Organizational Governance and Trade-Offs Between Pay and Subjective Employee Well-Being

Suppose you were offered a job or a promotion that gave you higher intrinsic rewards, but required accepting less pay than you could get elsewhere. Might you have concerns that the employer would, at some point, renege on its promise of higher intrinsic rewards—which are harder to observe than pay—leaving you with just lower pay? Even if the manager is being sincere at the time, later on there could be new pressures, perhaps because of profitability concerns, new executives, or a change in ownership. 

One thing that might shape your willingness to accept this deal is whether you think the organization’s reputation is important to it, such that it will live up to its promises in order to maintain a good reputation in the labor market. However, David Marsden, a longtime professor of employment relations at the London School of Economics, argued that a stronger signal of an organization’s likely commitment to implicit contracts is its governance structure, which is stable, easy to observe, and difficult to change, unlike perceptions about a desire to maintain some amorphous sense of reputation.

For example, in an investor-owned company with a strong shareholder value ethos, the managers are the agents of investor-owners and are tasked with acting on their behalf to generate financial returns. Because of financial concerns and the ability to buy and sell ownership and assets, employees should be wary of implicit contracts in which the promise of intrinsic rewards offsets lower pay because of managerial incentives and the prospect that new corporate owners or executives will ignore these non-transferable agreements. To the extent that family-owned firms may face weaker shareholder pressures while also embodying stronger social connections, visible ownership identities, and enduring inter-generational transfers of ownership, workers may be more willing to trust implicit contracts at family-owned corporations. 

In nonprofit and charitable organizations, conventional owners do not exist as there are not profits to distribute, but donors can be seen as key stakeholders to whom managers are accountable. Moreover, assets are largely non-tradeable and a social mission is explicitly part of the organization’s mandate. So discretionary actions allowed by this model of organizational governance are expected to serve the public good. In an earlier article, my colleague Avner Ben-Ner argued that “an organization’s nonprofit status may serve as a signal of trustworthiness to customers that their well-being will not be compromised by the organization’s pursuit of profit,” and the Marsden theorizing is that this applies to employees, too. Public sector organizations with socially-oriented missions, as in public education, health care, and social services, are theorized to be similar to nonprofit and charitable organizations such that the pursuit of the organization’s mission is likely to remain consistent with respecting commitments made to employees. But public sector agencies with more of a bureaucratic or regulatory function are more likely to have new governments change their orientation, similar to new owners or executives in a private-sector corporation.

Marsden’s theorizing, then, is that organizational features that are easy to observe contain information about the likelihood that the organization will fulfill its promises, and thus we should observe different combinations of extrinsic and intrinsic rewards across different types of organizations. In other words, employees will be less likely to expect breaches of implicit contracts promising higher levels of intrinsic rewards in lieu of pay when certain organizational features are present. Ryan Lamare and I explore this in a new article “Organizational Governance and Trade-Offs Between Pay and Subjective Employee Well-Being: A Comparative Analysis” which will appear in an issue of the British Journal of Industrial Relations honoring Professor Marsden. I’ve created a short animation that provides an overview of our article. 

In short, we find supportive evidence across 35 European countries. Moreover, the trade-offs across organizational types appear larger in liberal market economies, like the UK, where there is a stronger shareholder orientation and capital is impatient, compared to coordinated market economies, like Germany, where governance arrangements are somewhat more insulated and capital is more patient. At the same time, employee well-being across all organizational types appears greater in coordinated market economies, which isn’t surprising given the relatively greater strength of labor unions and other pro-worker institutions in that type of country.

Advocates for improving work often focus on work-related laws and institutions such as unions. But we shouldn’t overlook how organizational governance, such as a strong shareholder ethos, also affects human resources and worker well-being.

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Source: John W. Budd and J. Ryan Lamare (2025) "Organizational Governance and Trade-Offs Between Pay and Subjective Employee Well-Being: A Comparative Analysis," British Journal of Industrial Relations. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12860. 

The article is open access, or you can watch our animated video overview.

Does 5 to 9 solve 9 to 5?

In the title song for the 1980 movie "9 to 5", Dolly Parton captured the inhumanity of underpaid and over-harassed working women, which includes the well-known chorus:

Working 9 to 5, what a way to make a living
Barely gettin' by, it's all taking and no giving
They just use your mind and they never give you credit
It's enough to drive you crazy if you let it
9 to 5, for service and devotion
You would think that I would deserve a fair promotion
Want to move ahead but the boss won't seem to let me
I swear sometimes that man is out to get me.

