The Tumbleweed Society: Working and Caring in an Age of Insecurity

by Allison J. Pugh

In The Tumbleweed Society , Allison Pugh offers a moving exploration of sacrifice, betrayal, defiance, and resignation, as people cope in a society where relationships and jobs seem to change constantly. Based on eighty in-depth interviews with parents who have varied experiences of job insecurity and socio-economic status, Pugh finds most seem to accept job insecurity as inevitable but still try to bar that insecurity from infiltrating their home lives. Rigid expectations for enduring connections and uncompromising loyalty in their intimate relationships, however, can put intolerable strain on them, often sparking instability in the very social ties they yearn to protect. By shining a light on how we prepare ourselves and our children for an uncertain environment, Pugh gives us a detailed portrait of how we compel ourselves to adapt emotionally to a churning economy, and what commitment and obligation mean in an insecure age.

Genres: Sociology, Nonfiction

278 pages, Hardcover

First published November 22, 2014

Reviews

[Mark Underwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Voice for Employment Fairness: Farsighted, Faint

Allison Pugh's (@Allison_Pugh) sociology project, The Tumbleweed Society: Working and Caring in an Age of Insecurity paints a grim picture of work life in America and forecasts that it will get worse. She does not mention anything about it getting better, but -- well, those Americans are an adaptable bunch.

There aren't as many possible perspectives on this text as there are thorns on a drought-happy tumbleweed (and this reviewer grew up in Tucson), but maybe as many as on a baby weed.

But start with its premise: The easy part: That an overwhelming sense of helplessness has settled in with increasing number of long term unemployed, underemployed of all ages, including skilled and college-educated workers. The harder: those employees almost never blame their employers, and steadily engaged in lowering expectations of employers.

Or on to the perspective afforded by from impact of serial unemployment / employment on care-givers, gender roles, marriage and issues of identity.

The book may not prove to be a bullet train to the promised land of labor justice for the proletariat. In fact, there are several paths to derailment.

For one thing, prospective readers might want to start with Appendix A, "Commitment Talk," which explains the interview method. It's a methodology that won't satisfy some non-sociologists, which is to say there won't be much conversation about hypothesis testing or statistical significance.

Readers should be prepared for a calculated mix of essay, polemic, storytelling, light discourse and academic coverage. In some respects this is better than some long essays, such as long form New Yorker or Harpers pieces (e.g,, Harpers recent "The Great Republican Land Heist" by Christopher Ketcham, February 2015). These long form pieces have many of the same elements sans academic coverage, which means that there are few references provided if any. Fact-checking, or even opinion-seeking are an uphill battle. That weakness is not to be found in Tumbleweed Society.

On the other hand the mix of bibliographical zeal and storytelling doesn't always make for a smooth journey. The side trips (to endnotes, and the references cited there) , while necessary and even reassuring, do not always support the polemic. Interpretations provided by the author for interviews are plausible, but often not the only interpretation possible. Pugh has several themes that are exploited in the text, and these play out in her interpretations, but other possible explanations are not introduced; it would have been helpful to learn how she might refute these other views.

But these reservations should be no excuse for reading about the emergency of what Pugh calls "the 'insecurity culture,' a culture of personal responsibility and risk, linked to the spread of precariousness at work, the neoliberal receding of the state, and the domination of the market." How widespread is this phenomenon? Silicon Valley statistics of 50% turnover every two years seem plausible, though turnover in smaller businesses (somewhat of a blind spot in this study) is likely less.

The impact -- and the risks -- no doubt hit women hardest, and "gendered" impact is a focus of Tumbleweed. Exceptions are numerous, but many will conjure a woman when asking:

How does a society predicated on mobility handle the bothersome needs of the young, the sick and the elderly, that act to drag caregivers down from the stratosphere of choice and flexibility?

and, later:

Widespread insecurity, inflected by social inequality, has a profound impact, both the insecurity we choose, and that which we are dealt, whether we are a leaver or the left behind. It magnifies dependency into a problem, it hides the way society organizes access to care as an individual solution and it creates the sort of choices we face in charting our pathways through care and connection.

Pugh presents, but does not resolve some social paradoxes. Americans, according to a 2011 survey she cites, are satisfied with their work -- to the tune of 83%. Yet the insecurity is increasingly systematic. When asked, 70% say they work extra hours, more than in other countries. Full-time work is, it seems, increasingly a marker of identity, with many voting against public policies that are seen to be supporting a largely mythical population that "does not want to work."

Often her interviewees maintain a respectful distance from their employers -- sometimes blaming themselves, sometimes excusing the termination rationale, if one was even provided by employers. Others turn inward, feeling that their resolve has been tested and that terminations -- even serial terminations -- will lead to better days and greater opportunities, even though the odds are usually against them.

