theoretical perspectives, which include commitments to cross-cultural comparison and a holistic understanding of the human species.

The ethnographic tradition of U.S. community studies began with the “Middletown” studies of sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd (Lynd & Lynd 1929, 1937) and continued by anthropologist W. Lloyd Warner in his studies of “Yankee City” (Warner 1949, Warner & Lunt 1941, 1942). Other studies by anthropologists established some of the variations in community form and their articulations with regions, ethnic populations, and industries. The works of Allison Davis, Burleigh Gardner & Mary Gardner in the U.S. South (1941), St. Clair Drake and Horace Clayton (1945), Hortense Powdermaker (1939), and Walter Goldschmidt (1947, 1978) are representative.

Community studies conducted after World War II challenged the assumption of cultural homogeneity and conformity popular at the time. The 1967 study by Herbert Gans of Levittown, a planned community typically portrayed as blandly conformist, drew attention to its diversity of behaviors and beliefs (Gans 1967). Anthropologist Herve Varenne (1977) explored the typically American values of individualism and community participation in a Midwestern town, documenting tension and conflict as well as conformity and integration.

Anthropologists also documented the place of work in people’s lives and in the very nature of community. Anthropologist Louise Lamphere (1987) traced the participation of generations of immigrant women in the New England textile industry, while June Nash documented the effects of 1980’s de-industrialization in a historical account of Berkshire County, Massachusetts (1989). Katherine Newman’s Falling From Grace (1988) and Declining Fortunes (1993) focused specifically on middle class families and communities caught in the spiral of de-industrialization, downward mobility, and falling expectations, research extended by Kathryn Dudley’s research in the Midwest (1994, 2000).

Anthropologists have long conducted comparative studies of families, and this tradition has been extended into studies germane to the American mainstream. The research of Sara Harkness and Charles Super (1995,1996) has focused on the parents’ cultural belief systems and their relationships to the practices of parenting. Thomas Weisner (1999) and his colleagues (Weisner & Bernheimer 1998, Weisner & Garnier 1992, Weisner, Garnier & Loucky 1994) have studied samples of two-parent married families and “nonconventional, countercultural families and their children” for over two and a half decades, tracking school achievement, peer relations, behavior problems, drug use, values and social attitudes (Wesiner & Bernheimer 1998). Other ethnographers are contributing to a nascent comparative research agenda on middle class families. Marianne Gullestad’s Kitchen Table Society (1984), for example, explores how the lives of young Norwegian mothers unfold in their homes and neighborhoods. Other studies, such as Weston’s study of lesbian families (1991), have expanded our very definition of family.

In the latter 1990s, research within organizations by ethnographically inclined sociologists focused specifically on the use of time and its impact on the lives of people. Arlie Hochschild’s The Time Bind (1997) and Leslie Perlow’s Finding Time (1997) have inspired further anthropological research into time use by families. Christena Nippert-Eng’s Home and Work (1996) explored the articulation of these two realms through ordinary material objects such as calendars and address books.

Although much of anthropology’s work is relevant to issues of work and family, it is only recently that some anthropologists have focused explicitly on work and family in the U.S. mainstream. Three of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Centers on Working Families are broadly anthropological and ethnographic in methodological focus, and their agendas and projects are especially relevant to the mismatch thesis (Fricke 1998).4  The Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life at the University of Michigan (CEEL) concentrates its projects on families in the Midwest (Stewart, Henderson-King, Henderson-King & Winter 2000), but is able to link them to national data sets available from the Institute for Social Research where it is housed (Fricke 2001, Hofferth & Sandberg 2000a,b). Its projects address the relationship of workplace variations and personal and family identity (Han & Upton 2001, Hoey 2002, Rudd, Root & Young 2002, Upton 2002), continuities and discontinuities in obligations across generations, work and the socialization of children (Dunn, Kinney & Hofferth 2001, Kinney, Dunn & Hofferth 2000), and civic and religious cultures (Descartes & Kottak 2001, Dunn 2002).

