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Ethnographic and qualitative research were utilized to examine how the effects of geographic place can be related to heroin abuse and collective identity in non-metropolitan areas (NMAs) in the mid-Hudson region of New York State, U.S. The socio-geographic consequences of this interrelationship are explored. In-depth interviews were conducted with 237 recent admissions to drug treatment at 28 facilities in the seven mid-Hudson region counties. The effects of geographic place and collective identity emerged in interviews through narratives relating to heroin experimentation, subsequent dependence, and the lure of New York City. Heroin experimentation and the New York City lifestyle are collectively constructed by many respondents as 'cool.' They are both oriented toward city life and in conflict with what respondents believe to be a lack of community and caring among city dwellers and the dehumanizing effects of the city. The idea that heroin use is cool serves as tacit permission to experiment with heroin . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares the work of fashion models and “new media workers” (those who work in the relatively new medium of the Internet as dot-com workers) in order to highlight the processes of entrepreneurial labor in culture industries. Based on interviews and participant-observation in New York City, we trace how entrepreneurial labor becomes intertwined with work identities in cultural industries both on and off the job. While workers are drawn to the autonomy, creativity and excitement that jobs in these media industries can provide, they have also come to accept as normal the high risks associated with this work. Diffused through media images, this normalization of risk serves as a model for how workers in other industries should behave under flexible employment conditions. Using interview data from within the fashion media and the dot-com world, we discuss eight forces that give rise to the phenomenon of entrepreneurial labor: the cultural quality of cool, creativity, autonomy, self-investment, compulsory networking, portfolio evaluations, international competition, and foreshortened careers. We also provide a model of what constitutes the hierarchy of “good work” in cultural industries, and we conclude with implications of what entrepreneurial labor means for theories of work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]