Working Hard and Making Do: Surviving in Small Town America (review)

Accompanying dramatic changes in the organization of global production is the transformation of local communities characterized by declines in the long-term, full-time work that once characterized industrial employment. With a focus on the consequences of plant closures in Coolidge County, Vermont, Margaret Nelson and Joan Smith argue that rural communities are not only becoming more modern and reindustrialized — depending increasingly upon service sector and self-employment — but that there are other advantages of stable, permanent employment, the loss of which we have yet to fully appreciate.

In Working Hard and Making Do Nelson and Smith examine how households, as collective organizations of life and livelihood, come to terms with a changing labor and resource market. Animating the book’s focus are the questions: How do families with and without secure employment engage other ways of earning income to both respond to and create new organizations of production and work? How do these changes simultaneously build upon and reorganize family life and gender relations?

The author’s empirical focus are families who had been full-time industrial wage workers now forced to develop strategies of work and resource management that no longer depend upon the work of a single family member able to provide for the needs of the entire household. Instead, families increasingly rely upon a multiple set of income earning and resource replacing activities to secure their livelihoods. As families in Coolidge County show, their incomes often include a combination of wage work, entrepreneurial skill, self-provisioning, and barter, what Nelson and Smith refer to as dual-earning, moonlighting, self-provisioning, and interhousehold exchange.

Examining white, in-tact, heterosexual households — as conditions are presumed to be worse for black, Latino, and gay families — the authors differentiate families into those with “good” jobs and those with “bad” ones. Following substantive chapters that examine how these two broad types of household create sources of work with very different resource endowments, the authors go on to disaggregate their sample households in order to draw attention to how family members, under permanent and dramatic changes in their employment profile renegotiate gender and kin relations. Following 117 individuals in 81 households, they show how bad job households are more likely to depend upon normative gender expectations, and fail to maintain social networks because they are unable to meet the obligations associated with barter and informal exchange. This contributes both to their limited access to good jobs and their limited ability to successfully make ends meet.

Good job households, in contrast, have the resources to maintain networks that position them to locate good jobs as they become available, and carry out self-provisioning and entrepreneurial activities that can be financially sustaining. These households also were able to benefit from barter and inter-household exchanges because they were able to meet the expectations and obligations associated with these relations. Thus, good job households can weather crises in ways that mediate the temporary effects of the loss of a good job. As other household members desire or need to find employment, they too are more likely to find a second good job, whereas it is among bad job households that second jobs are likewise low paid and impermanent.

There is a wealth of information marking differences in the constraints and opportunities good and bad job families face in meeting their resource needs. Perhaps counter-intuitively, Nelson and Smith confirm that families with members having one good job are precisely those better able to negotiate other resources to secure additional income, whether it is the wife securing a second good job, or a husband able to negotiate for off-the-books exchanges that enable the household to reduce their dependence on wages. Self-provisioning that includes building one’s own home, cutting wood, and putting up summer produce for the long winter are forms of income displacement that depend upon strong community networks, time, and the money...