On Tidying Up and Organizing Ourselves

As neither a reality-TV watcher nor a particular messy person, I had no idea of the ubiquity of professional organizers (although I know a few people who would greatly benefit from their services). In Lane’s astute, empathetic, and critical ethnography, I learned much about the who’s, what’s, and why’s of organizing, deftly threaded through a history of gendered labor and neoliberal accumulation in the US over the past thirty years. In many respects, the book also offers a rejoinder to the feminism of the 2010s, which promised, as Sheryl Sandberg pronounced in 2013: if women just “lean in,” we can do it all! Lane points out that the version of capitalism we in the US live under today has made it impossible for anyone to do anything with their “all,” whatever or whoever that is. But, as is so often the case, it’s often women who are tasked with trying to keep everything together. As 1950s housewives came to rely on mechanized labor like dishwashers and laundry machines to free up both their time and energy, so do 21st century women come to rely on housework-labor-for-hire. Nannies and housekeepers and gardeners are some examples of this, but so are professional organizers. Those whom Lane details work in homes, closets, garages, storage units, and corporate offices. And although we may be tempted to distinguish organizing work between personal and professional spaces, I think this would be a mistake: I am thinking of my grandmother who set up my grandfather’s office for him; and of Emily Gilmore of The Gilmore Girls who, when her husband starts his own insurance company, plans and hosts his office party. In other words: the work of office organizing was still squarely in the purview of “wives’ work” for much of the 20th century.

In Lane’s interlocutors, I recognized some of my own. My research takes place in a retirement community in Arizona, and for some of my fieldwork, I shadowed real estate agents who themselves live in the community. Like some of Lane’s organizers, my friends had come to this profession, which they found incredibly fulfilling, after retiring from office jobs. Real estate work is also deeply imbricated in market capitalism—I heard of some agents in the area who made six figures a year (this was also during the height of the COVID pandemic, when people moved to Arizona in record numbers). There are other resonances as well: first, in the way that both careers are highly individualistic, allowing a framework for self-employment that provides little to no safety net; second, in the way that both careers have built-in assumptions, often represented in the media, about the social type and demographic category (often, female and white); and third, the way in which men show up in the profession—in the real estate agents’ case, they were in positions of power as the owner and broker, while for the professional organizers, they were highly sought due to their relatively rarity and physical strength. Another similarity between my interlocutors and some of Lane’s: most of my interlocutors were married to men, their husbands had been long retired. So in their work, my interlocutors were able to maintain and build the kind of financial and personal independence that may have been elusive to them in earlier decades when they were primarily concerned with child-rearing.

As real estate agents in their 60s, 70s, and 80s, my interlocutors also helped buyers navigate the emotional pitfalls and heights of excitement and fear that are often concurrent with the decision to retire and leave their previous lives behind. Not only were many buyers moving to the neighborhood from other states and concerned about making friends, retirement could also be a fraught experience in a culture of work in the U.S. that applies meaning and fulfillment to career-making and mid-adulthood. Making such a big move in late adulthood—to a new place and out of the wage economy—could be very daunting. On the selling side, my interlocutors also sometimes helped people decide whether to move out of homes that were too big for them; for helping geographically distant children of residents who had passed away in selling the home (sometimes with furniture included); and in putting into storage items that snowbird retirees wanted to leave in Arizona for the summers until their return in temperate October. Emotional labor was thus a major part of their work: the most successful real estate agents I knew during my fieldwork were those that maintained years-long relationships with their clients that blurred into the personal.

There is one key exception between the real estate agents and the organizers that I think has great theoretical potential beyond Lane’s text. I was very interested in the fact that for most of Lane’s organizers, emotional labor is at times privileged over other kinds of success, including financial gain. Lane incisively notes, on page 147, that the “ethic of responsible stewardship and mutual concern distinguishes organizers’ ethos from the instrumental, impersonal relationships that typically characterize life under market capitalism.” This provides, as she shows, a possible way out of the demanding and demeaning pressures of a neoliberal economy that privileges the individual (and the individualizable) over the collective; that uplifts financial accumulation at the expense of mental and physical health; and that calcifies labor norms around gender and race…and if I may extrapolate, also age and, potentially, citizenship status.

