Carrie Lane’s book, More than Pretty Boxes, will appeal to anthropologists interested in work; the United States; cultures of capitalism, consumption, and the accumulation of things; and the ways in which expectations related to gender impact how Americans arrange their work and home lives. The book will also appeal to a wider audience interested in the topic of home organizing. The book moves well beyond noting the specific things that are organized and the ways possessions are arranged by professional organizers, and it moves beyond pretty boxes and attractive tidying-up systems that are peddled by retailers like The Container Store. An ethnographically rich examination of this relatively new service occupation, More than Pretty Boxes enables readers to place those pretty boxes in social practices related to work and family life in the United States.

A Model Example of Anthropological Work

More than Pretty Boxes demonstrates the value of anthropology to examine daily practices that we might simply take for granted as merely “the way things are.” Many people in the United States have been entertained by reality shows such as Netflix’s “Get Organized with The Home Edit,” consumed books and digital media related to Marie Kondo (slogan: “Organizing the world, one home at a time”), and sought out organizing tools from the Japanese company Yamazaki Home with its tagline “If home is what you make of it, make it tidy.” But have we considered the meaning and context of these cultural phenomena?

Lane has. She also shows how anthropological methods enable a researcher to move beyond their own assumptions. Lane explains that she had initially assumed that professional organizers perpetuate gendered neoliberal priorities about self-reliance and the importance of women dutifully maintaining homes and keeping up appearances. She was surprised when an organizer in an early interview referred to her work as “a feminist act.” Lane wrote, “I’d been imagining the organizing industry as almost anti-feminist, in that it convinced people, especially women, to add having a perfectly organized home to their already teetering tower of gendered responsibilities at home and work” (p. 173).

Lane came to re-frame these workers as doing significant relational labor. She invokes sociologist Allison Pugh’s concept of connective labor, “work that involves forging an emotional understanding with another person to create the outcomes we think are important.” (Pugh, p. x).

As Lane writes,

My inside look at the organizing process has led me to believe that what many people are looking for when they hire organizers, whether they’re conscious of it or not, is for someone to help them manage the unmanageable lives they find themselves living. The stuff is just a symptom of the larger feelings of overwhelm brought on by a culture of overwork, constant consumption, and rising uncertainty. In this context, organizers provide a particular kind of therapeutic relationship suited to people trying to manage their copious belongings while also working through their feelings around their stuff and the labor it demands of them. They are, as it were, therapists of capitalism. (p. 183)

The book provides a compelling example of the value of participant observation and the importance of establishing rapport with research subjects, including at professional meetings and in people’s homes. It also demonstrates how to situate fieldwork findings into a wider socioeconomic and historical context. Lane casts her net wide, writing a cultural history of clutter and responses to it. Starting with definitions of “clutter” from the 1500s in Europe, Lane shows how the new profession that emerged in the United States in the 1970s grew out of post-WWII changing expectations for women’s work and their roles at home.

Lane situates the field of professional organizing at the heart of US cultural values around gender, work, and home: how the growth of this field tracked to changes in how people relate to their possessions, their home lives, and their work lives. After years of explaining to those who asked that she was studying people who organize your stuff not your labor movement, her book turns out to be a powerful study of how we organize our labor and our lives. As Lane writes,

It strikes me as ironic that I spent so much time clarifying that the organizers I studied weren’t labor organizers, and I’ve ended up making the case that professional organizers can, in fact, help us imagine better ways to organize our labor. The women who founded and joined this profession did so because there was a fundamental mismatch between the work they’d been doing (whether as unpaid homemakers or in paid jobs), what their family needed (whether more time, more care, or more income), and what they wanted for themselves (meaning, autonomy, self-­ determination, human connection). In organizing, they found both an escape from some of the worst aspects of standard employment and an opportunity to do meaningful work that meshed better, though by no means perfectly, with their other values and responsibilities. (p. 191)

Lane moves deftly between fieldwork experiences, narratives about specific clients and their relationship to their things, and the wider professional context for this new field of work. The book includes several “organizing stories,” Lane’s term for vivid and emotionally resonant stories of some organizing jobs she participated in or heard about. Lane decided to share these stories, “because they show what organizing looks like and because they get at the heart of the organizer-client relationship: often intimate, sometimes transactional, occasionally contentious” (p. 23). By interweaving the stories of organizers and clients, showing their respective points of view, Lane allows readers to see how they jointly participate in the same changing context for women’s work and unsustainable neoliberal work arrangements.