From this chorus you can get a pretty good idea that work isn't portrayed all that positively in the song and accompanying movie. Work here is unfair, unequal, and sexist. Fast forward 40 years and Dolly Parton's song has been rewritten — or perhaps we should say "has pivoted"? — to "5 to 9" for a Super Bowl commercial:

 Replacing the original chorus, but with essentially the same tune, 9 to 5 becomes:

Working 5 to 9, making something of your own now
And it feels so fine to build a business from your know-how
Gonna move ahead, and there's nothing that you can't do
When you listen to that little voice inside you
Well you got dreams and you know they matter
Be your own boss, climb your own ladder
That moment's getting closer by the day
And you're in the same boat with a lotta your friends
Launching ideas you all believe in
The tide's gonna turn and it's all gonna roll your way.

In many respects, nothing has improved — in real life, and in the song's portrayal of work. The Super Bowl commercial starts out with repetitious images of the drudgery of office work and bored office workers — again, not a rewarding way to make a living. And the new chorus above has you dreaming of something better and being your own boss because the daily grind is just that.

But as I've explored in my book The Thought of Work, work is complicated and can have multiple meanings. In addition to being a curse, drudgery that people tolerate to earn money, or something endured to confirm your social status as someone who works rather than loafs, work can also be a source of freedom and fulfillment — be your own boss, climb your own ladder, launch your own creative ideas.

Work as freedom and fulfillment are a reality for some (at least partly); a dream for others. And yet, 5 to 9 has created a backlash, including in provocative opinion pieces in the New York Times and NBC News. To see why, we need the remainder of the new 5 to 9 lyrics:

Working 5 to 9 you've got passion and a vision
'Cause it's hustlin' time, a whole new way to make a livin'
Gonna change your life, do somethin' that gives it meanin'
With a website that is worthy of your dreaming
5 to 9, you keep working, working, working
Working 5 to 9, 'til your dreams, come true
Working 5 to 9, you keep dreaming, dreaming, dreaming
5 to 9, 5 to 9, you can do it

One controversy stems from the apparent celebration of "working, working, working" at a time when many feel overworked during the pandemic. Particularly ironic or galling is that the original 9 to 5 was somewhat of a feminist anthem, but 5 to 9 becomes extra humiliation as women are bearing much of the extra caring burdens with children home from school and elderly relatives unable to access support services. Indeed, 5 to 9 could mean 5pm to 9am (the famous "second shift") so that women are expected to work, work, work around the clock.

Another controversy is that, whether intentional or not, the "hustling time" reference in the new lyrics taps into slang around the gig economy in which workers are continually forced to work side hustles or numerous jobs just to make ends meet. This is particularly true during the pandemic with record rates of job loss and unemployment. We shouldn't be celebrating how hard it is to make a living. 

So how should we interpret 5 to 9? Is it really a way to really break from jobs that are "all taking and no giving" such that people can earn a decent living doing "something that gives [life] meaning" without needing to work side hustles and multiple jobs, or becoming overworked through working, working, working. That is, does it allow you to take your day job and shove it, to paraphrase another well-known work song? If so, then this would be a good thing.

But the harsh reality is that for many, this takes more than a website worthy of their dreaming (yes, 5 to 9 is an ad for a web hosting and design company, Squarespace). So 5 to 9 really is 5pm to 9am, and it's added on top of other jobs. If this is the case, then we shouldn't be celebrating overwork. We should be trying to improve work so that people have can high-quality jobs that allow them to support a family without being overworked. And we should be doing so in ways that recognize rather than deny the deep inequalities rooted in race, gender, class, and other identities that shape work. But in the meantime...

9 to 5, yeah, they got you where they want you
There's a better life and you think about it don't you
It's a rich man's game no matter what they call it
And you spend your life putting money in his wallet

Finding the Meaning in Bullshit Jobs

I’ve been reading Bullshit Jobs by LSE anthropologist David Graeber (Simon & Schuster, 2018). Graeber defines a bullshit job as “a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case” (pp. 9-10), and identifies five major types: 

• Flunky jobs make someone else look or feel important without any other real purpose,
• Goon jobs are those with an aggressive element that exist only because someone else has also created them and has an advantage if they are unmatched,  
• Duct-taping jobs fix problems that shouldn’t exist,
• Box-ticking jobs make an organization look like it’s doing something when it’s not,
• Taskmaster jobs manage others who don’t need managing.

The common theme here is that these are all pointless jobs. They are not bad in the conventional sense of having lousy pay and working conditions—indeed, Graeber notes that many bullshit jobs are corporate and government jobs with good pay and safe working conditions—but they don’t have any real value. Citing the fact that 37% of survey respondents said that their job does not make a meaningful contribution to the world, Graeber then claims that “if 37 percent of jobs are bullshit, and 37 percent of the remaining 63 percent are in support of bullshit, then slightly over 50 percent of all labor falls into the bullshit sector in the broadest sense of the term” (p. 62). 

