This book explores the interrelations between work and social life. It emphasizes how workers' expressive forms and public performances connect with processes of social, cultural, and individual empowerment. Departing from perspectives that emphasize organizational integration, equilibrium, and continuity, the authors present evidence from anthropology, history, and folklore to explore intersection of popular culture and working situations.

The authors offer new data in the on-going debate about the separation of work and leisure, and raise questions about the diverse representations of class and the labor process. They identify workers' cultural values that emerge within the changing context of production, and that are not merely an outcome of industrial hegemony. Instead, workers' representations and articulations of craft mastery, class identity, and gender, reveal transformations of the traditional categories of those who produce and those who appropriate value. The studies of workers' lives range from contemporary United States and Mexico to China, India, and Japan.