More than pretty boxes: How the rise of professional organizing shows us the way we work isn't working By Carrie M.Lane, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 2024. 288 pp.

How the Rise of Professional Organizing Shows Us the Way We Work Isn'tWorking is an ethnography of the growing professional organizing industry in the United States.Through attending industry meetings and assisting professional organizers on many jobs across the country, Lane shows how professional organizing is actually people work, care work, and feminist work that can change how we think about our relationship with work in the United States.Professional organizers don't simply organize spaces but rather empower people with personalized practices to organize their own spaces and thereby renegotiate their relationships with their belongings and the social expectations that come with them.This way, organizers give "households and the women who typically lead them" tools to manage the "overwhelming demands" society places on them to keep their spaces and belongings in proper care while balancing other workplace and family duties (26).It is part of the new work in US anthropology in which scholars like Allison Pugh, Ilana Gershon, Marianne Cooper, Christine Beckman, and Melissa Mazmanian have turned their attention to the complex relationship between work and life in the United States in the contexts of workplace automation, politics, insecurity, and overwork, respectively (Beckman and Lane, 2024;Cooper, 2014;Gershon, 2024;Lane, 2024;Pugh, 2024).The first three chapters explain and analyze professional organizing's rise.In chapter 1, Lane details the gendered rise of professional organizing in the 1970s and 1980s as an alternative to the limited jobs available to women, with an emphasis on married White middle-class mothers.Organizing became a niche for these women, where stereotypes worked to their advantage since it was already seen as "women's work" (35).Chapter 2 documents the founding of the National Association for Productivity and Organizing Professionals (NAPO) in 1983 as the first professional association for organizers.These organizers (double entendre) joined together in a fight to gain recognition and legitimacy for their work and through developing an ethos of professionalism.Chapter 3 describes what makes organizing so appealing to its professionals in the United States: its flexibility.Though this feature has allowed aspirants from all parts of society to enter the industry, success in organizing is hampered by a lack of access to clients and perceived professionalism, especially among organizers who are not White, female, and upper-class.Running one's own professional organizing business requires not only networking skills but also social acceptance.Men and women of color working as organizers report difficulty establishing connections with clients not only because of race and class-based exclusions but also because of lasting stigmas about the work.For instance, some Latina organizers reported to Lane that they had difficulty maintaining Latina women as