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Our last observation in this chapter, and a theme that runs throughout our analysis in this book, is that agency matters. All of the workers we considered made choices. Mike had a child at a young age and dropped out of high school, Meg elected to have three children and to pursue a high-powered career, Tammy took the initiative to return to school, Emily keeps her eyes and ears open for new work, Rain chose to move from his village to the United States, and Kavita applied to work in a call center even against her family’s wishes. These observations highlight the ways in which people direct their life courses and how access to different resources and constraints shapes how lives are constructed over time (Elder 1998, Moen 2001, Sweet and Moen 2006). The life course perspective is essential to understanding the contours of the new economy because it focuses on careers—the patterns of entry, exit, and movement between jobs. People do not just have careers—they forge them.

Sociologists are often accused of arguing that people are simply “pawns” or “cultural dopes” of the larger social structural and cultural contexts in which their lives are lived. The depiction of individuals as victims of external forces ignores the capacity of individuals to direct their own lives and those of others (Emirbayer and Mische 1998, Garfinkel 1967). However, the effective application of agency depends on resources. People with unlimited resources at their disposal are in a far better position to design their own lives than are those who have few resources. An important consideration is whether the new economy advances agentic capacity or undermines it. On the one hand, the new economy may be creating a context that is expanding the control individuals have to direct their life courses, in essence making lives less scripted than in the old economy (MacMillan 2005). Many old structural barriers have been removed (such as segregation laws) and so have the cultural barriers that funneled women and ethnic minorities into restricted ranges of occupations. Before the enactment of civil rights legislation and the women’s movement, the prospects that women and racial/ethnic minorities like Barack Obama, Sheryl Sandberg, Hillary Clinton, or Sonia Sotomayor could move into positions of power were slim to nil. At the same time, each can rightfully claim that their successes should be attributed to agency, as their achievements would not have happened without the combination of incredible talent and incredible hard work. Today, one can quickly generate a sizable list of minority group members and women who have moved into professions from which they once had been entirely absent. And some have gone so far as to argue that personal effort can trump disadvantages imposed by factors such as race and gender. However, as we discuss in detail throughout this book, ample evidence indicates that women and minorities are at a distinct disadvantage in securing many types of jobs (Grusky and Charles 2004, Reskin, McBrier, and Kmec 1999). And beyond disadvantages created by social divisions, evidence indicates that more and more workers are in precarious jobs, undermining their control and the capacity to plan their lives (Kalleberg 2013a). The extent to which the new economy is fundamentally altering the possibilities for people to shape their own biographies is one of the central questions posed in this book.

Numerous ethnographic studies reveal that workers are not simply passive recipients of culture and structure; they use personal initiative to influence how their jobs are performed and the returns they receive from work (Darrah 2006, Richardson 2006, Roy 1955, Tulin 1984). To illustrate agency at work, consider Michael Burawoy’s (1979) observations of production workers in the machining industry. These workers’ jobs were regulated by quotas, wherein they had to make a specified number of parts to earn their base pay. But when they surpassed those quotas, they could “make out” and earn additional money. Quotas constituted a social structure, operating with explicit rules that were rigged by management to increase productivity. However, Burawoy observed that the machinists invented a variety of tricks to game this system. For example, they kept quiet about the easy jobs in which quotas were underestimated and complained incessantly about the impossibility of meeting quotas on virtually all other jobs. They bribed supervisors to get the easiest jobs and curried favor with coworkers to provide the stock needed to get their jobs rolling. When given an easy quota, workers overproduced and then hid their “kitties” that they turned in for extra compensation at a later date. In sum, these machinists showed that when workers are confronted by cultural and structural arrangements, they also engage in strategic action to influence how these arrangements affect their lives. Underpinning much of the research on agency is the question of equity and how it is socially negotiated. One wonders whether, if the economy has changed significantly, the strategies workers use to assert their will have changed as well.

Finally, it should be added that agency also operates at a collective level. Workers make efforts to carve out work lives for themselves, but they also collaborate to reshape the contours of work and create more satisfactory work opportunities for others. An obvious example is that workers band together in organizations such as unions or professional associations that use the strength of numbers to press for needed changes. Union publicity materials that describe unions as the “people who brought you the weekend” remind us that collective action obtained the taken-for-granted days off workers now enjoy. Similarly, the professional associations formed by doctors, lawyers, and others help protect those workers from competition, define what are acceptable (and unacceptable) professional practices, and generally shape the conditions under which those types of jobs are performed. Throughout this book, and particularly in the concluding chapter, we examine how collective action has shaped workplaces in the past and how it might do so in the future. Is the new economy making certain forms of collective action by workers obsolete? Is it creating openings and needs for new kinds of collective action? What are the key issues around which workers band together to effect change? Ultimately, if the workings of the new economy are to be improved, it will require the application of agency.