ABSTRACT
The occupational lives of Potter Addition's poor diverged dramatically from the orderly career trajectories of middle-class men and women. Potter Addition's work histories seldom exhibited logically ordered patterns in which one job served as a substantive prelude. In socializing their children to cope with the life they know best, parents communicate norms and perceptions that are often the inverse of career-oriented values. This means rewarding broad-ranging mechanical skills, physical agility and strength, and a dogged persistence to continue a task despite its estrangement. The path to entrepreneurship often reflects a lingering commitment to a rural way of life. In that the autonomy of the small farmer remains the cultural ideal for many in Potter Addition, entrepreneurship is a compromise path by which one recoups that independence and autonomy. The mythical life of the self-employed seems as close as most will get to the idealized freedom of that now-vanished world.
