Elsewhere, USA

Dalton Conley
(Pantheon Books, 2009)

      In Elsewhere, USA, University Profesor and and Chair of Sociology Dalton Conley depicts the United States as a country populated by intraviduals—fractured people who struggle to juggle professional, familial, and personal pursuits.
      Three decades ago, professionals could count on clearly defined workdays with the same company for 20 years and clearly defined family roles to come home to. But today’s citizens must try to satisfy their various selves simultaneously. They work late into the night on portable email devices while watching their children; or they conflate their personal and professional goals by attending a steady stream of networking cocktail parties.
      By examining economic, familial, and technological trends, Conley illustrates how we have all become inhabitants of “Elsewhere, USA.” He connects our daily experience to relatively invisible sociological changes: women’s increasing participation in the labor force, rising economic inequality that generates anxiety among successful professionals, and the individual of the modern era being replaced by the need to play different roles in the various realms of one’s existence.