People at Work: Life, Power, and Social Inclusion in the New Economy

View the Table of Contents
Read the Introduction

“DeVault's brilliant introduction transforms our understanding of work in contemporary North America. The collection as a whole, particularly the institutional ethnographies, expand and deepen her re-vision. A magnificent volume!”
—Dorothy E. Smith, author of Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People

People at Work is noted sociologist Marjorie L. DeVault’s groundbreaking collection of original essays on the complexities of the modern-day workplace. By focusing on the lived experiences of the worker, not as an automaton on an assembly line, but as an embodied human of flesh and bone, these essays offer important insight on the realities of the workplace, and their effects on life at home and in communities. With contributions from some of today’s top scholars, each essay is a detailed case study of a different aspect of the working world.

Compelling, lively, and sometimes chilling, the contributors address issues from disability rights to immigrant labor, welfare reforms to budget cuts, competition to personal motivations. Each one valuable on its own, the essays in People at Work combine to illuminate the hurdles that workers of all backgrounds struggle with and, more broadly, the impact of change on workers’ lives in the new, increasingly global, economy.