A01=Laura A. Orrico
alternative employment
artists
Author_Laura A. Orrico
boardwalk
busking
Category=GTM
Category=JBSD
Category=JHB
community resilience
creative ecosystem
cultural diversity
economic disparity
economic safety net
economic survival
entrepreneurship
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethnography
gentrification
gig economy
inequality
informal economy
informal workplace
insecurity
LA government
labor market
labor rights
marginalized communities
panhandlers
precarious work
public space
social dynamics
social inequality
social justice
social mobility
social safety net
sociology
street performers
street vending
urban
urban development
urban policy
urban poverty
Product details
- ISBN 9780226840260
- Weight: 286g
- Dimensions: 140 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 09 Jun 2025
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Shows how the precarious workers of Venice Beach—without help from the government—work together to create a safety net for themselves.
In Making Precarity Work, sociologist Laura A. Orrico shows how Los Angeles’s Venice Beach boardwalk, which is a magnet for tourists, is also a workplace, one that wouldn’t exist without the motley crew of people selling art, drinking, performing, using drugs, and working odd jobs who gather daily to engage in varied activities, from selling crafts to minding each other’s wares and asking for spare change.
Throughout the book, Orrico lifts up this workplace as a collective accomplishment, demonstrating how it can be a safety net to manage insecurity and inequality for those opting into its flexible and precarious structure, as well as how the LA government’s efforts to stabilize this work often disrupt the success of this collaborative and creative ecosystem. She also presents the ways this work can exacerbate those very inequalities. Sharing the personal stories of boardwalk workers, Orrico considers these juxtaposed realities and asks her audience to question how we can and should respond to a society whose best option for the disadvantaged is precarity.
In Making Precarity Work, sociologist Laura A. Orrico shows how Los Angeles’s Venice Beach boardwalk, which is a magnet for tourists, is also a workplace, one that wouldn’t exist without the motley crew of people selling art, drinking, performing, using drugs, and working odd jobs who gather daily to engage in varied activities, from selling crafts to minding each other’s wares and asking for spare change.
Throughout the book, Orrico lifts up this workplace as a collective accomplishment, demonstrating how it can be a safety net to manage insecurity and inequality for those opting into its flexible and precarious structure, as well as how the LA government’s efforts to stabilize this work often disrupt the success of this collaborative and creative ecosystem. She also presents the ways this work can exacerbate those very inequalities. Sharing the personal stories of boardwalk workers, Orrico considers these juxtaposed realities and asks her audience to question how we can and should respond to a society whose best option for the disadvantaged is precarity.
Laura A. Orrico is assistant professor of sociology at Temple University.
