Description
How did Americans come to believe that working at home is feasible, productive, and desirable? Easy Living examines how the idea of working within the home was constructed and disseminated in popular culture and mass media during the twentieth century. Through the analysis of national magazines and newspapers, television and film, and marketing and advertising materials from the housing, telecommunications, and office technology industries, Easy Living traces changing concepts about what it meant to work in the home. These ideas reflected larger social, political-economic, and technological trends of the times. Elizabeth A. Patton reveals that the notion of the home as a space that exists solely in the private sphere is a myth, as the social meaning of the home and its market value in relation to the public sphere are intricately linked.
About the Author
ELIZABETH A. PATTON is an assistant professor of media and communication studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She is the co-editor of Home Sweat Home: Perspectives on Housework and Modern Relationships.
Reviews
"This easy to read, fun, and unique book approaches discourses on work/life in a way that no one has before."- Elizabeth Fish Hatfield, editor of Communication and the Work-Life Balancing Act
"Patton draws on an impressive array of archival sources to demonstrate how communication technologies and architectural design have constructed ideals about working at home. Her nuanced historical analysis importantly reveals that our contemporary struggles over work/life balance are not new."- Amy Corbin, author of Cinematic Geographies and Multicultural Spectatorship in America
"Easy Living sheds necessary light on the practice of working from home. It is also (and seemingly unintentionally) timely: as societies negotiate an exit from the pandemic emergency and attempt to move towards some form of the new normal, choices about whether to continue working from home or to return to the office are being made on both corporate and individual levels." - LSE Review of Books
"Easy Living: The Rise of the Home Office [is] a piece of engaging and prescient scholarship which, especially at the present moment, makes a valuable contribution to now central and ongoing global debates about what working from home has meant, means now, and might mean in the future."- Visual Studies
"Easy Living offers a strong critique of the contemporary myth of work-life balance, a myth that 'keeps workers from recognizing the exploitation of their labor and the dependence on service workers to support work-life balance'....Although written before the onslaught of Covid-19, Easy Living exposes the long-standing discourses of gender, race, and class undergirding American experiences of work and home, discourses laden with power and inequality that the pandemic has exposed."- Television & New Media
"Remote Work Won't Save Us: The home office was never designed to give workers more freedom. The pandemic has only made it worse," by Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein
https://newrepublic.com/article/158704/remote-work-wont-save-us-home-office-elizabeth-patton-review- The New Republic
Book Information
ISBN 9781978802223
Author Elizabeth A Patton
Format Paperback
Page Count 216
Imprint Rutgers University Press
Publisher Rutgers University Press
Weight(grams) 3g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 15mm
About the Author
ELIZABETH A. PATTON is an assistant professor of media and communication studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She is the co-editor of Home Sweat Home: Perspectives on Housework and Modern Relationships.
Reviews
"This easy to read, fun, and unique book approaches discourses on work/life in a way that no one has before."- Elizabeth Fish Hatfield, editor of Communication and the Work-Life Balancing Act
"Patton draws on an impressive array of archival sources to demonstrate how communication technologies and architectural design have constructed ideals about working at home. Her nuanced historical analysis importantly reveals that our contemporary struggles over work/life balance are not new."- Amy Corbin, author of Cinematic Geographies and Multicultural Spectatorship in America
"Easy Living sheds necessary light on the practice of working from home. It is also (and seemingly unintentionally) timely: as societies negotiate an exit from the pandemic emergency and attempt to move towards some form of the new normal, choices about whether to continue working from home or to return to the office are being made on both corporate and individual levels." - LSE Review of Books
"Easy Living: The Rise of the Home Office [is] a piece of engaging and prescient scholarship which, especially at the present moment, makes a valuable contribution to now central and ongoing global debates about what working from home has meant, means now, and might mean in the future."- Visual Studies
"Easy Living offers a strong critique of the contemporary myth of work-life balance, a myth that 'keeps workers from recognizing the exploitation of their labor and the dependence on service workers to support work-life balance'....Although written before the onslaught of Covid-19, Easy Living exposes the long-standing discourses of gender, race, and class undergirding American experiences of work and home, discourses laden with power and inequality that the pandemic has exposed."- Television & New Media
"Remote Work Won't Save Us: The home office was never designed to give workers more freedom. The pandemic has only made it worse," by Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein
https://newrepublic.com/article/158704/remote-work-wont-save-us-home-office-elizabeth-patton-review- The New Republic
Book Information
ISBN 9781978802223
Author Elizabeth A Patton
Format Paperback
Page Count 216
Imprint Rutgers University Press
Publisher Rutgers University Press
Weight(grams) 3g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 15mm
