Rural Sociology Commons^™

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, …

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 …