Elsewhere, USA: How We Got from Company Man, Family Dinners and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, Blackberry Moms and Economic Anxiety

January 28, 2009
Dalton Conley | Chair, Dept of Sociology, New York University

Welcome to Elsewhere, USA where the American individual has become extinct. Our culture is populated by “intraviduals”, fractured people who struggle to juggle professional, familial and personal pursuits. The division between home and office has been all but demolished; our weightless, wireless economy urges us to work 24/7; marketing has invaded the most intimate aspects of our lives; leisure has become a lost art. Much of these changes can be connected to relatively invisible sociological changes: women’s increasing participation in the labor force; rising economic inequality generating anxiety; the idea of the “individual” being replaced by the need to play different roles in the various realms of one’s existence.

Speaker Details

Dalton Conley is University Professor of the Social Sciences and Chair, Sociology at NYU, and also teaches at NYU’s Wagner School of Public Service and the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and his essays have appeared in the New York Times, the LA Times and Salon, among other publications. In 2005 Conley became the first sociologist to win the National Science Foundation’s Alan T. Waterman Award.