Connection, Collaboration, and Academic Clutter: Author’s Response

First of all, I am unbelievably flattered and honored that all of you took the time to read and engage with my work. I will say a few things in response, but I’m hopeful these conversations will continue going forward.

I’ll start with Rachel’s point about women’s unpaid work in offices as well, and the story of grandma setting up grandpa’s office. This makes me think of Kanter’s classic book, Men and Women of the Corporation, which has a whole chapter on executive wives and the labor they did to advance their husbands’ careers in the 1960s. And so, Rachel’s point is making me wish I had included a nod to that connection.

I’m fascinated by the overlap Rachel sees between organizers and real estate agents. I know organizers are part of a larger set of high-end service industries with personal trainers, concierges, and coaches, but the more I think about those connections, the larger that group grows. Rachel noted that organizers and real estate agents differ in how they value emotional connection over economic success. I don’t want to overstate it, but I do think it’s really key. It’s one of the major things organizers like about this work. And many of them are in a position where they have the luxury to privilege that sort of connection over income, although of course that’s not true for all organizers.

I also like Rachel’s points about the specter of a life not lived, especially through the stories I tell of the shirts and the frames. The way we connect to objects helps us answer questions like “What kind of person am I? What kind of life am I living? What kind of life do I have a chance to live in the future?” And, of course, that goes back to Arlie Hochschild’s The Time Bind. The example I remember from that book is the family that has all this camping equipment in their garage for the imagined future in which they will actually have time to go camping as a family. They purchased it as a symbol of their commitment to being a certain kind of family, even though they’ve never actually used it. That makes me think about what it means to let go of things and dispense with the kind of person we think we are or want to be, which connects to Katie’s work, which I’ll say more about later.

Rachel ends by asking what we anthropologists are holding onto that is cluttering our discipline. There are certain models of professionalism and what constitutes academic writing, which I’ll return to in a moment, that I think anthropologists–maybe all academics–are holding onto that are getting in the way of us doing really cool stuff. I love that Rachel poses that parallel, which I’m going to be mulling for a long time to come. Ilana and I have talked about writing a piece on time wasting in our jobs: what tasks are simply wastes of our time that we should stop doing? It feels to me like there’s a connection there with what Rachel’s saying.

Turning to Caitrin, you complimented my willingness to challenge my presumptions. I owe that in great part to my PhD advisor, Kate Dudley, who taught me that if you go into field thinking one thing and leave thinking the same thing, then you haven’t done it right. As for my writing, thank you again for your kind words. I say I hate writing, but I love writing narrative. I love the organizing stories sandwiched between the chapters. They were a joy to write. I got the idea to include the vignettes between chapters from Linda Gordon’s The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction, which tells the story of a group of Irish Catholic orphans shipped across the country to be adopted by Catholic parents in Arizona. In the context of New York, these kids are Irish and Catholic, which marks them as ethnic minorities. But when they arrive in Arizona, the racial divides are more binary in terms of white vs. Mexican, so these Irish Catholic kids “become” white. The Anglo locals freak out when these white orphans are placed with Mexican families and essentially steal the kids and give them to white families. Then the nuns freak out because you can’t give Catholic babies to Protestant families, and the whole thing goes to court. Gordon narrates the story through vignettes interspersed between chapters on the history of mining and labor conflicts in Arizona.  Another influence was Susan Falls’ work on breast milk sharing, White Gold, which we published as part of a series I co-edit on the Anthropology of Contemporary North America for University of Nebraska Press. Falls did something similar where in between the chapters she analyzes art that depicts breast milk. And I just loved the way those vignettes functioned.

When I think about writing, for me it’s all about the people and the stories of the people. If I read an ethnography that doesn’t have people in it, it’s less satisfying to me. So, when I think about what is cluttering our discipline, I wish we had a little more space for that. I wish we were less tied to the idea of research articles and theoretical interventions and literature reviews and more focused on good stories that engage us and help us learn about people and the lives they live. It makes me want to put out more books that are personal. For this book, for example, I wrote one conclusion and then, as we often do, wrote a whole different conclusion later in the review process. The new conclusion starts out with a story of me feeling overworked and overwhelmed, with a huge to-do list I couldn’t imagine completing. As an academic, I was ambivalent about ending on such a personal note. But my editor loved the new version, which was validating. I’m always trying to find that balance between narrative, analysis, and personal reflection–it’s not about me, but I do feel like I can be a vessel to tell a story because of how I felt in the moments I describe.

