review of  Living on the Edge: When Hard Times Become a Way of Life by C.M. Pascale, Journal of Working-Class Studies (June 2022)

 This often poignant and moving book presents a vision of America and Americans that is often missing from dominant narratives produced by people living in relative comfort some distance away from the reality for millions of economically struggling Americans. It is based on an original research design that is a cross between Studs Terkel’s opportunistic approach and more rigorous sociological research methods. From 2017 to 2018, Pascale ‘travelled the country to talk with people who live in communities where hard times have become a way of life’(p. 233). Her decision to visit three regions of the country –Appalachia, the Standing Rock and Wind River Reservations in the Midwest, and Oakland, California–allowed for a much more diverse sample (racially, ethnically, geographically, politically) than other recent works on‘white working class ’people in a single location. In each locale Pascale initiated conversations with random strangers, whom she met at gas stations, flea markets, pawn shops, and other places where strangers are likely to converge. Some of these conversations went so well that she was able to formally invite the stranger to sit down with her for a formal interview. These twenty-seven interviews form the heart of the book. Information on these interviewees, including the names they adopted for themselves for this book and their espoused racial identities (e.g., Arapaho, White/Italian, Mexican/Latino, Native American/American Indian, Caucasian, Black/White), are found in a helpful appendix. Pascale adopts an Institutional Ethnography (IE) approach, adapted from Dorothy E. Smith, the trailblazing feminist scholar who also developed standpoint theory. Although their stories clearly anchor the book, it is not simply about particular people, but rather ‘the larger contexts around them’–how ‘business practices and government policies create, normalize, and entrench economic struggles for many in order to produce extreme wealth for a few’(xi). Local experiences provide ‘a window into how broader power relations work’(p. 236). Pascale takes individual stories about unemployment, bad jobs, payday loans, slum landlords, and traces these back to structures of power and policy. For example, she explains payday lending and food deserts as background to stories about being in debt and hungry.Embedded throughout the text are ‘budgets which highlight the disjuncture between what people are paid and what is required for a decent living in a particular place. These budgets are an eye-opener for those accustomed to being able to pay their bills. Ultimately, Pascale explains, this is a book ‘about power that has been leveraged by government and corporations at the expense of ordinary people’(xi). Each chapter can operate as a stand-alone chapter, although the whole still adds up to more than the sum of its parts.