Read the full review at InsideTheOrdinary.

[Leah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Needless to say, the plant-people tumbleweed analogy won't parallel perfectly, but it's a colorfully useful image. Living in the southwest, I've seen lots of tumbleweeds, but still needed to learn a little about them. Via wikipedia, here are a few facts:

"A tumbleweed is a structural part of the above-ground anatomy of any of a number of species of plants, a diaspore that, once it is mature and dry, detaches from its root or stem, and tumbles away in the wind. ... Tumbleweed species occur most commonly in steppe and arid ecologies, where frequent wind and the open environment permit rolling without prohibitive obstruction ... Many tumbleweeds are ruderal species, opportunistic agricultural weeds."

Sociology sometimes is a quantifiable soft-scientific discipline that studies, analyzes, charts, and plots. At other times sociologists report in a more essayistic manner, using prose to describe their findings, as Allison Pugh does in The Tumbleweed Society. Our lives are about story, our lives becomes stories, and sometimes a narrative approach like this book uses lines out the truth a lot more clearly than charts, graphs, stats, and percentages do. Given the true employment insecurities many of us already have experienced, and every single one of us knows is out there, no wonder I found this book so interesting! Allison Pugh's writing flows well, without any annoying mannerisms, though I need to comment on what feels like her frequent use of "eschew" and its variants. Who on earth says "eschew"?

Pugh's and her colleagues' one-on-one interviews of and observations about eighty individuals demonstrate that these days job retention and change is mostly related to socioeconomic class, rather than being as ethnicity- or gender-driven as job and career opps were in times past. So we find high employment mobility and high residential relocation rates amongst those with high-end, elite level skills who tend to be sought out, sought after, and routinely draw high income levels. We also find high employment mobility and high residential relocation rates amongst those with approximately high school level schooling and skills.

But The Tumbleweed Society experiences not only "Working," but also "Caring in an Age of Insecurity," as the subtitle describes. Briefly, it seems as if a lot of people are okay with companies they work for having only nominal commitment to their workers' lives while the workers do their best by the company. On the other hand, we find truly dramatic, impressive instances of individuals maintaining "no matter what" commitments to family (parents, offspring, sibling) and significant others.

At any rate, I'd love to read a similar report about a similar population cohort about ten years from now. I also wonder where I'll be working, where you'll be working, if housing and employment will have settled down and stabilized? Or not?

[Biblio Files (takingadayoff) · Rating 4 out of 5]

There have been so many good books recently about the plight of the American worker and massive financial inequality worldwide. According to The Economist, the wealth of the top 0.10 percent will soon exceed that of the bottom 90 oercent. The Tumbleweed Society looks at the worker from a different angle. Sociologist Alison Pugh investigates how job insecurity is affecting workers' personal lives apart from work.

Pugh interviews dozens of workers, mostly parents, to find out about their marriages and relationships, their attitudes toward child rearing, friendships, taking care of sick parents. Do the employers' attitudes that workers are disposable seep into the workers' self-regard? Do workers who move from job to job also move from relationship to relationship?

By and large, Pugh finds that people are not only as committed to their children and partners as they've ever been, but they also tend to be loyal to their employers, despite layoffs, downsizing, benefit cuts, and outsourcing. If for nothing more than personal pride, they do the best jobs they can. Fear of losing their jobs doesn't seem to embitter them, maybe because they are resigned to the inevitability of job insecurity.

One thing that Pugh doesn't seem to address directly is how age plays into the equation. Those she interviewed varied widely in social class, education, and geography, as well as age, but since she wanted to concentrate on people who were parents of teens, the youngest subjects were well into their thirties and most older than that. I wonder if growing up entirely within the era of job insecurity will create a Soviet-style class of workers who do as little as possible, or if the work ethic is some kind of a national characteristic that will endure?

Also recommended -- Down the Up Escalator: How the 99 Percent Live by Barbara Garson

[Christine Zibas · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book addresses an important topic that, frankly, not enough people are talking about these days. While commentators focus on the economic crisis and recovery, companies and stock prices, too few examine the effect it has had on working people at every level (except, perhaps, to count up the officially unemployed). This book goes deeper, into the issue of job insecurity, which many would argue is simply a modern day fact of life.

While it may be an omnipresent condition for many (at a time when corporations have sacrificed loyalty to employees for corporate profit), perhaps the greater question is why do US employees accept this fate? Why so little push back, when it's been proven that this lack of loyalty on the part of business has not necessarily resulted in stronger companies? Why do Americans continue to exhibit a strong work ethic in the face of so little guarantee from their employers?