The Emory Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life (MARIAL) concentrates regionally on families in the Southeastern United States and topically on myth and ritual in their lives. Myth and ritual are broadly explored, including how they reflect the articulation of work and family. The MARIAL Center’s research agenda includes studies of rituals and life cycles in the home, workplace and community (Auslander 2002, Jandreau 2002, Richardson 2001, Shore & Kendall-Taylor 2002), the consumption and symbolism of food and its marketing, physiological and ritual responses to stress in families and individuals (LeVeen 2002, Paxton 2002, Whitelegg 2003, Worthman, DeCaro & Brown 2002), and the role of mass media in creating representations of family (West 2002). Methodologically, MARIAL researchers conduct ethnographic and historical research, with special interest in the role of narrative in constructing the lives of families and individuals (Fivush & Duke 2002).

The UCLA Center on Everyday Lives of Families (CELF) conducts research that focuses on social interaction and behavior within families (Goodwin, C. 2003, Leininger 2002, Willihnganz 2002, Wood & Repetti 2002), and a primary goal is to develop a digital video archive that can be shared among researchers. Its projects document the types of activities performed routinely in families and households (Sirota 2003), how artifacts and spaces are actually used by family members (Arnold & Graesch 2002), and how family members communicate in carrying them out (Paugh 2002, Winogard 2003). Center researchers are specially interested in the role of language in children’s socialization and the articulation of work and family with formal and informal education (Goodwin, M. H. 2003, Klein 2003, Leininger 2003, Montgomery 2003). Like research agendas at the Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life and the Emory Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life, projects at the Center on Everyday Lives of Families addresses issues of health and psychological outcomes of family members (Izquierdo 2002, Izquierdo & Paugh 2003, Story & Bradbury 2002).

The anthropologists and ethnographers of these three Centers are pursuing distinct research agendas, but there are also similarities that are salient to the mismatch thesis. The Centers are interdisciplinary at the core and they are organized around research questions, not anthropological identity. Their projects explore the everyday lives of family members as they navigate domains including, but not limited to, work and family. The socialization of children into the changing realities of work and family is a common concern, as is the role of stress and its management in the lives of families. Finally, while the Centers primarily conduct research and train scholars, there are explicit programs to engage and make research findings available to wider publics.

* * * * * * *

Anthropology clearly cannot claim a privileged role in understanding the mismatch and, indeed, the contributions of other disciplines and fields are noteworthy. We may thus fairly ask what role remains for anthropology to play. I argue that it is anthropology’s tradition of integrating different perspectives on complex, emerging phenomena that makes it essential. The idea of a mismatch is itself shorthand for a larger and multidimensional cultural shift with important features that are just emerging. It represents the intersection of structural changes in the lives of families, as conceptualized in a way that is culturally familiar and comforting. What anthropology offers is an integrative perspective on the mismatch, as well as a way to contextualize it in a particular historical moment.

It does so through its four-field approach to understanding social phenomena. A distinctly anthropological perspective then is inherently heterogeneous, reflecting the discipline’s constituent fields of archaeology, linguistic anthropology, physical anthropology, and cultural anthropology. The latter field, and its associated methodology of ethnography, is at the center of the discipline’s interest in work and family. Cultural anthropologists are especially concerned with practices that link social organization with cultural models and their material embodiments. They are sensitive to inconsistencies or contradictions between structural constraints, lived experience, and familiar cultural assumption, values and norms. Distinctive characteristics of cultural anthropology include a holistic analysis of social systems, attention to the often-divergent understandings of cultural insiders, and concern with the meaning of action to its participants.

Linguistic anthropology focuses both on the primary means by which children are socialized into those practices and the categories by which cultural models are organized. The language socialization paradigm, for example, assumes that “language is a form of social action, as well as a critical means of social reproduction and transformation across generations” (Paugh 2002: 2). It focuses on the activities and interactions of everyday life in which children participate and observe, and it is especially valuable for understanding how children gain working knowledge of adult worlds. The paradigm provides a tool for understanding in detail how a family is created and maintained through talk, such as personal narratives, directions or instructions, expressions of emotion, and topics of conversation. It allows comparable analyses of how children learn about work in their lives, and how knowledge about the mismatch is being transmitted from parent to children (Paugh 2002: 5-13).

