The rise of privileged precarity: reconfiguring white middle-class womanhood in the new economy

This study examines how multi-level marketing (MLM) organizations function as sites where health lifestyles, work behaviors, and social inequalities intersect. Drawing on 100 hours of participant observation and 38 in-depth interviews, I show that organizations actively socialize members to adopt particular health practices while simultaneously structuring participation in non-standard work. White, middle-to-upper class participants often engage in MLM work despite its precarity, leveraging racial and socioeconomic advantages, a position I term privileged precarity, and promoting narratives of meritocratic success that attract working-class and/or non-white participants, who experience unprivileged precarity. These dynamics illustrate how meso-level organizational structures and micro-level interactions reinforce alternative health beliefs, propagate non-standard labor practices, and reproduce racial and class inequalities, advancing understanding of the social mechanisms that shape contemporary work and lifestyle behaviors.