All Barbara Ehrenreich wants is a white-collar job at 50k a year, plus benefits. Yeah, well, join a little club called America.

In Bait and Switch this veteran social critic uses the undercover tactics deployed in her bestselling Nickel and Dimed to explore life in the suites. Her goal is simple: Land a corporate job and report from within. Well, simple in theory; tough in practice.

While Nickel and Dimed detailed Ehrenreich's experience in the minimum-wage world, cleaning houses, waiting tables and toiling in Wal-Mart, here she's Googling, Monstering and disseminating her résumé from her home in Virginia. She uses her maiden name, Alexander, acquires a separate checking account and creates a résumé with friends as bogus references.

She also employs a Dreamless Team of job coaches who, in exchange for fees of up to $200 an hour, provide useless assignments (describe your fantasy job!), résumé-formatting advice and personality tests.

But after a year, the best she can manage are two gigs pimping the respective merits of AFLAC (quack!) and Mary Kay. Because both are independent-contractor jobs, she opts to pass. Given her failure to deliver, Bait and Switch is not an up-close-and-personal exposé of corporate America as much as a politicized job-seekers diary.

In proving its seemingly foregone conclusion - that you can't get by on $8 an hour - Nickel and Dimed could be tedious. However, it was exceptional in its observations of people and their complex relationships with work.

This time, as Ehrenreich ventures out to job-coaching sessions, executive boot camps and a host of networking events at exurban restaurants and even a few evangelical churches, she's never in a position to observe her fellow job seekers over the long term. What's missing in "on-the-job" immediacy, however, is occasionally made up for in analysis.

Take her distinction between blue- and white-collar job hunting. In the former, basic motor skills and a drug test usually can get you in the door. No one expects anyone to be passionate about the drive-thru window. Not so in the white-collar world, where employers demand an almost spiritual calling for work that does little more than gnaw at the soul.

The contradictions stack up like unpaid bills. On one hand, there's the onus of being a team player, while at the same time job coaches and other enforcers of a decidedly utopian individualism insist that your search is a spiritual journey. So, somewhere in a gaping chasm between obeisance and personal quest lies the path to employment.

Needless to say, it seems like a recipe for schizophrenia.

Of course, Ehrenreich has no love for such pabulum. She particularly detests the way victim blaming is dressed up and barked out as therapy by those profiteering from the misfortune of others. Observing the author ripping these job coaches and titans of the "transition industry" is one of Bait and Switch's greatest pleasures.

It's worth remembering that however similar Ehrenreich's recent books, they come out of very different contexts. Nickel and Dimed was written in the boom years of the late 1990s. Bait and Switch comes after a recession, wars on multiple continents and a jobless recovery.

Even for middle-class folks, work is less stable now. Health care premiums continue to rise. Communication technology make fields once considered safe from outsourcing vulnerable to the Bangalore highway. With their "independent contractor" status (read, no benefits), some positions resemble jobs less than they do corporate sharecropping.

For Ehrenreich, this amounts to a shattering of a social contract understood by generations of Americans. That is, work hard, stay loyal to the company and be rewarded with security. A generation ago, such employer monogamy was the norm. Today, with the exception of niches found mostly in the public sector, folks are impressed if you've stuck with the same job for five years.

The irony here is palpable - or at least it should be. Where dissident intellectuals once lamented the conformist oppression both meted out and endured by incarnations of "the man in the gray flannel suit," now, it seems they'd line his return with lotuses. For want of basic necessities, cultural stultification seems like a no-brainer.

In her conclusion, Ehrenreich makes a rather bold assertion that the attitudes she observed in her quest were indicative of those of the corporate world at large. But looking for work and working are hardly analogous.

"Undercover" journalism often is criticized by the trade's purists. If you lie to get access, why should anyone believe the rest of your story?

Let's bypass this discussion and criticize it from another vantage point: In order to write with authority, one has to spend real time with people inside their institutions. Ehrenreich does not come close, and as a result, Bait and Switch is incomplete.

It's miles from thoughtless or dry, just not the book it bills itself to be. Covers notwithstanding, sometimes you can judge a book by its title.

John Dicker's book, "The United States of Wal-Mart," recently was released from Tarcher. He lives in Denver.