Sociology: Among the most affecting sights for a European visitor to the US is that of a family packing the entire contents of their home into a U-Haul trailer, as they prepare to tow it halfway across the country to a new job, new friends and an unknowable future.
The ease with which Americans uproot and start afresh elsewhere reflects some of the most attractive features of the national personality: a spirit of adventure, optimism and pragmatism.
The thousands of U-Haul trailers that traverse the country every week are part of a darker reality too, however, as companies hire and fire at will, treating workers as a commodity like any other, subject to strict laws of supply and demand.
Job insecurity is no longer confined to the working class and one out of five job losses now affects white-collar workers, many of whom are relatively high earners laid off in favour of cheaper, younger rivals. Executives who still have jobs often work many more hours than they would like to - or are paid for - in the hope of being spared during the next round of downsizing.
Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed illuminated the world of low-wage work, as she went undercover to work as a cleaner, a waitress, a Wal-Mart "associate" and a call centre assistant. The book sold more than a million copies and stayed on the US bestseller list for two years.
Now she has applied the same investigative technique to the white-collar unemployed, spending almost a year looking for a job in the corporate world. Ehrenreich originally planned to write about working in a white-collar job as well as finding one, but 10 months of job coaches, makeovers, job-seekers' boot camps and hundreds of applications failed to secure a single genuine job offer.
Victims of corporate lay-offs do not, as Ehrenreich soon discovered, regard themselves as unemployed but as being "in transition" and many continue to identify with the corporate values that consigned them to the scrap heap. This makes them easy prey for the industry of job coaches, "networkers" and assorted quacks that Ehrenreich encounters in her job search.
Her first coach uses dolls of Elvis and characters from The Wizard of Oz to determine her personality type - a technique with as much scientific rigour as the personality tests widely used by the human resources departments in big corporations.
Another coach encourages Ehrenreich, who is well advanced into middle age, to give the impression that she is 20 years younger by limiting the employment experience on her CV to the last 10 or 15 years.
Reverting to her maiden name, Ehrenreich tweaks her CV to present herself as a PR professional who is returning to the workforce after a divorce, having spent a number of years working in the home. When she submits the CV to a potential employer, however, she learns that it contains a fatal flaw - a gap.
"A gap of any kind, for any purpose - child raising, caring for an elderly parent, recovering from an illness, or even consulting - is unforgivable. If you haven't spent every moment of your life making money for somebody else, you can forget about getting a job," she writes.
Indeed, most of Ehrenreich's advisers, who charge large fees for their mostly worthless advice, suggest that job- seekers should treat the job hunt itself as a kind of job, drawing up timetables like at work and filling every hour with application writing, Internet research and networking opportunities.
The fundamental message is the same: your future is entirely in your own hands and failure only comes to those who lack the proper "winning attitude" to market themselves.
Ehrenreich is an engaging companion, reporting on each humiliating stage in her search with an acerbic wit but viewing her fellow job-seekers with compassion and curiosity. The most grisly group she meets is a Christian job-seekers' fellowship that is run like a Bible-based self-help group that encourages the unemployed to accept their misfortune as God's will.
"So this is the new, ideal, Christianised, 'just in time' white-collar employee - disposable when temporarily unneeded and always willing to return with a smile, no matter what hardships have been endured in the off periods. Maybe one of the functions of the evangelical revival sweeping the US is to reconcile people to an increasingly unreliable work world: you take what you can get and praise the Lord for sending it along," Ehrenreich writes.
As a woman over 50, Ehrenreich faces a double disadvantage in the corporate labour market, where younger workers are valued as more flexible and less demanding. After 10 months of effort and thousands of dollars in coaching fees, her only job offers are positions as a sales agent with no basic salary, no health insurance and no pension entitlements.
Few of the job-seekers she met along the way had better luck and many found themselves lowering expectations steadily until they accepted work paying the minimum wage, often as little as $7 an hour.
Bait and Switch is a compelling exploration of the human cost of the flexible labour market and the culture of shareholder value that have become the hallmarks of modern business, not only in the US but increasingly in Europe. Ehrenreich argues that white-collar workers have been stripped of dignity as the corporate culture demands that they sell not only their skills and hard work but their personalities.
She calls for legislative changes to offer better job protection, a stronger social safety net and universal health care, but concludes that the unemployed and the anxiously employed need to develop a stronger sense of solidarity if they are to assert the rights of the individual in the face of corporate power.
"What they need, too, is not a 'winning attitude' but a deeper and more ancient quality, one that I never once heard mentioned in my search, and that is courage: the courage to come together and work for change, even in the face of overwhelming odds," she writes.
• Denis Staunton is the Washington Correspondent of The Irish Times
• Bait and Switch: The Futile Pursuit of the Corporate Dream By Barbara Ehrenreich Granta, 237pp. £9.99