Suppose that this is true, and, as Graeber argues, it’s largely a post-war phenomenon. Then this means that in that time period, “upward of 50 percent to 60 percent of the population has, in fact, been thrown out of work” when we equate work to doing something meaningful (p. 265). That’s a provocative way to think about what might be happening in the world of work. Moreover, Graeber also points out that “if you combine this with the bullshitization of useful occupations (at least 50 percent in office work; presumably less in other sorts), and the various professions that basically exist only because everyone is working too hard (dog washers, all-night pizza deliverymen, to name a few), we could probably get the real workweek down to fifteen hours—or even twelve—without anyone noticing much” (pp. 62-3).

Admittedly, I’m not convinced that the true magnitudes are as large as claimed. In Bullshit Jobs, the supporting anecdotes perhaps represent the worst cases and I'd be surprised if we couldn't find dsyfunctional examples in all occupations. But it's entire occupations that are then characterized as being bullshit, as in this description of goon jobs: “If no one had an army, armies would not be needed. But the same can be said of most lobbyists, PR specialists, telemarketers, and corporate lawyers” (p. 36). By the end, pretty much all administrative and finance-related jobs have been labeled as useless, including human resources. So I think we need to be concerned with fallacies of composition. But even if the actual number of bullshit jobs is (a lot?) less than claimed, the implications in the previous paragraph are still important to confront, albeit perhaps better phrased as questions (e.g., how many people have essentially been put out of (meaningful) work?).

On a personal level, having a bullshit job is a problem because work should be providing meaning and rewards beyond a paycheck (as I’ve written about in The Thought of Work and elsewhere). In this way, the micro-level problems with bullshit jobs are contained within Karl Marx’s articulation of the problems of worker alienation under capitalism. But I’m not seeing how this aspect of Bullshit Jobs improves upon the concept of alienation. In fact, it seems that workers in bullshit jobs are all alienated, but the concept of alienation importantly also draws attention to the ways in which non-bullshit jobs can also be alienating.

Graeber goes onto argue that bullshit jobs create a moral envy in which workers with bullshit jobs feel resentment toward those with meaningful jobs, even though in Graeber’s eyes these meaningful jobs often have worse pay and working conditions. In fact, envy and resentment among managers, who are all seen as occupying bullshit jobs, towards those below them who are doing real work “is a key part of the justification of underpaying such workers” (p. 248). Frankly, I’m skeptical of this. Indeed, I would argue the opposite—blue collar and service workers are paid less because of prejudice and bias (not envy) that subconsciously allow managers to overstate their own importance while devaluing the contributions of manual and service work. Graeber also gives a lot of power to the finance industry and government officials in intentionally creating processes that lead to bullshit jobs in order to line their own pockets or prevent others from being able to navigate social safety nets. The former seems compelling but I’m not sure how much of the big picture it can explain, while the latter might be the unfortunate result of other priorities that are seen as legitimate by policy-makers (e.g., fraud).

But in some respects, these might just be second-order squabbles. For what Graeber really seems concerned about are the polarization in society (which is connected to work in one way or another) and freeing up work so that individuals can choose their own meaningful paths (including the freedom to find fulfillment without working at all). These are critically important issues that deserve all the attention they can get, and Graeber's ideas on the primary concerns are worth serious reflection. So in the end, if the provocatively overstated style of Bullshit Jobs causes more to confront these deeper issues, then I can overlook—OK, you know I have to say it—the bullshit.


Update (January 14, 2019): Just published research finds that the fraction of workers who report that their jobs are socially useless is a lot lower than what's claimed by Graeber, but it's still non-negligible.  

Working with Purpose…Not Just for the Productive

In April I had the pleasure of meeting Arthur Woods (@ArthurWoods), a co-founder of Imperative, who was in Minneapolis to speak at a couple of our events, including our annual HR Tomorrow conference. Imperative emphasizes working with purpose—creating a measure of purpose, identifying the importance of purpose, and helping companies facilitate purpose. In his presentation, Arthur eloquently articulated the meaning of purpose (“Purpose is something that we gain daily from relationships, doing something greater than ourselves, and from personal and professional growth”), and documented the value and importance of purposeful workers.

At the end of this stimulating and important presentation I commented that the only thing missing from his presentation was a picture of Karl Marx. It’s common to popularly associate Marx with communism, but first and foremost Marx was a profound social theorist of work whose concern with workers’ suffering led him to seek a more humane society. He thought that the commodification of work under capitalism leads to the loss of one’s essential humanness, a loss that Marx labeled “alienation.” In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx identified four ways in which workers are alienated under capitalism:

1. Individuals are divorced from the product of their labor—the business owns and controls what the workers produce.
2. Since business owners control how things are made, workers surrender control of their actions to someone else.
3. Creative work is seen as an essential feature of being human so #1 and #2 deprive humans of their essential nature.
4. Because people relate to each other through their work, they are alienated from each other.

