“In this powerful and provocative book, Robert Fairbanks delivers an incisive, street-level analysis of the brutal biopolitics of neoliberal poverty management. This remarkable journey through the recovery house movement leads us through the fraught regulatory spaces where devolutionary neglect meets do-it-yourself governmentality, where survival meets self-help, and where urban informality meets institutional reinvention. How It Works sets a new standard for marrying ethnographic depth, social relevance, and robust, creative theorizing.”

Jamie Peck, University of British Columbia

“This ethnography of subsistence and street-level entrepreneurship in the informal economy of addiction recovery reveals the unintended effects of the post-welfare state’s parasitical management of the ravages of spatially contained poverty. Fairbanks takes us to the crux of the unintended depoliticizing effects of the entanglement of neoliberal statecraft with self-craft. He artfully documents the unplanned interface between a safety net shot full of holes and workfare, carceral repression, regulatory incompetence, low-wage labor, inner-city decay, incipient gentrification, and the struggle for individual worthiness and sober survival in one of America’s poorest deindustrialized big cities.”--Philippe Bourgois, coauthor of Righteous Dopefiend and author of In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio

Philippe Bourgois