Reviews
"This fascinating book examines workplace practices in a new light. By examining incarcerated workers, workfare recipients, graduate students, and college athletes, Hatton probes how these groups experience and conceptualize work. . . . Through a series of in-depth interviews, the author examines the contradictory ways in which workers understand their situations: some accept their status almost without question, while others who understand that they are being exploited rebel against it. Hatton's study excellently argues the importance of the concept of status coercion and its relevance to these workers, in turn expanding the understanding of the punitive aspects of work and the theoretical understanding of work to highlight its precarity. Highly recommended."—CHOICE
“Erin Hatton’s book Coerced: Work under Threat of Punishment shines a bright light on the labor of prisoners, welfare recipients, college athletes, and graduate students.”
—American Journal of Sociology
"Written with clarity and style, this is a book that offers the best of sociology: a mix of people's compelling, even tragic stories and an innovative contribution to what we know about work, highlighting a poorly understood phenomenon that nonetheless is happening right under our noses and that illustrates some important trends. I would definitely assign this."—Allison J. Pugh, author of
The Tumbleweed Society: Working and Caring in an Age of Insecurity
"As this brilliant and thought-provoking book makes clear, key groups in American society who labor intensely day in and day out, doing essential tasks and generating profit for other people, aren’t at all valued as 'workers' and thus aren’t seen as citizens who contribute. Erin Hatton pushes us to reckon with how we view 'work' and, in the process, challenges us all to question why it remains acceptable to allow some people, particularly people who are marked by their race and class marginalization, to be utterly exploited in ways we would never accept for those marked by their position of privilege."—Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer Prize-Winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy
“By recognizing similarities between very different types of workers—prisoners, graduate student assistants, college athletes, and workfare workers—Erin Hatton illuminates status coercion, a system of labor control that is transforming work and labor in America. Her interviews with such workers vividly reveal how they experience and resist such work.”—Arne L. Kalleberg, author of Precarious Lives: Job Insecurity and Well-Being in Rich Democracies
"The real value of this text is that it highlights not just the relationship between the growth of the carceral state and subsidies from private industry but how each has implications for the way work is done in the modern era. This is a major, major contribution."—Adia Harvey Wingfield, author of Flattlining and Mary Tileston Hemenway Professor in Arts & Sciences and Associate Dean for Faculty Development, Washington University in St. Louis
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