If we set aside the fact that Marx’s alienation is inherent in capitalism and is not a subjective feeling of job dissatisfaction or a result of  undesirable job characteristics, in important ways the dimensions of alienation match Imperative’s emphasis on the importance of relationships, autonomy, and personal meaning in work. I think this is important because it reinforces the gravity of these issues, even if there are important differences. 

Imperative’s business case for organizations to embrace the importance of working with purpose is that purposeful workers are better workers. Since it is a business enterprise itself, I understand why Imperative makes this case. But there is an unsettling conundrum here in which the deep, non-instrumental importance of work is being justified on instrumental grounds. This seemingly implies that in cases where purposeful workers are not more productive, then imbuing work with greater meaning isn’t something important to pursue. Or that only purposeful workers are worthy of efforts to improve their working conditions. This is analogous to the problem with justifying corporate diversity programs solely by the business case (then these programs become subjected to the vagaries of executives’ perceptions of which employees, if any, are a source of competitive advantage, rather than diversity being seen as important for human reasons). From an industrial relations perspective in which labor is more than a commodity, the improvement of work (and diversity) is an important imperative for all workers, even when it doesn’t improve productivity or other instrumental outcomes.

Returning to Marx’s alienation, I raised this connection with Arthur as a way to emphasize that these are longstanding concerns in the world of work (so bravo!), and there have been numerous movements between Marx and now to try to give work and workers deeper meaning and respect (for example, the field of industrial relations). By bringing new data and case studies to the issue, I hope that Imperative can successfully expand upon earlier movements to embrace of the deep importance of work, which is also a goal of my book The Thought of Work. This is a deeply important issue, and a longstanding one. Unfortunately, history doesn’t seem to be on our side.

Happy May Day!

Reflections On My Own Work Experiences

In my May blog posting, I reviewed a new book by Grant Michelson and Shaun Ryan called Just Work. In the tradition of Studs Terkel’s famous book Working, Just Work gives voice to 30 workers. Actually, they gave voice to 32 workers because although they modestly relegated themselves to an appendix, they shared their personal narratives of their own work experiences. Because work can be a deeply personal experience, it was great to see these authors putting themselves into the same position as their research subjects while also self-reflecting as well reflecting. And they inspired me to do the same…

My family tree is full of occupations typical of various eras—homemakers of many types, toolmaker, cigar maker, rope maker, teacher, innkeeper, coal miner, tailor, mariner, produce dealer, farmer, woodcutter, soldier, cemetery-mover (when Lake Zoar was created), laborers of many types, and even a judge. Both of my grandfathers were electricians in the navy yards and factories of the eastern United States (and hence both suffered from asbestos-induced health problems) and both of my grandmothers were homemakers, with one of them becoming a librarian after her children were grown. My father was a Coast Guard officer; my mother was a teacher before transitioning to a variety of administrative positions, one of which she still works at today in her mid-70s. My stepfather is a retired engineer and jack of many trades, and my stepmother is a nurse.

I had my first formal job when I was 14 years old. I was the janitor for the Huntington (CT) United Methodist Church and the preschool that met there during the week. I remember having to delay playing with friends to instead ride my bike there most days after school, and getting chased many times by a dog on Walnut Tree Hill Road. I was there by myself so it was a little eerie, and during the summer it was also particularly challenging fighting with the floor waxing machine. In high school, I followed a friend and his sister to work at Colonial [Caterers] of Hickory Hill in Stratford. This was a free-standing wedding reception hall so the work was exclusively on weekends, usually as a busboy, but sometimes as a waiter or dishwasher. The work was intense. A “four-party weekend” consisted of arriving at 5pm on Friday to set-up for a reception that ran 7pm-midnight, then cleaning up and setting up until 2am for the next one. Then it was a late Saturday morning arrival for a noon-5pm reception followed by intense clean-up/set-up for another 7pm-midnight reception, and then another reception on Sunday. Phew! I remember that all of the busboys, waiters, and waitresses either worked just once, or many times. So it was a good group of regular workers because those who couldn’t take it (like two other of our friends) left after only weekend and never returned. We worked really hard, but had a lot of fun. At that time, I also worked during the week at a correspondence school where my mother was an administrator (County Schools on Main Street in Bridgeport). I did copying, mailroom tasks, and other things that needed doing. We listened to Imus in the Morning on WNBC (AM), had Merritt Canteen chili dogs for lunch, and listened to Howard Stern become famous in the afternoon.