Physical anthropology draws our attention to the interplay of cultural practices and meanings, and human biology. For example, the work of Carol Worthman and her colleagues at MARIAL seeks to create a biocultural model that systematically links social structure, culture and meaning, and the well-being of people. Their working model combines the methods and concepts of cultural consensus modeling, status incongruity, and the analysis of cultural models, with psychobiological models of stress, affective regulation, and reactivity (Worthman, DeCaro & Brown 2002).
Archaeology, long associated in the popular imagination with the monumental remains of past cultures, is useful for understanding the everyday lives of household members. Such methods can be used to analyze the architecture of houses, the organization and use of spaces within them, and their provisioning with artifacts (Arnold & Graesch 2002).

As different as the fields of anthropology are, they share characteristics that make them especially relevant to the mismatch. First, they permit exploratory research in which the very existence and nature of a phenomenon is uncertain, and where familiar measures and indicators may be misleading. Second, they document processes and systems that can then provide the bases for decisions about what dimensions of a phenomenon should be measured. And third, they problematize the very categories they seek to explore. Rather than simply accepting taken for granted categories, they allow us to confront our own, often culture bound assumptions about that which we seek to explain. They are thus well matched to the challenges posed by the mismatch.

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Anthropology, Ethnography and the Mismatch

The anthropological research program on U.S. families and work is still in its early stages, and it is premature to speak of consensus among its practitioners. Nonetheless, several generalizations can be offered. These are offered not as a definitive summary of the field, but rather for their salience to the mismatch thesis.

The Field of Obligations. Ethnographic research demonstrates that people engage a heterogeneous field of obligations that cut across work, family and other familiar cultural domains, such as recreation, religion and civic involvement. These obligations are often discharged independent of particular places, so that different domains partake of the meanings and practices of the others. Driving these obligations are structural changes that have left individuals increasingly “empowered” to assume more and more responsibilities, such as managing their children’s educations and their own retirement portfolios, shopping for best buys on everything from airline tickets to utilities, and becoming experts on health and medical information. The tasks associated with these obligations are performed opportunistically, and they far exceed any simple distinction between work and family. Yet they are not merely externally imposed, for they also reflect decisions about lifestyles, status competition, and a bias toward activity and doing more.
Several implications follow. One is that we cannot assume work to be simply a source of stress, for it can also be a source of the very resources people use to manage their obligations. Another is that families may be less a refuge from an often hostile or indifferent world, than sources of stress for their members; the workplace may provide that respite. A deeper issue is that the interface of work and family may simply be the visible arena where problems are expressed, even if their causes lie elsewhere. Finally, by breaking down familiar categorizations, the web of obligations may be driving the need to create personal and family narratives that provide people with meaningful identities and coherent trajectories through life. The ethnographic record suggests that people do not organize their lives along discrete variables, but through narratives that connect disparate elements and weave them together. In doing so, they provide us with windows onto the strains and tensions that people grapple with daily. None of this is to minimize the impact of jobs and work on families, but to caution against narrow formulations of the relationships and normative assumptions regarding good or bad outcomes.

It’s in the Details. The ethnographic record documents that very specific conditions affect how work and family play out. People do not work or have families in general, but they work in particular ways and have particular families; they face specific opportunities and constraints. They want to be workers and family members and people in specific ways, and the details of their lives, such as how they define being a good person, worker, parent, child, and neighbor, have consequences.

Assumptions about prototypical workers, jobs, homes and families are misleading, and responsive policy must be based on assumed variability. For example, we cannot simply juxtapose the workplace as the location for work and the home as the place for leisure. The former is indeed the site of leisure for many workers, and accounts of hours spent with nose to grindstone often exaggerate hours working. Furthermore, we cannot assume that the tasks performed at work are necessary, especially in an era when workers have learned the necessity to be perceived as busy in order to protect their jobs. There is a performative or theatrical aspect of work, one in which people signal to each other that they are indeed hard pressed to meet the demands of their jobs. At the same time, households have taken on many of the characteristics of workplaces as the requirements of maintaining them have become another job. Yet allocating tasks at home may be less well defined than at work, and the tasks can be less predictable, stable or sequential. A child’s sudden need to construct a model of the earth from familiar kitchen goods or to investigate the history of the Greek alphabet can upset evening plans, but so, too, can canceled insurance policies, demands for medical information, and troubleshooting defunct Palm Pilots or personal computers. The home then can be the site of multitasking and real work, precisely because the stakes are higher and slack is non-existent.