In terms of the book’s reception, I hope the organizers I studied like the book. I hope they feel seen and represented. There are critiques in there of organizers and of NAPO and so far it’s been well received, which has made me really happy.  Any ethnography is a snapshot of a moment in time, and that can be challenging, especially when books are so slow to come out. I went to a NAPO conference last year and one of the things that really impressed me was how hard NAPO is trying to be more inclusive in terms of race and class. They did the DEI panels that everybody did in the wake of Black Lives Matter, but they have continued this with a main stage DEI session at every conference. I attended the last one and it was one of the best I’ve seen. Since I sent in the final draft of the manuscript, I also learned that there is now a Pro Organizers Latinas group, which didn’t exist when I was conducting my research. Things have already continued past the moments I document in my book, in ways that I find promising and interesting.

Turning to Katie’s comment, when I first saw Katie had written an article about organizers, I had that moment of panic when you find out someone else is doing work in your field: “oh shit, they’re going to scoop me.” But every single time I think that, I end up finding that the other person’s work actually makes me think better. Every single time. I don’t know why I even have that initial response. I should just skip to the “thank you” part. Thank you for being a partner in this conversation, someone who is also digging into this world and thinking about these kinds of things. Katie’s writing about the strategies organizers used to help people part with objects, for example, made my chapter on that topic a lot better. Rather than being scooped, I have a new partner in this research.

Tarini, in terms of your comments on self-employment, I love when our interlocutors are already doing such trenchant, insightful, nuanced analysis of what’s going on before we even get there. They’re like, “here you go, here’s your argument.” For instance, I was interviewing a self-employed organizer and she talked about not wanting to be a corporate drone, that it just seems like a miserable life. When she was offered a permanent position, she turned it down. She said, “that’s not what I want for me. I want the freedom to be self-employed.” And then she immediately added, “of course, that’s freedom in quotes, because I’m not actually any freer than I would be working for a corporation.” So even as she’s using the narrative of freedom, she’s deconstructing it herself, acknowledging that she’s telling herself this story that she’s freer, but actually it’s just a different kind of burden she’s taking on.

Tarini, you mentioned being struck by the place of touch and feeling in all this. I wrote about all the hugging at NAPO meetings. At the last NAPO conference, NAPO President Mindy Godding started her address by saying she had something controversial to share. After a dramatic pause, she said, “I’m not a hugger.” Everybody laughed because the hugginess of NAPO is such a given. You said, “the organ of organizing is the organ of touch.” That reminds me of Kate Dudley’s work about the culture of the mind versus the culture of the hand. It makes me think about clients touching their objects. And it’s making me wish I had been more attuned to moments of touch between organizer and client, which I’m sure were there, but I wasn’t necessarily looking for.

In terms of the personal space of the home, the home of one organizer I interviewed was featured in the design blog Apartment Therapy. She insisted that they include evidence of her family’s everyday life, her dog’s toys, a dish towel on the counter. It was important to her that she not propagate what she called “house porn,” the picture-perfect image of an uncluttered, minimalist space. She wanted her home to look lived in. She said yes, I’m an organizer and an organized person, but I live in a house with three other people and it’s not my place to tell them how they should live. We’re all cooperating here and compromising on what our home looks like, it’s not about me reaching my standards of order. It’s about having a home that we all love and can comfortably live in. And for her, that was a conscious effort to push back against an overwhelming flow of information that said otherwise. I like to think my book is part of that effort, too, trying to help people push back at the “palpable too-muchness” of the lives they’re living and all that is being expected of them.

Author Bio

Dr. Carrie Lane is Chair and Professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton and author of More Than Pretty Boxes: How the Rise of Professional Organizing Shows Us the Way We Work Isn’t Working.