What's Happening to Home?: Balancing Work, Life, and Refuge in the Information Age [Hardcover]

Maggie Jackson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 2002

In our chaotic modern world, where technology offers the empty promise of mobility and flexibility, in reality the lines between work and home, public and private, become increasingly blurred. Maggie Jackson, the national workplace writer for the Associated Press, has noticed home playing a secondary role to work in her reporting and her personal life. A mother of two, Jackson found herself bringing work home to spend more time with her family, only to hustle them off to bed early so she could get her work done. In What's Happening to Home? Jackson explores the ever-changing role of home in our lives. "I set out to make home more than a bit of life snatched on the fly, or a dusty ideal from the past," Jackson says. "Along the way, I learned that home is more important than I ever had realized. Without a home, we're hardly human."

Jackson updates our idea of home. The very word "home" conjures images of coziness, lawn mowers and Betty Crocker. What's Happening to Home? redefines that image without short-changing the work lives so many of us value. Jackson explores ways to preserve intimacy and caring at home without returning to rigid ideals of the past.

What's Happening to Home? goes beyond debates about square footage and working moms, and helps us start thinking about larger questions of the value of home for everyone. Jackson encourages constant evaluation of how our homes influence our lives to create private sanctuaries amenable to the modern world without losing the support, warmth and love everyone needs.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Jackson, an Associated Press workplace columnist, asserts that Americans have rephrased the maxim "home is where the heart is." According to her, home has been transformed from a haven offering solitude from the world to something akin to a railroad station. She has spent years observing Americans' work habits and lifestyles, noting the career trends that have transformed the country. She creates a map charting the evolution of the changing workplace, positing that only as paid work moved outside the home did family life become more intimate and homes grow private. By the Industrial Age, the home was idealized as a sanctuary. But now we live in an era in which people who have their own communications technology constantly scramble to build new barriers and adjust the degree of access others have to them. Jackson also addresses those who work from home, who, she writes, are stressed because they can't escape work and because home offices create forced intimacy as clients venture into what was once a very private domain. According to Jackson, the result of all of this hustling from home has been a market in which some of the topselling home furniture is designed to bring work into all parts of the house. That's a plus for furniture manufacturers; however, all of this obsessing over work has left many children stranded. Jackson has crafted an insightful book, more a cultural study than a guidebook, that will make readers reexamine how, where and why they work.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Not a book exhorting families to return to another time, this is instead a provocative look at work and family that challenges us to examine our lives and find our own solutions. In the first part, Jackson, a workplace columnist for the Associated Press, shows how work is creeping into the home and asks whether we need a home and what it provides us. From there, she examines what we can do to create a haven. Although Jackson acknowledges that home and work activities will continue to mesh as technology becomes more and more pervasive, she stresses the need for privacy in time and space. She also recognizes that we are unlikely to return to a day when women are the primary housekeepers; instead, she believes that everyone (woman, man, or child) can contribute to the creation of a home. Homes, Jackson says, can coexist with mobility and technology if we "make [them] places of experience, rootedness, learning, and sharing." Highly recommended. Kay Brodie, Chesapeake Coll., Wye Mills, MD

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 190 pages
• Publisher: Sorin Books (February 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1893732401
• ISBN-13: 978-1893732407
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,638,684 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A fascinating, informative, highly recommended account, April 10, 2002

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: What's Happening to Home?: Balancing Work, Life, and Refuge in the Information Age (Hardcover)

What's Happening To Home? Balancing Work, Life, And Refuge In The Information Age by veteran journalist Maggie Jackson is an effective, "reader friendly" guide for the twenty-first century, focusing as it does on the invasion of telecommunication, e-mail, and the onward march of information technology to deliver more work to one's home doorstep - as well as the increasing American trend to take just about everything short of the actual office home after the official workday has ended. What's Happening To Home? addresses very real contemporary concerns, concentrating on practical and effective guidelines to balance work and home life for a happier and healthier future. What's Happening To Home? is a fascinating, informative, highly recommended account that speaks to everyone caught up in the manifold pressures of the digital age.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fresh and thought-provoking, May 27, 2002

By 

"sandy969" (Monrovia, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: What's Happening to Home?: Balancing Work, Life, and Refuge in the Information Age (Hardcover)

I really loved this book! It spoke to me at a deep level but had an ease about it that made it pure pleasure to read.

There is no book like it - it considers a totally fresh subject. The author shines very thoughtful light on the `essence' of home, considering the nuances of what has changed about it and what is vital to keep. She takes us on a journey - her own -- and we discover with her how important it is that we preserve the home - although a redefined version of it -- `as a place of anchor and refuge from the public and from work'. There is a clarity that comes from reading this book and a reassurance from the understanding it offers.

I found myself changing my own behavior in the midst of reading it and feeling a sense of relief somehow. I suspect that my life will remain enriched by what I took away from it.

The book will have wide appeal both by its style and its substance. It is a great book for individuals who are deliberate about the quality of their own lives, for social observers and for people just plain curious about the invisible forces that carry us along.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Self-indulgent but provocative, June 19, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: What's Happening to Home?: Balancing Work, Life, and Refuge in the Information Age (Hardcover)

There's less here than meets the eye. Award-winning work-life journalist Maggie Jackson interviews numerous people about tensions between work and home, but we learn only that people are feeling stressed and overwhelmed, and that the trend is likely to continue. It's an entertaining read, but what's missing? Social context, for one: the ideal of a private home life valorized by Jackson is essentially the possession of the post-1850 suburban middle class. Rural and working-class families successfully combine home and work with fewer stumbles over the molehills that her painfully self-aware cell phone-toting interview subjects turn into mountains. What else is missing? Social context again: Jackson's nostalgia for housework (she doesn't so her own, she admits) ignores the history of housework as a means of limiting women's aspirations (well documented in numerous books), as well as research that indicates homemaking is a full-time job that few husbands fully share. The spiritually cherishing "home" for which Jackson's overstressed subjects yearn is most probably a social construct that matched the lived experience of few, if any, Americans. Teasing out the shape of the unattainable domestic ideal may be the most entertaining part of reading the book.