I went to a private high school for my junior and senior years, so I could no longer work at County Schools during the school year. So I gave my job to a friend. The next summer, I didn’t want to step on his toes so I decided to skip working at County Schools and instead got a janitorial job at a real factory via a placement service. I’m not overly social and I’m fine being alone, but for some reason this felt like the two loneliest weeks of my life. I’m sure others worked there (obviously!), but I don’t remember any people or faces, just sweeping and mopping around pallets of things, and eating lunch in my car by myself. Compared to the fun I had with peers at County Schools and Colonial Caterers, this was dreadful. So in addition to working again at Colonial Caterers, I went back to County Schools.

The private high school I attended for two years had extra-long Christmas and Spring breaks. Who needs extra workers at Christmas time? A Christmas tree farm, so I wrote a letter (how quaint!) to Jones Christmas Tree Farm in Huntington, and spent two holiday seasons there. Since I could work all week, I worked the pre-cut lot and remember struggling to pull stout blue spruce trees through the chute to wrap them with mesh for easier handling by the customers. To this day I still have a Jones Christmas Tree Farm knit hat that smells of pine! They also hired me during spring break to walk the farm and put a coffee can worth of lime in a circle around each of the growing trees. I would be white as a ghost at the end of windy days—that was “fun,” and undoubtedly “fun” too, for my mom who was doing my laundry (sorry Mom).

I went off to college at Colgate University, and tried to enjoy my first semester by reading the New York Times and not working at all. But I think I took things too easy, and it was my worst academic semester grade-wise. My later-to-be-wife but then-new-acquaintance was on work-study so she was working a lot of hours in the dining hall, and she teased me about doing nothing except reading the New York Times (hmm…norms about being a productive member of society?). So in the spring of my freshman year, I followed her lead and started working in the dining hall in the Bryan complex (later, a little in Cutten, too). Working in the dishroom was particularly fun for some reason (having nothing to do with the occasional food fight with various college girls I’m sure). I made friends not only with other student workers, but with some of the full-time workers who lived in the area, too—but not with one cook who was particularly nasty. I spent 3½ years working there, including nearly three as a student manager. My later-to-be-wife, of course, became student manager before me. I still remember that I was working in the dishroom at Cutten listening to the radio when the Challenger space shuttle tragically exploded. Looking back, working in the Bryan dining hall was one of the strongest constants of my college life, and was the only thing that connected me to anyone besides students and faculty.  

Like every other economics major in the northeastern United States at that time, I had visions of striking it rich on Wall Street. My mother and stepfather had gone to high school with someone who was a vice president at the investment bank Kidder Peabody when I was in college, and from that connection I spent the summers after my sophomore, junior, and senior years working there in fixed income research. I lived at home in Connecticut and had quite the commute—driving to the Bridgeport train station, Metro North to Grand Central, the Lex Ave express subway to Wall Street, and a brisk walk to Hanover Square in lower Manhattan. As just a summer worker, I was probably the last to arrive and the first to leave, and yet the days were exhausting (and that was without any non-work obligations). Nonetheless, it was a fantastic experience working in New York City. I even got to cover the collateralized mortgage obligation (CMO) trading desk for a couple of hours when the two traders had to be away (probably in violation of some securities law). And I still remember that because the bond traders and salespeople couldn’t leave the floor during the day, every morning we got to fill out an extensive menu choosing whatever we wanted for lunch, and it would be delivered free of charge at lunchtime.

I’m not sure how much value I created for Kidder Peabody. I don’t think my model to predict the BusinessWeek’s industrial production index made them much money. And I think my efforts to predict when a CMO would be called based on identifying the characteristics of the underlying mortgage securities were quite crude (in a retrospect, too bad others didn’t learn a lesson from this difficulty before the 2008 financial crisis). But I learned three important things of value to me. I enjoyed being part of the intellectual workforce, but I hated commuting in such big metropolitan area and I disliked doing what others wanted me to (wearing a suit every day, especially on the subway during the hot evening commute, wasn’t much fun either). So before I even worked my last summer at Kidder Peabody after graduating from Colgate, I knew that I was going in a different direction—onto an economics PhD program. [For completeness, I also had a brief internship in London during a junior semester abroad—I think it was with a tire manufacturer, but my memory is hazy. Too many pints of bitter at lunch perhaps.]