Family as Code. We speak comfortably of work and family, often assuming that the former is robbing us of time to meet the obligations of the latter. Yet family, or “doing family,” has become a sort of code for many obligations that the family has assumed as they have been shed by other institutions. The result is a burgeoning collection of activities that are designated as “family,” but which could be (and have been) performed elsewhere. When parents share information about the variety of teams, courses and clubs that they can patch together to provide after school care, it is simultaneously done for family and a commentary on the absence of safe neighborhoods and unavailable adult supervision. When they devote evenings to investigate college opportunities for their children it is also a commentary on the lack of such services in cash strapped schools. And when they become each other’s medical experts through navigating the Internet, it is also a commentary on the availability of medical advice. Ethnography shows us the results of proliferating choices and responsibilities in so many domains of life that ultimately play out in the family. A corollary is that providing families with more time may not translate into benefits, but rather just be absorbed by more of this sort of work. The mismatch thesis is thus situated in a much larger social and cultural shift that is largely played out in the intimate realm of family and household. An implication is that policy experiments cannot simply be bounded by the parameters of work and family. Any gains for the family would likely soon be absorbed by the relentless incursion of obligations from elsewhere, further transforming the family into a site for production and consumption, rather than for intimacy, refuge and simply being.

Time Management. Better managing our time, working smarter, and being more efficient have become middle-class mantras for the new century, as indicated by a proliferation of self-improvement books and workshops, the quest for electronic devices that enhance our ability to communicate and keep track of our lives, and the importation of management techniques from workplace to home. Yet the emphasis on time management begs the question of precisely what is being managed. It deflects attention from the content of the activities that are being performed and somehow managed, without asking why those activities are necessary in the first place. It is a question of content, not just “creating” more time or better ways to manage it. Ethnographic research (Darrah, English-Lueck & Freeman 2001) documents both the proliferation of obligations, as well as the creation of a social and technological infrastructure to cope with them. Creating plans and their backups, collecting intelligence about threats to busy schedules, provisioning and maintaining the web of efficiency enhancing devices, and always building social networks that can buffer uncertainty are themselves time consuming activities. It is not enough to simply improve time management skills or even “give” people more time, but the underlying necessity for activities that take the time must be addressed.

Talk about time and its management is at best distracting, diverting us from the sources of our busyness and seeking to enable us to take on more. A more sinister view is that the apparent time bind is a function of the very notion of efficient management that creates or enacts it. There is a pervasive sense that we can and should do more, and the metric of productivity has pervaded many families that emphasize constant activity and the increased status that busyness and participation brings. In this way, the logic of the workplace has pervaded home, and we must question the sense in which there is a mismatch between family and work.

Agency and Best Practices. Ethnography documents the creative efforts of people to develop practices to cope with the demands of work and family. Regardless of what researchers, policy makers, or employers expect or think is reasonable, American families are not simply passive responders to externally driven changes, but rather they exert agency to control their lives. They do so by colonizing their homes with offices that mirror what they have at work, just as they colonize workplaces to fulfill the obligations of other domains of everyday life. From their perspectives, these practices make sense and are usually the best they can do under the constraints they confront. Just as researchers speak of experiments, so too are ordinary people watching and querying others for best practices, and experimenting with their everyday lives.

This is neither to argue that folk wisdom should trump empirical research, nor that the practices people use are optimal. Indeed, the very quest for best practices is embedded in a larger worldview in which there is a status value to activities. Parents may well enact their own lives in those of their children through over-scheduling, so the latter becomes a demonstrable act of devotion. Middle class status, which used to be simply a function of consumption, may now be equally defined by participation in activities, so that the more we do the higher our status. And this valuing of busyness is not simply imposed upon us, but it also results from internal drives toward status. Still, we must not assume the need for de novo solutions to the mismatch: American families are already conducting their own experiments.

Individuals, Together and Apart. Finally, ethnographic fieldwork documents the impact of broader social change in the lives of ordinary people. These changes also provide the context for the mismatch thesis and they reveal an individualism that is both typically American and strikingly new (Hall & Lindholm 1999). American individualism has been long noted and variously defined, and much of the phenomena subsumed by the mismatch thesis reflect the rhetoric of the empowered individual, free to assume responsibilities and navigate routes in perilous waters. Attachments to particular employers can be brief and jobs can suddenly disappear. Anticipation of unpredictability is both oxymoronic and ubiquitous. Building a career that spans different organizations is increasingly the norm, and those careers are ultimately the responsibilities of virtuous individuals.