Organizers’ emotional labor is neither a byproduct nor a bug of their work: it is a key component of it. Lane shows how different organizers work to determine which kind of client and need is most suited to their personality and what they can offer. They are not therapists even though they work within and extend the boundaries of therapeutic thinking. Their clients mostly suffer from an (over-)consumption of both things and the stories about who they imagine themselves to be. In other words, they suffer not only from the overwhelm of modern capitalism, but also from the specter of a life not lived. I am thinking particularly of two cases: the first is of a woman who is downsizing from a home to a condo and becomes overwhelmed and upset with the number of blouses she has collected over the years. How can I be the kind of person who owns this much clothing? Lane sees the woman asking herself. The shirts, laid out on her bed, appear to her as an indictment: you are an over-consumer. The second case is Lauren, a character Lane weaves throughout the book, who has purchased dozens of empty frames she might fill up with paintings as gifts for friends she might make in the future. These two women were such interesting figures to me because in them I see mirrored the emotional qualms of a version of capitalism that extends beyond the financial or the laborious, that seeps into the psyche. In Lauren, I see a person who wants desperately to be a different kind of person, who imagines herself or is holding onto an image of herself that belongs on a different temporal plane—either in the future, or in some other lifetime. In the woman with the blouses, I see a person who has hidden behind capitalist consumption—or erased her emotional reliance on it; and in being confronted with her purchasing habit, becomes distraught. Fundamentally, to organize, as Lane shows throughout the book, is to practice living a different kind of life—one that has systems for filing and donating and throwing out. But to accept that one needs the help of an organizer in the first place is to, in some sense, recognize the limits of the neoliberal imagination and dispense with the vision of the kind of person we think we are.

There is grief in this dispensation, to be sure. It is very hard to see yourself through another’s eyes, and people who hire professional organizers for themselves are paying someone to take a close look at things that they would rather not (or are unable to) confront. And although we see some of the emotional fallout of this, Lane’s focus on the organizers themselves provides a more systematic overview of what a refocus on the nature of work could be, were it gentler on the time and emotional preparedness of both clients and practitioners.

Something I often thought about during my own fieldwork, and something that Lane’s book shows very clearly, is the way that the anthropologist herself is changed by the work she observes and very often participates in. I think these shifts are sometimes very difficult to sift through when it is the case—as it was for both Lane and myself—that the anthropologist is proximal (either geographically or by nature) to her interlocutors; and when it comes to fieldwork with people whose work appears to offer a way out of the individualizing constraints of neoliberalism and late-stage capitalism that is focused only on the product of labor, not the labor itself. Like real estate agents and organizers, I think an effective ethnographer is one who engages in both affective and productive labor. The book made me consider how anthropologists are sometimes constrained and sometimes empowered by the same kind of individualism as experienced by the organizers, particularly with regards to the ways in which the university structure has shaped and is changing the nature of our own work: for instance, the tenure track requires solo authorship, and as some of our colleagues who teach in Florida where the AAA took place are discovering, the things we can say in the classroom must be translated or erased in order to fly under the radar of an increasingly radical political order.

There is much to be learned from Lane’s interlocutors if we apply some of their lessons to our own work. What would our work look like if we were more like professional organizers or the clients who hire them? What are we holding onto that is cluttering up our discipline? And what can we afford to let go? Maybe this means more collaboration, asking others to open up our intellectual closets and throw out what we don’t realize we don’t need. Maybe it means coming closer to meeting people where they are, to putting our interlocutors’ needs and desires above our own goals of professional success—because as we have seen, this can be taken away, whole departments slashed and hiring lines cut. Fundamentally, I think it means asking ourselves more directly who and what our research labor is for, to ask what stories we are telling about ourselves and our discipline, and to work to see ourselves through others’ eyes.

Author Bio

Rachel Howard is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at the University of Chicago, working at the intersections of political-economic anthropology; feminist theory; and linguistic anthropology. Her primary research project is based in Arizona, and focuses on the experiences of retirees and the effects of retirement communities across the Southwest.