Moreover, what impact is this having on families, spouses, children, and those who need care? It's a big topic, and Sociologist Allison Pugh uses a study of real world workers, both secure and insecure, to address these topics and more. What she and her study subjects have to say about work, family, and life is compelling and thought-provoking. While this is a solidly academic treatise, it's also important for the average working American. Not only does it speak to the current economic dilemma workers find themselves in, it sheds some light on the fact that this situation is not a foregone conclusion either.

[Philip Cohen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent book. I wrote about it here https://familyinequality.wordpress.co...

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

At the outset of her book Pugh establishes the archetype of many of the people I work alongside, who fall under the moniker ‘tumbleweed’. She uses the analogy in her title to describe those employees and intimate partners who pick up and move along, often with very little foresight or advanced planning, in search of different employment and intimate relationships.

Pugh makes her analogy without dwelling on it—she could have put the problem another way, I suppose, by asking why it is that some individuals don’t put down roots. To her, tumbleweeds’ rootlessness is a function of low-wage labor at companies that don’t honor anything to their employees besides a paycheck at the end of the day, or do anything else that might encourage them to ‘set down roots’ in a community or in their personal lives. Employees in such situations usually don’t hold grudges at their past or current employers, even after they have been summarily fired. They see themselves entirely as ‘at will’ employees, and so don’t look to their status of employment, or their relationship with their employer at a basic level, as anything besides mere survival. Again, while not putting it quite these terms, Pugh makes the case that more stably employed and slightly higher paid middle-class workers tend to establish roots in their personal and working lives over time. At the highest levels of income, salaried white-collar professionals tend to drift to the most fertile soil of all, where headhunters go to great lengths to get them to establish roots in a locale, and presumably, to keep them there, once they’ve been hired.

Tumbleweeds similarly experience rootlessness in their intimate relationships. They roll away from partners at a moment’s notice as a survival strategy. Again, intuitively, this strategy makes sense especially for women who don’t stand much to lose by leaving partners in difficult or abusive relationships (Pugh interviews mainly women for her case studies.)

‘Moral walls’: these are a salient features that working professionals of the highest echelons, according to Pugh, build around themselves, to shield their intimate private lives from their business lives. One obvious reason they do so, is because they can afford to. Pugh maintains that these ‘moral walls’, surprisingly, separate opportunistic behaviors of the workplace—accepting higher salaries, perks, remunerative contracts, etc., from a primly domesticated sense of obligation to uphold traditional ‘family values’ in marriage, religion, and in leisure pursuits. She could have applied these ‘moral walls’ also to workers/partners in working class situations, too; it is just that for them moral walls are less discernable, because financially strained families already have their ‘family values’ waylaid by the vagaries of life including unemployment, substance abuse, and incarceration.

Pugh’s account of ‘tumbleweeds’ in modern American society explains to me the conundrum of ‘class warfare’—why, frankly, it is a chimeras, despite the popular charge by the right against their political rivals on the left for trying to incite it. The ‘tumbleweed’ class isn’t fighting any war. They are just doing what they have to, to get by. Certainly, they have no inclination or reason to fight something that isn’t in their own interest of being able to secure a job, if they have to, tomorrow, or next week. Similarly, most of those remaining in the middle class seem hardly inclined to give up the benefits of relative stability that they enjoy—and whatever their political persuasions—by making life more difficult for the 1 percenters. The ‘ideological argument’—because that’s what it is—is between people of privilege and wealth, in any case.

In her account of the influence of the ‘new economy’ on our personal lives, she describes how pragmatism, flexible family structures, and coral-like networks of social awareness and interpersonal connection will encourage individuals and communities to survive, even during periods of grave uncertainty (if, indeed, that's the kind of epoch we're all in, now).

A bigger challenge will be for corporations to adopt at least three mutually compatible bottom lines in any of their business transactions: not just their obligations to shareholders, but to their customers and their employees as well.

[Rama Rao · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sociology of the divided mind: Tackling the mind-body disorders of the 21 century.

The 21 century is becoming more like a tumbleweed society, where job insecurity is large and the economic disparities are wide. Will this eventually become 99.9 percent to 0.1 percent class system? What would be the future of let “free market” take care of itself so that the prosperity offered thus far will continue to get better, as many politicians like us to believe every four years when they need our votes. In this book, University of Virginia Professor Allison Pugh focuses on job insecurities and forging family connections. The insecurity resulting from the end of the traditional job and the traditional family (historically this was referred to married life between a man and woman) is already discussed by numerous sociologists, philosophers and management/business specialists. The premise is that we are moving away from an "insurance" state, where our basic security was protected by jobs and "till death do we part" marriages, with kids and moral support from parents/grandparents. There is no such thing as traditional marriage now, and the jobs could be anywhere in this global economy.