At the heart of the mismatch thesis is a dissonance between structural necessities and the space for alternative conceptualizations of the self. If the mismatch can be viewed macroscopically as one between workplace and workforce, then microscopically it is between culturally variable notions of character and moral virtue, and the ability to act in ways that realize those virtues (Sennett 1998). The resulting dilemmas play out in everyday life and they will not be resolved by individual efficiency or productivity alone.

Ethnography suggests that different implications follow from these macrolevel and microlevel views. The former leads to experiments with workplace arrangements that take for granted a flexible, malleable self that can be engineered to fit the new, inevitable specifications of work. The latter suggests experiments that respect variable conceptions of the self and that enable people to live consistently with them. The former thus focuses on remaking the self to fit new realities, the latter on remaking our institutions, including workplaces, in ways that respect different notions of character. These perspectives can be viewed as conflicting, or just as easily as complementary: How can we have productive workplaces in which qualities of character are assets and are not diminished?

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Implications

Several implications follow from the analysis presented in this chapter.

First, it suggests a conceptualization of the mismatch thesis that situates it in a larger context, while simultaneously tracing its impacts on the minutiae of everyday life. Regarding the former, it calls for us to examine the relationships of work and family to larger systems. We cannot understand the causes and consequences of the mismatch between work and family without also understanding, for example, their articulations with community, consumption and healthcare. Regarding the latter, it calls for us to focus on the specific pathways by which the mismatch is manifested in the lives of diverse, actual families. In this way, we can capture how the mismatch is remaking the very definitions of family and character, and how these changes are affecting health and well-being of workers and their children.

Second, it suggests a research design in which ethnography is combined with other methods, such as survey research. Ethnography can inform survey design and construction by pointing toward measures that are close to empirical data and by providing contextual data that can be used to interpret findings by explicating potential causal relationships. The breadth of anthropological data collection strategies and techniques is well suited to this challenge. Surveys and other quantitative methods can enhance the rigor of ethnographic findings by testing relationships and measuring the extent of phenomena described through field research. Integrating the methods of linguistic anthropology, physical anthropology, and archaeology with ethnography and survey methods can contribute to the theoretical integration warranted by the mismatch thesis.

Third, anthropology can inform us about the domains in which we should experiment. It suggests an approach that binds together analyses of body and ritual, technology and household economics, and artifacts and meaning. Above all, it suggests experiments that builds on the extant practices people are using to cope with the mismatch in their own lives.

Finally, ethnography can capture the impact of experiments on workplaces and families, including their costs and benefits from the perspectives of different stakeholders. Addressing the mismatch requires us to go beyond familiar assumptions that equate family with goodness and respite, and work with badness and stress. Teasing apart the complex sentiments surrounding both work and family is a critical step in addressing the mismatch, one to which anthropology is well suited to contribute.

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Endnotes

    1 The author thanks Tom Fricke and Bradd Shore for their generous contributions to this paper. James Freeman graciously provided editorial comments on short notice. Responsibility for the content, of course, rests solely with the author.
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    2  The fieldwork on which parts of this paper are based was sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (Darrah, English-Lueck & Freeman 2001). The author acknowledges the support of the Foundation and program officer Kathleen Christensen, as well as the contributions of co-principal investigators Jan English-Lueck and James Freeman.
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    3 The reader is referred to Mary Margaret Overbey and Kathryn Marie Dudley’s discussion of “History, Tradition and Methods” in Anthropology and Middle Class Working Families (2000) for a fuller discussion of anthropological/ethnographic studies of the U.S. mainstream. This account is largely based on their discussion.
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    The author acknowledges the assistance of center directors Tom Fricke (CEEL), Bradd Shore (MARIAL), and Elinor Ochs (CELF) in preparing this section.
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2003 Affect, Participation Structure, and Occasioned Knowledge Exploration in Family Interaction. Los Angeles: UCLA Center on Everyday Lives of Families, Working Paper No. 15.