After all those jobs between age 14 and 21, my adult work narrative becomes less varied. I was a research assistant and a teaching assistant at Princeton during my PhD studies, and since then I’ve only had one formal job—a professor at the University of Minnesota. Growing up primarily in the northeastern United States, I never imagined myself living in the tundra—at least that’s what we thought Minnesota was. But here I am, why? Because of work. The University of Minnesota offered me a great job as an assistant professor 25 years ago, and I’m still here. So I guess something must have clicked. Why industrial relations? At Colgate I majored in economics and in math, and then chose graduate study in economics because it seemed more connected to real-world things. Imagine my surprise when I got to Princeton and found out that economics at that level is mostly abstract math. So I gravitated toward labor economics and development economics as being the most grounded, and within that I further gravitated toward labor relations issues as, at first, being fascinating, and then later on, as being more amenable to multidisciplinary study which is something I particular enjoy. 

Even though I’ve only had one job for 25 years (wow!), of course this one job is much more complex than my earlier jobs, and within it I’ve had varied roles—not only as a researcher and a teacher, but also as a Director of Graduate Studies, department chair, and in various service roles. The rewards are similarly complex. It has allowed me to support my family for which I am grateful. I have enjoyed tremendous autonomy which facilitates creativity and lifelong learning. My job has enabled me to interact with people from many different cultures, whether in classrooms here in Minneapolis or at conference venues, and an occasional pub, scattered around the globe. I have been able to develop teaching strategies and write books to shape student thinking, which has hopefully created more good than working on Wall Street. I have a stimulating set of colleagues who do amazing things in their research, their teaching, or their support of faculty and students (though no friendly food fights). And so on and so forth. Of course, there are many stressors, too, deriving from many of the same factors that generate these rewards, and magnified by the realities of having obligations outside of work (unlike when I worked at my earlier jobs). But I have to say that being a professor is a great job, at least for me. At practical level, it is work unlike any other job I’ve had, and unlike most other jobs period; at a conceptual level, it is work exactly like all other.

Thoughts on an Earlier Book, Just Work

In my previous post, I reviewed a new book called "Just Work." The funny thing is, this isn't the first book that I've reviewed with this title. Here is my earlier review of Russell Muirhead's book Just Work (Harvard University Press, 2004).

The clever title of Dartmouth government professor Russell Muirhead’s book reflects the tension inherent in the nature of work. On the one hand, there is the societal pressure on individuals to “just work”—don’t complain, don’t fight it, just get to work. Work is a necessary evil to support consumption, others, or God. On the other hand, there is the demand of individuals on society to provide “just work”—work that fulfills principles of justice and respects the dignity of workers as human beings. Just Work therefore tackles the centuries-old issue of the meaning of work: “What should we expect from work? Should the promise of work be restricted to its instrumental value—to the wages it brings? Is it right to invest work with the deeper promise of fulfillment?” (p. 3).

The powerful and thought-provoking central theme developed in Just Work to address these questions is “fit”—just and meaningful work is work that fits. As a political theorist, Muirhead’s first task is to justify fit rather than freedom as the standard for just work, especially against the backdrop of the liberal market ethos of the 21st century. The author argues that a liberal political regime provides freedom while requiring citizens to work. The fact that we must work then necessarily gives legitimacy to questions about the quality of that work. Furthermore, democracy is premised on self-determination and equality. Work that degrades the human condition or provides rewards to a lucky few runs counter to these democratic principles. Fit better than freedom also captures the common associations between work and human dignity, and also better recognizes that freedom in the world of work is often imperfect. The quality of work—fit—is thus a legitimate subject for modern democracies; freedom alone does not suffice as the standard for work. These arguments provide the basis not only for a richer conception of just work, but also for re-introducing the subject of work back into political theory. If justice is simply choice, then there is nothing special about work in political theory. But if fit defines work in a democratic society, work deserves special attention by political theorists (and politicians).

So what is fit? Muirhead defines fit through two dimensions, social fit and personal fit. Social fit captures the extent to which individual abilities match what society needs done. Personal fit considers the extent to which work is personally fulfilling. A key contribution of Just Work is exploring the tensions between social fit and personal fit which have characterized visions of work back to at least Plato and Aristotle.

In Plato’s simple city, jobs are all focused on contributing to the common good. Strong but simple individuals are laborers, smart but weak individuals are merchants. Social fit is maximized, but at the expense of personal fit—what if someone doesn’t want to be a laborer, or a merchant? Aristotle, in contrast, elevates the importance of human capacities and by extension personal fit—even if a job serves the common good, it should not be allowed to stunt an individual’s personal growth. The parallels with the liberal market economy of the 21st century are surprisingly striking. The political system of ancient Greece has been replaced by the invisible hand of the market, but the end result is the same. Markets are very powerful for channeling individuals and resources into their socially-optimal uses, albeit with a narrowly-defined construction of social value rooted in consumerism and marginal productivity justice. But what happens when markets produce sweatshops and assembly lines that degrade human capabilities? This again is the tension between social fit and personal fit, with personal fit unjustly dominated by the demands of social fit in today’s global economy.

