The Alienation of the Striving Middle Class

Forward-looking companies will take measures to remedy our anxious, fractured, work-obsessed lives, argues Dalton Conley in Elsewhere, U.S.A.

By Susan Berfield

Editor's Rating:

The Good: A provocative and disturbing look at knowledge workers and alienation.

The Bad: The author didn't see the economic meltdown coming.

The Bottom Line: A persuasive examination of professionals' fractured consciousness.

Reader Reviews

Elsewhere U.S.A.:
How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners,
and the Affluent Society to the Home Office,
BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety

By Dalton Conley
Pantheon; 221 pp.; $24

A young boy wanders into the blazingly lit living room late at night, looking for his mother. She is on a video conference call to Australia. "Come cuddle me," he says. But she can't. She holds up a finger, asking him to wait a moment. She's there, but she's also a million miles away.

This story comes early in Dalton Conley's book Elsewhere, U.S.A.: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, Blackberry Moms, and Economic Anxiety. Conley, the youngish, well-regarded head of the sociology department at New York University, examines a particularly recognizable group of Americans: middle-class professionals who are striving, overworked, always in motion, and, says the author, feel a bit out of place everywhere. His book is a fresh, provocative, sometimes disturbing, mostly dispassionate take on why apparently successful knowledge workers are suffering from that early-industrial-era condition Karl Marx called alienation.

Elsewhere, U.S.A. examines this modern phenomenon, and there is none of the bravado or guilt that characterizes many books about working life. The book isn't meant to be prescriptive, but the author offers one piece of advice: In the coming years a company's success will depend on how well it helps employees integrate the domains of their fractured lives.

Conley says we blur our professional and private lives, mostly through the use of technology. We have allowed, and sometimes welcomed, the marketplace into nearly every nook, even turning our homes into potential profit-and-loss centers. We are constantly on the lookout for economic opportunities, whether we're at the gym, our kids' school, or out with friends. This collision of worlds has made us busier, if not downright frenetic. But it has also left us feeling disjointed and dislocated, as if we should always be somewhere else, doing something else. Conley has come up with an unfortunate term—the intravidual—for those who must constantly play more than one role at once, managing "myriad data streams." Terminology aside, this is a persuasive notion—that in a world of bits and tweets and links, we have become fragmented.

Not everyone is so affected. Conley says that the elsewhere phenomenon strikes the younger members of this professional class more than the older ones, parents more than the childless, the urban more than the rural, and particular personality types more than others. But most everyone feels some of those influences every now and then, or at least notices their effect on American culture. They have become part of the texture of everyday life.

One of the most essential forces that has insinuated itself into our fractured, elsewhere lives is economic anxiety. Conley's discussion of our contemporary work ethic is insightful, but some of his analysis seems more suited to a time when money worries were more subtle than they are now, given the financial crisis. His starting point will be familiar to many readers: that the steadily rising inequality among members of the professional class makes many of us feel as if we're not keeping up. Things get more interesting when he points out that for the first time in history, the more we are paid, the more hours we tend to work. Why? Because all of a sudden just hanging out with the family or friends seems like wasted time, hours we could be making money.

Conley gets in trouble when he argues that the cause of our economic fears is not job instability as much as other financial shocks that have nothing to do with wage cuts or layoffs, such as when a woman decides to stay home with the kids or when a couple divorces. He writes: "Driven by a phantom anxiety that something big is going to go wrong, the most successful professional class in the most powerful country in the world lives in fear that its personal house of economic cards is about to collapse." Alas, for some that fear has been realized.

O.K., so he didn't see the economic meltdown coming. But Conley has one other unsettling insight into our economic anxiety. He believes that because value is elusive in today's vast marketplace, our own worth is elusive, too. He writes that "when you can't assess yourself, when you're unsure of your place in the world, what you end up feeling is alienation."

So what does this mean for the workplace? Conley, like so many others, points to Google (GOOG) as an example of what may come. It's a company that encourages and even requires employees to integrate their professional, social, and, at times, family lives—all while working crazy hours. Brace yourself.

Berfield is an associate editor at BusinessWeek .