Professor Pugh sees a connection between the obligation of an individual to his/her job and the employer, and to his/her family. With greater sense of job insecurity, the individual turn to fulfilling family obligations and likes to develop intimate relationship to gain a sense of security. If family situation doesn’t pan out to be secure, then people construct stronger walls between themselves and the jobs and the family: The fabric of our connected lives weakens.

It is rather interesting to compare this work with the work of University of South Carolina Professor Jerald Wallulis who has studied this problem from a philosophical point, and concludes that the American dream of a well-paid job and greater prosperity for one's children is very remote and unrealistic romantic notion. Equally unrealistic is the expectation of sharing the American dream with the same partner for the rest of one’s life.

In this tumbleweed society, working and caring in an age of job insecurity is not a simple problem to tackle. We live in a global market where the goods and services are bought and sold across the borders. The global economy, technological advances and the multiculturalism is changing the way of life faster than we can imagine. Professor Pugh is seeing the problem through a very narrow window where she doesn’t even discuss how the tumbleweed society made of many cultures and age groups are affected by the new insecurities. There are many studies that suggest that age plays out differently on personal and professional insecurities. Younger generation handles things differently than older generations, and in the world of alcohol and controlled substances, moods and perceptions change, and priorities take whole new meanings.

[Nancy Kennedy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Allison Pugh's book is part Studs Terkel, part sociology textbook. I always appreciate authors who insert real life into their manuscripts, instead of just dry statistics and theories. In her book, Ms. Pugh examines the flexibility (or fragility, depending on how you look at it) inherent in today's work environment and home life through the lens of about eighty people.

By "Tumbleweed Society," Ms. Pugh means that we as Americans are less tethered to communities, jobs and family members than in past generations. She sees both good and bad in the trend: mobility allows workers to capture opportunities wherever they arise, but uncertain employment may uproot people who in the past would have enjoyed job stability and long-term relationships.

In general, she separates society into three categories: the highly educated and well compensated people who are free to go where their careers lead them; those in less remunerative but stable positions, such as firefighters and teachers, who put down roots in their jobs, families and communities; and the insecure workers who are at the mercy of their employers (mostly in retail and service sectors) and lack safety nets who tend to hopscotch between jobs, personal relationships, and locations. In reality, I think society is much more stratified. Most of my friends have (or had) good jobs and would prefer to stay put, but because of layoffs have had to move two or three times. They're certainly not following a promising and highly-paid upward career path; most are lateral moves at best.

The interviews are interesting, although spread out over the course of the book. An interviewee comes and goes and you have to remember who they are and pick up their story and the author's new point. I prefer the presentation of a Studs Terkel book of oral history, where you get the entire interview in one shot.

In the end, it seemed to me that most people just put a good face on their situations, whatever they were. I wasn't sure they were telling the author how they really felt. Or, I'm wondering if people's personalities determine their situation more than external things like jobs or relationships. I just can't believe that most people consider an itinerant lifestyle, whether forced or chosen, as a positive form of independence. I think most people crave connections at work and at home. This seems especially true in the case of single parents... I don't know anyone who assumed this role for its "independence."

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Tumbleweed Society by Allison J. Pugh associate professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia is a useful examination of the modern American, middle class work place. The author, rightly in many ways, expresses the modern work place, particularly in corporations, as one where employees have few rights and the employers have few obligations. As a work to study among a broad group of individuals, how these changes are effecting them, this book is a good start, and a decent continuation of an academic discussion, from a sociological perspective.

The 80 individuals interviewed and examined here are a decent mix of the modern workplace, and the book does show how the workplace effects private lives as well. As someone who has lived, to some degree, a similar story to some of the individuals interviewed here, their stories do have a compelling angle. Yet, the interviewees could be placed in greater context, with each other, to form a more complete picture.

This is a fine book for what it is: an investigation into how changes that have happened in the workplace, particularly since the 90's technological revolution, and retreat of large scale manufacturing, have effected many. This is an academic work that should be understood from within the discipline of sociology. A general reader might appreciate a more interdisciplinary approach.

[Lynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Allison J. Pugh is a sociologist who studied The Tumbleweed Society, one in which work is temporary and poorly paid. She wondered if itinerant work changed social relationships and society also. She found people had more itinerant relationships with friends, marriages often ended and children lived with different parents or had step parents, etc. All caused by temporary life situations. Employers also had few obligations to employees and could leave the area quickly.

[Tina Panik · Rating 2 out of 5]

A strong premise, but the heavy reliance on case studies and narratives made it a cumbersome read.

[Mills College Library]

331.2596 P9782 2015