In her book A Company of One: Insecurity, Independence, and the New World of White-Collar Unemployment, Carrie Lane, an anthropologist,  characterizes the strategy her informants use to participate in the economy as “career management.” It is a type of free agency, whereby the individual employee focuses on building his “brand” because he is a “company of one;” in his book The Start-up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career, Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, refers to this career strategy as the “start-up of you.”  Hoffman theorized that Millennials are becoming the entrepreneurs of their own lives.  Lane believes that the ethos of career management is embedded in the economic philosophy of neoliberalism.

When Lane analyzes “career management” as a strategy used by laid off high-tech workers in Dallas, Texas, she provides a framework to answer the central question of my research: What does it mean to have a job or to work in the 21st century global economy?  I hope to make a contribution to how anthropologists have analyzed and written about work.  Work is both an aspect of the political economy and a cultural symbol, a marker signifying an important part of what it means to be an adult.  The severe economic change brought about by the Great Recession is affecting even how we think about work, a living wage, who is responsible for providing healthcare and how government should treat the long term unemployed,[1]  decline in wages, the disappearance of traditional pension plans,[2] and the increasingly tenuous financial condition of America’s middle-class families.  All of these phenomena are a part of the redefinition of what it means to have a job and a redefinition of the relationship between an employer and an employee.

Through entrepreneurship my informants are not just trying to create their own jobs and gain control over their futures but are changing the nature of what we have traditionally thought of as a “job.” Unlike other generations of the middle-class dispossessed who relied on an employer to their detriment, Millennials are using entrepreneurship in a proactive way to avoid the downsizing and outsourcing phenomena their Baby Boomer parents have gone through.

[1] Neal Soss, Chief Economist for Credit Suisse, characterized payments to the long term unemployed as the new welfare.  Structural unemployment rather than traditional cyclical unemployment is a systemic consequence of the Great Recession. Passage of recent legislation to avert the fiscal cliff included a provision to extend unemployment insurance for one more year.  This adds 52 weeks to the existing 99 weeks of unemployment insurance coverage.

[2] IBM is a recent example of a company that changed its pension plan from a defined benefits plan to a defined contributions plan.  In other words, employees go from having a fixed pension to having a 401(k) plan.  Thus the employee is responsible for making his own investment choices and how much he has for retirement will depend upon the quality of the investment choices he makes.