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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™

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Family, Life Course, and Society

Selected Works

Lifestyle Migration

Articles 1 - 5 of 5

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Theorising The ‘Fifth Migration’ In The United States: Understanding Lifestyle Migration From An Integrated Approach, Brian Hoey Jun 2014

Theorising The ‘Fifth Migration’ In The United States: Understanding Lifestyle Migration From An Integrated Approach, Brian Hoey

Brian A. Hoey, Ph.D.

This chapter is an empirically-informed discussion of relevant social theory for examining the phenomenon of lifestyle migration in the United States in both rural and urban settings. Specifically, the chapter explores key explanatory models born of research into so-called non-economic migration occurring since the early twentieth century—models that may be characterized as primarily either production or consumption oriented in their emphasis—as a context for outlining an integrated approach. The author then highlights changes in how some Americans appear to calculate personal and collective quality of life as engendered by an emerging economic order—based on principles of flexibility and contingency—whose affects …

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Place For Personhood: Individual And Local Character In Lifestyle Migration, Brian A. Hoey Dec 2009

Place For Personhood: Individual And Local Character In Lifestyle Migration, Brian A. Hoey

Brian A. Hoey, Ph.D.

While drawing on literature of narrative interpretations of the construction of self and place-based, embodied identity, this article will explore the impact of invasive market forces on intertwined processes of person, self, and place-making. It considers how resources for these projects have changed in the face of translocal market forces and neoliberal ideals. Despite numerous proclamations of an essential placelessness to contemporary American society, place continues to be a basic part of the construction of the person. In fact, a variety of place-making practices are increasingly pursued as ways of negotiating tension between personal experience with material demands in pursuit …

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Pursuing The Good Life: American Narratives Of Travel And A Search For Refuge, Brian A. Hoey Dec 2008

Pursuing The Good Life: American Narratives Of Travel And A Search For Refuge, Brian A. Hoey

Brian A. Hoey, Ph.D.

September 11th 2001 helped create a sense of ever-present risk for many Americans. At the same time, highly publicized abuses of corporate power and financial meltdowns in former Wall Street gems like Enron and WorldCom together with more recent economic trouble in the U.S. housing market heighten uncertainties. Although these events have hastened personal experience of insecurity across all socioeconomic levels, even in the dotcom glory days many middle-class families rightly sensed a threatening undercurrent of change. Although unsettling, global economic restructuring begun in the 1970s fueled stratospheric growth in the 90s as corporations embraced “flexibility.” On an individual level, …

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American Dreaming: Refugees From Corporate Work Seek The Good Life, Brian A. Hoey Dec 2007

American Dreaming: Refugees From Corporate Work Seek The Good Life, Brian A. Hoey

Brian A. Hoey, Ph.D.

The economic restructuring and corporate downsizing that has come to define the contemporary working world has made contingent, part-time, and temporary work a part of the American social landscape. In this chapter, life-style migrants describe challenging taken for granted assumptions of the American Dream as a framework, a moral horizon that orients and promises future reward for present day loyalty, hard work and self-sacrifice. The decision of how to live one’s life is made of more than simply economic choices, they are also moral. The case of life-style migration shows how people may attempt to be true to an emerging …

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Grey Suit Or Brown Carhartt: Narrative Transition, Relocation And Reorientation In The Lives Of Corporate Refugees, Brian A. Hoey Dec 2005

Grey Suit Or Brown Carhartt: Narrative Transition, Relocation And Reorientation In The Lives Of Corporate Refugees, Brian A. Hoey

Brian A. Hoey, Ph.D.

This article examines relocation stories of people who leave behind corporate work culture, relocate from metropolitan areas to small towns and rural places and attempt to reorient themselves to work and family obligations. Decisions to start over take place within the context of moral questions about what makes a life worth living and what does not through a process in which geography has bearing. For these migrants, a choice about where to live is also one about how to live. Choices of how to live one’s life are made of more than simple economics, they are also moral. The restructuring …

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