Doctoral Dissertation Research: Households and the Future of Work: The Rise of Industrious Households After the Decline of the Family Wage, 1970-2008.

随着工作变得越来越灵活、偶然和自动化，社会研究和政府关注的焦点已经集中在工作的未来。自20世纪70年代以来，为了应对劳动力市场的这些变化，越来越多的美国家庭在劳动力市场以外寻求资金。在这个项目中，三个案例研究将跟踪直销(雅芳、安利、康宝莱)、住宅内附属住宅单元租赁的兴起，以及房屋净值提取的兴起。在20世纪80年代和90年代，直销者仔细权衡了将亲属关系和社会关系市场化的努力，而不是不可挽回地切断它们，这为家庭主妇提供了追求二次收入的途径，同时又不完全放弃养家糊口的家庭主妇模式的理想。20世纪90年代开始租赁空余卧室和车库的家庭，试图通过租赁“奶奶公寓”和“姻亲单位”来避免移民随随便便的污名，将他们对独栋住宅的市场化描述为核心家庭的自然延伸。本世纪初的房屋净值提取利用了房产所有权和土地独立之间的长期关联，允许房主将股权贷款解读为利用自己的财富，而不是承担高风险贷款。这些案例说明了家庭在标准工资之外创造资源的战略，这让人们得以一窥自上世纪70年代以来家庭经济生活的重新安排。调查结果将为政府政策提供参考，特别是那些管理住宅租赁和房屋净值提取的政策，以最大限度地适当使用它们，平衡风险。随着美国家庭面临不确定的劳动回报，其成员越来越可能采取三种勤奋战略：(1)劳动密集型勤劳，其特征是工薪阶层人数的增加，或家庭用于有工资工作的时间的增加；(2)分配性勤奋，其特征是企业家转向亲属关系和社交网络，试图吸纳规模虽小但经常获得现金资源的机会；以及(3)食利者勤奋，其特征是试图从对家庭商品或资产的索取权中获得收入。由于大多数关于劳动力结构调整的社会研究都集中在劳动密集型的勤奋程度上，因此本项目的核心是对分配和食利者家庭活动的案例研究。利用来自市政当局、联邦监管机构、国会记录、报纸和行业出版物的行政和档案数据，三个案例研究中的每一个都分析了：(1)推动早期勤奋活动的动机；(2)监管挑战和合并；(3)社会经济、种族和性别在家庭群体中扩散的轨迹。这个项目表明，最近经济非正规性扩张的根源不是新的技术平台，而是可以追溯到20世纪80年代的劳动力市场组织的变化。这项研究的发现阐明了关于家庭及其与美国经济在20世纪末和21世纪初的交集的社会学理论。调查结果还将提供对相关变化的洞察，因为工作在美国和世界上继续发展。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

As jobs become increasingly flexible, contingent, and automated, social research and governmental concern has centered on the future of work. Responding to these changes in the labor market since the 1970s, a growing number of American families pursued money outside of labor markets. In this project, three case studies will follow the rise of direct selling (Avon, Amway, Herbalife), leasing of accessory dwelling units within homes, and the rise of home equity extraction. Direct sellers in the 1980s and 1990s carefully balanced attempts to marketize kinship and social ties, without severing them irreparably, that provided housewives an avenue to pursue secondary incomes without fully abandoning the ideal of the breadwinner-homemaker model. Families who began leasing spare bedrooms and garages in the 1990s sought to avoid the stigma of immigrant informality by leasing “granny flats” and “in-law units,” portraying their marketization of the single-family home as a natural extension of the nuclear family. Extractions of home-equity in the early 2000s tapped into long-time associations between property ownership and landed independence, allowing homeowners to interpret equity loans as tapping into their wealth, rather than as taking on risky loans. These cases illustrate household strategies to generate resources outside standard wages—providing a lens into a rearrangement of household economic life since the 1970s. Findings will inform governmental policies, particularly those governing dwelling leasing and home equity extraction, to maximize their appropriate use balanced against risk. As American households faced uncertain returns to waged labor, its members grew likely to embrace three strategies of industriousness: (1) labor-intensive industriousness characterized by increases in the number of wage earners or the time devoted to wage work by a household; (2) distributive industriousness, characterized by entrepreneurial turns toward kinship and social networks in attempts to siphon small but regular access to cash resources; and (3) rentier industriousness, characterized by attempts at securing incomes from claims on household goods or assets. Because most social research on labor restructuring focuses on labor-intensive industriousness, the core of this project are case studies of the distributive and rentier household activity. Leveraging administrative and archival data from municipalities, federal regulators, congressional records, newspapers, and industry publications, each of the three case studies analyzes: (1) the motivations driving early industrious activity; (2) regulatory challenges and incorporation; and (3) trajectories of socio-economic, racial, and gendered diffusion across groups of households. This project suggests that at the root of recent expansions in economic informality are not new technology platforms, but rather changes in labor market organization dating back to the 1980s. The findings of this research illuminate sociological theories regarding the family and its intersection with the U.S. economy in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Findings will also provide insight into related changes as work continues to evolve in the United States and the world.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.