So instead let’s structure work to be personally fulfilling. Not so fast warns Just Work—a wholesale focus on personal fit is equally problematic as a wholesale focus on social fit. Muirhead shows how Betty Friedan, by largely ignoring the realities of the full range of good and bad jobs that society needs completed and by inflating work to be the single source of human fulfillment, raised the standard of work so high that it was impossible to fulfill. And in her later writings, Friedan abandoned the personal fulfillment element of work and focused instead on pay. Just Work therefore advocates a more nuanced middle-ground—work should contain elements of both personal and social fit. In other words, what’s needed is a balance—consistent with my contentions in Employment with a Human Face: Balancing Efficiency, Equity, and Voice (Cornell University Press, 2004). That the competing dimensions will only be partially satisfied is better and more stable than the extremes.

In this way, Just Work provides a reality check for all sides of the employment debate. To the aristocrats of old and the free market advocates of today, the reality check is the issue of personal fit. It is not acceptable to let markets and political systems structure work solely for good of others without consideration for the human effects on individual workers. To social reformers and other advocates of fulfilling work, the reality check is the issue of social fit. The “stinginess of nature” means that unpleasant jobs will always need to be done. We cannot survive by only doing pleasant tasks that are intellectually stimulating and fulfilling. These are very valuable reality checks that we all ignore at our own peril.

What’s murky, however, is the extent to which we have to accept the reigning vision of social needs instead of re-shaping this vision to be more just. This is particularly problematic in the area of traditional work standards. Muirhead forcefully focuses personal fit on the non-material aspects of work. In fact, the evolution (or degeneration) of the Protestant work ethic to the current pecuniary emphasis on work as supporting consumption is roundly criticized for losing work’s intrinsic purpose. It’s unclear then where standards like minimum wages, health insurance, and nondiscrimination emerge—standards that Muirhead admits in passing are also critical for just work. Along these lines, for a book so firmly rooted in the intersection of human dignity, political theory, and the employment relationship, the omission of human rights instruments from the analysis is also surprising.

Just Work simultaneously reveals the power and the frustration of scholarship on work. Scholars from many disciplines work on questions of work. This can be very stimulating as we learn from others with very different perspectives. But with different frames of reference and terminology, communication and cross-fertilization can be difficult. To an industrial relations scholar, Just Work’s omission of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, John R. Commons, and others who championed the moral element of work and analyzed the importance of employee voice and self-actualization misses a rich opportunity for the further development of critical ideas. Yet to an industrial relations scholar, the book’s reliance on Plato, John Stuart Mill, John Rawls, Betty Friedan, and Alasdair MacIntyre is freshly provocative and provides new ways to look at traditional employment issues. Just Work is poised to re-insert work back into political theory scholarship, but I hope this future scholarship is increasingly integrated into other perspectives that study work.

Some readers might also be frustrated by Muirhead’s lack of direct discussion of solutions to the dilemmas of work. The disapproval of assembly lines, sweatshops, the hyper-flexible workplace, and a lack of living wage is clear, and the natural next step is to take the author’s framework of personal and social fit and translate it into action for policy makers, unions, human resources professionals, and other actors. For example, one implication seems to be that unions should better promote a balance between social and personal fit. This might be achieved by what I call “employee empowerment unionism” in Employment with a Human Face in which unions negotiate the parameters and provide support for increased individual decision-making in the workplace. Many such implications lie just below the surface of Just Work but drawing them out is not its purpose. Rather, Just Work is successful at fulfilling a more profound goal by showing the fundamental importance of personal and social fit for understanding the meaning of work in modern democracies.

While well-written, Just Work is not an easy read. Nor should it be. Muirhead’s analysis of the tensions—some might say contradictions—inherent in the nature and meaning of work is very thoughtful and realistic. As I also argue in my book The Thought of Work (Cornell University Press, 2009), work is complicated. Freedom can promote fit, or restrict it. Personal and social fit both support and undermine each other. Work should be valued highly so that human dignity is respected, but not so highly that dignity only stems from work. This is not the place for slogans, rhetoric, or simplistic one-size-fits-all solutions. The persistent reader will be greatly rewarded. Just read Just Work.

Thoughts on a New Book, Just Work

Forty years ago, Studs Terkel published his famous book Working in which over 130 individuals provided their own narratives of their work. By letting workers speak for themselves in their own words with their own emphases, Working was and remains a powerful and influential testament to the multi-faceted nature of work that affects nearly everyone in deeply personal ways. Like many others, Working clearly impacted Grant Michelson and Shaun Ryan, two Australia-based New Zealanders who have written about varied aspects of work, and through their book Just Work they seek “to celebrate the significance of, and broadly continue in, the traditions established by Working” (p. 2). Just Work therefore parallels Working in presenting a variety of worker narratives about their work in their own words. Specifically, 30 individuals from a diverse set of occupations in Australia voice the good, the bad, and the ugly about their work in accounts that are nothing if not authentic, right down to the Aussie slang (which is “grouse”). 

