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157 A P P E N D I X A getting our own party started: studying direct home sales The process of finding a research topic can take a variety of forms. In our case, we did not have to go searching for an area to study; the topic literally came to us in the form of a postcard. For years, the two of us had opened our home mailboxes (and, at times, our e-mail inboxes) to find invitation after invitation to a variety of DHS parties. Living in different counties at the time and having separate social circles, we each attended a fair amount of parties individually but never together. As good friends and colleagues whose offices are directly across the hall from each other, we would make small talk about our weekends first thing on Monday morning. In addition to the usual reports of squeezing in housework , course preparation, research, and family time, we increasingly found that our conversations included DHS in some form. If we had not attended a DHS party, we had likely been invited to one at least every other weekend. At some point during the 2004–05 school year, one of us looked to the other and said, “We have to study this.” At that time, we did not know exactly what, how, or when we would study DHS. We were both finishing individual book-length projects on topics somewhat removed from issues of work, family, and emotions. The timing simply was not right to add a new project to our already busy academic lives, but we agreed that there was something too rich in DHS to ignore. A few quick scans of the existing literature left us surprised that there were only piecemeal treatments of the industry , mostly journal articles that examined a narrow slice of one particular company . Aside from manuals written by promoters of the industry, we found only two books that dealt with direct home sales (or multilevel marketing) more generally : one was nearly twenty years old and the other was written by an ex-insider as an exposé. Still uncertain where our research would lead us, we nonetheless agreed to come back to DHS after we wrapped up our other projects. In the meantime, we began collecting every paper and electronic invitation and catalog that came our way. By the time we actually started the project, we had a huge box of materials stored in our offices. As we teach our students in our introductory sociology courses, one of the joys and curses of developing a “sociological imagination” is the ability to see the familiar in a new light. Unlike some of our other projects, where we found ourselves as true outsiders as our research took us thousands of miles away to another continent or to hardcore punk shows (which, in some respects, felt equally as far), here we truly were starting from a place where we could not claim to be total outsiders. Though neither of us had worked in the industry as a consultant, strangers to the business we were not. As we fit many of the seemingly target demographics for the industry (middle-class women in our late thirties and forties), we had attended dozens of parties for a variety of companies before embarking on this research, and one of us had hosted a party in the past. Furthermore, we both had (and continue to have) friendships with women who work as consultants that predate their entrance into the industry. Narrowing the Focus As we discuss in the introduction, we focused exclusively on women in the industry . Although male consultants would likely add an interesting contrast to the perspectives of women in the industry, women comprise the bulk of the industry. In fact, we can see one quick and simple indicator of the feminization of DHS, which we explore in depth in Chapter 1, in the growth of women in DHS in a very short time frame. The female-to-male percentage of DHS consultants came in at 72.5 percent to 27.5 percent in 2000; by 2009, that percentage gap closed even further, with women making up 82.4 percent of consultants. Although we cannot substantiate the claim with national data, our fieldwork experiences suggest to us that, whereas some companies continue to attract men, the ones we examined are almost exclusively women. Regardless, given the wealth of data that trace women’s and men’s divergent experiences of work and...

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