Carrie M. Lane is a professor of American studies at California State University, Fullerton. She is the author of A Company of One: Insecurity, Independence, and the New World of White-Collar Unemployment, winner of the 2012 Book Prize awarded by the Society for the Anthropology of Work, a section of the American Anthropological Association.
The solution to the unraveling of the social contract of employment may not be to prop up the ailing traditional job but, instead, to imagine what other forms work lives might take.