Even though this book is about “more than pretty boxes,” and it does not focus on the possessions that clients want to have organized, there are numerous insights about people’s relationships to things, and about how “clutter” points to memories, identities, relationships, life stages, and status. We read of relationships among people and between people and their things. The “organizing story” of a new mother named Denise introduces us to a young woman whose own mother had recently died, leaving behind four full storage units for the daughter to sort through. Lane takes turns holding Denise’s infant while Denise works through her mother’s left-behind possessions with the support of an organizer named Lila. Lane’s book shows the sensitive connective, therapeutic labor that organizers do to support clients like Denise, identifying not how the organizer might organize her own home, but how to do this work in a customized way that identifies what really matters to the client.

Understanding Aging in the United States

Denise’s story of emptying her mother’s storage units raises the topic of what happens to people’s possessions when they die. My current research is on aging, care, work, and technology, focusing on older adults, family members, and paid care workers in the Boston area. These care workers include “Life Care Managers,” an occupation that, like professional organizers, is comprised mostly of women.

The topic of what to do with one’s stuff comes up repeatedly in my research among older adults who either have moved into retirement communities or are considering the move. It’s also a topic that comes up in popular culture: in newspaper stories, social media, routine conversation among families with older adults, and in recurring mention of the concept of “Swedish death cleaning.” In 2024, I saw the following query on the social media site Nextdoor, in a Boston-area community: “I’m looking for help in downsizing, figuring out what to take, what to trash, what to donate, what to sell, and how to sell the items easily and efficiently.” Among the many responses were several from people offering their truck-for-hire to transport items for disposal. The truck responses then led to another response: “There are companies that specialize in assisting with downsizing. Call your Council on Aging. You want more than someone with a truck. You want someone with experience in downsizing and all the emotions that go with it.”

This commentator suggests that it’s important to work with someone who can not only get rid of stuff but can attend to the person’s emotional response to the process. As Lane explains, “not having emotional attachments to the client and their belongings was an advantage, one that made hiring an organizer preferable to seeking help from unpaid amateurs you happen to be related to.” (p. 163)

Yet Lane also points out that while a professional organizer might be desirable for their emotional distance, the professional organizer is also recognized for being empathetic and supportive. Lane argues that with work like this that involves money and care, the workers must learn to “navigat[e] the tension between being a hired expert and a supportive, empathetic friend” (p. 163).

Life Care Managers “organize” experiences of aging in the United States. This can mean evaluating care needs, coordinating medical services, finding home maintenance contractors, and enlisting professional organizers. About ten years after the mid-1970s start of the professional organizer field, in the mid 1980s, women who had been supporting older adults connected and created a new field, complete with professionalization, growth, and forms of recognition (like Lane describes for professional organizers). They were first called “Geriatric Care Managers,” and have since been renamed as “Life Care Managers” or “Aging Life Care Experts,” a name change intended to avoid the stigma of the concept of “geriatric” among baby boomers (according to the Aging Life Care Association, one of the professional organizations).

Lane argues that the professional organizers and their clients participate in the same system of “overwork and overwhelm” (p. 15), where there’s too much going on for individuals and families to keep up. Near the end of the book, Lane shares observations about the larger system around us, including structural barriers to thriving, such as the absence of appropriately flexible work for people to attend to illness or family caregiving. The systemic stresses, Lane shows, led some women to enter a field of helping other women, to help them with their stuff, their memories, and their relationships. Life Care Managers perform similar work for their clients.

In a 2024 interview with me, a Life Care Manager named Ann (a pseudonym) explained how she describes her job to people she meets socially:

The best way that I know to describe it is just, it’s like having a really great daughter-in-law who happens to be a professional in the field, like a clinician who happens to know a lot of the local resources and happens to have the time to deal with all the things. That’s how I usually describe it to people outside the field, because people just don’t know what it is. But it’s all the things that families do all the time, but the system’s gotten so complicated, and because women now tend to work, and the women just always did it, and now people need help.

A few things of note in Ann’s self-description: a) Ann’s reference to a daughter-in-law; as with professional organizers, this is gendered labor, and I am struck by the fact that it’s a daughter by law that Ann invokes. b) Ann’s comments about the increasing complexity of the systems for accessing services for older adults. c) Ann’s insight into the fact that women now have paid work that keeps them from doing this unpaid caring family labor.

Before reading More than Pretty Boxes, I would not have thought to put the care of elders and the organization of clutter into the same frame. In both cases, families, work, and the systems around us have, as Ann says, “gotten so complicated… and now people need help.” Like the system of “overwork and overwhelm” that Lane describes for clutter, the same goes for the work of caring and experiences of aging and caring for people in their old age. In this way, reading Lane’s book helped me to think about what older adults and their children seek in hiring a Life Care Manager, and what are the social and economic systems around them that lead them to seek paid help.

Author Bio

Caitrin Lynch is Professor of Anthropology at Olin College of Engineering and Visiting Researcher on the Robotics, Ethics, and Society team at The Robotics and AI Institute in Cambridge, Mass., where she’s conducting research on aging, care, and work.