A useful aspect of this narrative approach is that each reader can make their own interpretations and identify themes of interest. The diverse meanings of work, not only across but also within individuals, resonated with me based on the multi-faceted conceptual nature of work that have written about. As I argue in my book The Thought of Work, work is not a source of income or fulfillment or stress or identity, it can be a complex source of income and fulfillment and stress and identity and more, in practice and in theory. Beyond this, it was striking that the best and worst things at work are all of us. When relationships with co-workers, managers, subordinates, and customers are good, these are frequently cited as the aspects of work that individuals found the most rewarding and engaging. In the words of Robert the migration agent, “any job is a good job if you are working with good people” (p. 115). But when these relationships were poor, they were frequently cited as the elements of work that were the most frustrating. David, a phone salesperson had just quit his job the day before his interview because he “was starting to hate people” (p. 72). Scholars and professionals in employment relations and human resources have long asserted that people issues are of central importance in the workplace, and these accounts bring this to life. But they further underscore the impact that each of us as individuals can have on others in the workplace, whether as workers or as customers.

Another theme I saw is that how work fits with a worker’s life situation, goals, and values at a particular time is very important. This goes beyond the well-recognized issue of work-family balance to become a recognition that personal goals, whether they be around schooling, family, community, or other spheres of life, fundamentally shape how individuals think about work and influence what they see as work that is fitting. So even individuals in the same job can view their work differently (Gordon Cooke, Jimmy Donaghey, and Isik Zeytinoglu  recently identified this same phenomenon in their 2013 Human Relations article, “The Nuanced Nature of Work Quality: Evidence from Rural Newfoundland and Ireland”). Australia also provides a rich context for understanding immigrants’ experiences with their work, and the multiple narratives from those born outside of Australia reveal many of the same influences, hopes, and frustrations. I’m sure other readers will find other themes that speak to them.

Given the prominence of Working, both in the field and in this book, comparisons are inevitable. Like in Working, Just Work brings workers’ voices to us in authentic, powerful ways. Working, however, has four times the number of interviews. While this makes Just Work more accessible than its 700-page predecessor, it does limit the scope of the occupations represented. In particular, while I applaud the authors for the explicit recognition that work can be unpaid, all of the interviews, by the authors’ own admission, pertain to paid employment. The inclusion of some narratives by unpaid workers could have helped reveal similarities and differences between paid and unpaid work.

Being written by academics, I appreciate that, compared to Working, Just Work devotes more effort in the beginning and end to providing frameworks for thinking about work and the themes that emerge from the narratives. But I think the concluding chapter could have dug deeper. While the authors discuss that the nature of work has changed since Working was published, less attention is devoted to the extent to which worker’s reactions to their work has changed, or not. The authors do note that the narratives generally seem at odds with the theme of work as “a Monday through Friday sort of dying” found in Working. But is this because of differences across time, across space and culture, or other factors? Of course, these are big questions and there are no easy answers. Ultimately, we’ll need to draw our own conclusions, but the authors experienced these interviews firsthand and it would have been nice to hear more of their overall thoughts.

Lastly, the authors also include their own personal narratives about work, though they modestly relegated them to an appendix. Given the personal nature of the 30 interviews, it was nice to see the authors put themselves in this same position. These reflections thereby further add to the feeling of authenticity of the entire book. Indeed, the authors’ own stories have inspired me to make a future blog post consist of my own narrative reflecting upon my own work experiences. Perhaps it will inspire you to do something similar?

Grant Michelson and Shaun Ryan (2014) Just Work: Narratives of Employment in the 21st Century (Palgrave Macmillan).

Making Work Meaningful...By Listening to Me??

One element of making work meaningful to employees is helping them see how their work fits into broader organizational goals and accomplishments. Indeed, a lack of deeper connections for one's work is part of Karl Marx's argument way back in 1844 that capitalism creates worker alienation, though Marx typically isn't recognized as the basis for contemporary human resource management! In any case, in December I had an opportunity to present my research to interested staff here in the Carlson School of Management. This is part of a professional development series that aims to help connect staff to the school's faculty and their research. I truly enjoyed this opportunity, and I hope that in some small way I contributed toward making work more meaningful here in my own organization. The topic of my presentation was, unsurprisingly, "The Thought of Work," but I also try to answer the burning question "What the heck is industrial relations?" If you want to watch my presentation, it's archived here.