Gullestad, Marianne

1984 Kitchen-Table Society: A Case Study of the Family Life and Friendships of Young Working-Class Mothers in Urban Norway. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.


Hall, John A. and Charles Lindholm

1999 Is America Falling Apart? Princeton: Princeton University Press.


Han, Sallie and Rebecca Upton

2001 Maternity and Its Discontents. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life, Working Paper No. 020-01.


Harkness, Sara and Charles M. Super, eds.

1996 Parents’ Cultural Belief Systems: Their Origins, Expressions, and Consequences. New York: Guilford Press.

1995 Culture and Parenting. In M. Bornstein, ed. Handbook of Parenting (pp. 211-234). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Hochschild, Arlie

1997 The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work. New York: Metropolitan Books.


Hoey, Brian

2002 Life-Style Migration in the Post-industrial Middle Class as Strategy for Feeling Greater Control, Balance, and Integration in Work, Family, and Personal Life. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life, Working Paper No. 034-02.


Hofferth, Sandra L. and John F. Sandberg

2000a How American Children Spend Their Time. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life, Working Paper No. 012-00

2000b Changes in American Children’s Time, 1981-1997. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life, Working Paper No. 013-00.

Izquierdo, Carolina

2002 How Health-Seeking Theories Inform Research on Working Families. Los Angeles: UCLA Center on Everyday Lives of Families, Working Paper No. 5.


Izquierdo, Carolina and Amy Paugh

2003 Modeling, Negotiating, Fixing: Discourses of Health Among Working Families in Los Angeles. Los Angeles: UCLA Center on Everyday Lives of Families, Working Paper No. 9.


Jandreau, Charles

2002 Social Rituals and Identity Creation in a Middle Class Workplace. Atlanta, GA: The Emory Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life, Working Paper No. 14.


Kinney, David A., Janet S. Dunn and Sandra L. Hofferth

2000 Family Strategies for Managing the Time Crunch. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life, Working Paper No. 011-00.


Klein, Wendy

2003 Children’s Participation in Household Work: Collaboration, Conflict, and Socialization in Working Family Interactions. Los Angeles: UCLA Center on Everyday Lives of Families, Working Paper No. 11.

Lamphere, Louise

1987 From Working Daughters to Working Mothers: Immigrant Women in a New England Industrial Community. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Leininger, April

2003 Feeling and Meaning in Socialization for Work. Los Angeles: UCLA Center on Everyday Lives of Families, Working Paper No. 13.

2002 Working Mothers in Downwardly Mobile Vietnamese-American Households: Some Preliminary Findings and Hypotheses. Los Angeles: UCLA Center on Everyday Lives of Families, Working Paper No. 3.


LeVeen, Emily

2002 Health Doesn’t Just Happen: the Time Crunch and Middle-Class Working Mothers’ Use of Complementary and Alternative Medicine. Atlanta, GA: The Emory Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life, Working Paper No. 18.


Lynd, Robert and Helen Lynd

1937 Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflict. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.

1929 Middletown: A Study in American Culture. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.

Montgomery, Alesia

2003 Talk of War: Battle News, Inside Stories and Family “Agitation”. Los Angeles: UCLA Center on Everyday Lives of Families, Working Paper No. 17.

Nash, June

1989 From Tank Town to High Tech: The Clash of Community and Industrial Cycles. Buffalo: State University of New York Press.


Newman, Katherine

1993 Declining Fortunes: The Withering of the American Dream. New York: Basic Books.

1988 Falling From Grace: The Experience of Downward Mobility in the American Middle Class. New York: The Free Press.


Nippert-Eng, Christena E.

1996 Home and Work: Negotiating Boundaries Through Everyday Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,


Osterman, Paul, Thomas A. Kochan, Richard M. Locke and Michael Piore

2001 Working in America: A Blueprint for the New Labor Market. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.


Overbey, Mary Margaret and Kathryn Marie Dudley

2000 Anthropology and Middle Class Working Families: A Research Agenda. Arlington, VA: American Anthropological Association.


Paugh, Amy

2002 Child Language Socialization in Working Families. Los Angeles: UCLA Center on Everyday Lives of Families, Working Paper No. 6.


Paxton, Felicity

2002 “Like a Haven: Not Work, Not Home!”: Ballet as Escape Ritual for Middle Class Working Women. Atlanta, GA: The Emory Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life, Working Paper No. 20.


Perlow, Leslie

1997 Finding Time: How Corporations, Individuals, and Families Can Benefit from New Work Practices. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Powdermaker, Hortense

1939 After Freedom: A Cultural Study in the Deep South. New York: Viking Press.

Richardson, Peter

2001 When Work Was Fun. Atlanta, GA: The Emory Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life, Working Paper No. 9.


Rudd, Elizabeth C., Lawrence S. Root and Alford A. Young (with Bob Bowen and Britt Halvorson

2002 “The Taste of Overtime.” Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life, Working Paper No. 040-02.


Sennett, Richard

1998 The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism. New York: W. W. Norton.


Shore, Bradd and Nathaniel Kendall-Taylor

2002 Salem Camp Meeting: A Theater of Family Memory. Atlanta, GA: The Emory Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life, Working Paper No. 011-02.

Sirota, Karen Gainer

2003 Doing Things with Play: The Play of Everyday Life. Los Angeles: UCLA Center on Everyday Lives of Families, Working Paper No. 16.


Stewart, Abigail, Donna Henderson-King, Eaaron Henderson-King and David G. Winter

2000 Work and Family Values: Life Scripts in the Midwest in the 1950s. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life, Working Paper No. 006-00.


Story, Lisa B. and Thomas N. Bradbury

2002 Understanding Marriages in Context. Los Angeles: UCLA Center on Everyday Lives of Families, Working Paper No. 1.


Upton, Rebecca

2002 A Culture of Expectations: The Imagined Family in the American Middle Class. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life, Working Paper No. 036-02.

Varenne, Herve

1977 Americans Together. New York: Teachers College Press.

Warner, William Lloyd

1949 Yankee Cities Series, Vol. 1. New Haven: Yale University Press.


Warner, William Lloyd and Paul S. Lunt

1942 The Status System of a Modern Community. Yankee City Series, Vol. 2. New Haven: Yale University Press.

1941 The Social Life of a Modern Community. New Haven: Yale University Press.


Weisner, Thomas S.

1999 Values That Matter. Anthropology Newsletter. May, pp.1, 4-5.


Weisner, T. S. and L. Bernheimer

1998 Children of the 1960s at Midlife: Generational Identity and the Family Adaptive Project. In Welcome to Middle Age! And Other Cultural Fictions. Richard Shweder, ed. Pp. 211-255. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.


Weisner, T. S. and H. Garnier

1992 Nonconventional Family Lifestyles and School Achievement: A 12-Year Longitudinal Study. American Educational Research Journal 29(3): 605-632.


Weisner, T. S., H. Garnier and J. Loucky

1994 Domestic Tasks, Gender Egalitarian Values and Children’s Gender Typing in Conventional and Nonconventional Families. Sex Roles 30(1/2): 23-54.

West, Laurel Parker

2002 Soccer Moms, Welfare Queens, Waitress Moms, and Super Moms: Myths of Motherhood in State Media Coverage of Child Care. Atlanta, GA: The Emory Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life, Working Paper No. 16.

Weston, Kath

1991 Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. New York: Columbia University Press.

Whitelegg, Drew

2003 “Family Life at the Cutting Edge of Flextime: Flight Attendants Describe Complex Juggling Act.” Families That Work: Newsletter of the Emory Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life, Spring 2003: 1-2.


Willihnganz, Heather

2002 Parent-Child Interaction Observation Systems: A Review of Psychological Research. Los Angeles: UCLA Center on Everyday Lives of Families, Working Paper No.7.


Winogard, Leah

2003 Natural Data and Discourse Perspectives in Analyzing Interpersonal Influence in Family Communication. Los Angeles: UCLA Center on Everyday Lives of Families, Working Paper No. 10


Wood, Jeffrey J. and Rena L. Repetti

2002 What Gets Dad Involved? A Longitudinal Study of Change in Parental Child Caregiving Involvement. Los Angeles: UCLA Center on Everyday Lives of Families, Working Paper No. 8.


Worthman, Carol, Jason DeCaro and Ryan Brown

2002 Cultural Consensus Approaches to the Study of American Family Life. Atlanta, GA: The Emory Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life, Working Paper No. 13.

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