Homo Economicus Sings the Blues, And We All Suffer For It

 In last month’s post, I contrasted the positive, intrinsic view of work that underlies high-road HR strategies with the negative, instrumental view of work frequently seen in songs about work. Continuing with the theme of how we think about work, varying perspectives on work often correspond with assumptions about work embedded in different academic disciplines. In general terms, economics treats work as a commodity and as a lousy activity endured because of a need for money, whereas psychology focuses on personal fulfillment, and sociology on social norms.

Most songs on work are consistent with how most economists think about work. And thus, work songs are a revealing way to illustrate the dominant assumptions about work inherent in economic analyses—work as a commodity, as a pain cost, and as an opportunity cost.

In a commodity conceptualization of work, labor is an abstract quantity of productive value governed by the impersonal forces of supply and demand. We can see this reflected in songs that lament factory closings due to cheaper labor elsewhere, such as Billy Joel’s Allentown or Harry Chapin’s The Day They Closed the Factory Down:

      So they're moving somewhere else now
      With their cloths and fabric press
      They found themselves another town
      Where they'll make shirts for less

In terms of the actual work experience, the mainstream economics view of work is that it’s the opposite of something that brings you positive utility. That is, the direct experience of work makes you worse off. Traditionally this was seen as a pain cost. We can see this reflected in songs about long hours, hot and dangerous working conditions, or, as in Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5, bad bosses and disrespect:

      Workin' 9 to 5, what a way to make a livin'
      Barely gettin' by, it's all takin' and no givin'
      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
 
      They let your dream, just watch 'em shatter
      You're just a step on the boss man's ladder
      But you got dreams he'll never take away

In modern economic theorizing, work doesn’t have to be inherently bad (a pain cost), but working can still make you worse off it reduces the amount of time you can spend doing things that you find more enjoyable (an opportunity cost):

      It's always better on holiday, so much better on holiday
      That's why we only work when we need the money
      It's always better on holiday, so much better on holiday
      That's why we only work when we need the money
      (from Jacqueline by Franz Ferdinand)

So why work? To earn money to live. That is, Workin’ for a Livin’ in the words of Huey Lewis & The News. But don’t oversimplify and take this to mean that economics predicts that people won’t work hard. Rather, economics predicts that people will work hard when the pay is worth it, as captured by Gretchen Wilson’s Work Hard, Play Harder.

While songs can usefully illustrate these perspectives on work that underlie economic approaches to work, perhaps they run the risk of normalizing these approaches. If the nature of work is seen as beyond our control, then instead we might just focus on Working for the Weekend. But there ought to be better ways. Partly this entails increasing our demands for better work. But we also need to dig deeper. In particular, making work into a commodity in our collective imaginations dehumanizes it, reducing workers to productive inputs tracked in headcount analyses and income statements. This sterile conceptualization is not innocuous—in contrast, it’s a key conceptual step towards exploitation. That is, it’s harder for leaders to exploit workers who they see as human rather than as numbers in spreadsheet.

      I work my back till it's racked with pain
      The boss can't even recall my name
      I show up late and I'm docked, it never fails
      I feel like just another, spoke in a great big wheel
      Like a tiny blade of grass in a great big field
 
      To workers I'm just another drone
      To Ma Bell I'm just another phone
      I'm just another statistic on a sheet
      To teachers I'm just another child
      To IRS I'm another file
      I'm just another consensus on the street
      (from Feel Like a Number by Bob Seger)

Also, economics perspectives on work implicitly or explicitly emphasize individual free choice. If you don’t like your job, tell your boss to Take this Job and Shove It, and then find something better. But we need to recognize that labor markets don’t always work as nicely as mainstream economics wants to assume. There can be power differential in societal institutions and discrimination. Not everyone has the same options. Not everyone is rewarded fairly. Economic theorizing on work (e.g., personnel economics), and mainstream economics more generally, often sanitizes this by ascribing different outcomes to different personal choices or productive characteristics rather the systemic inequalities.

Unsurprisingly given their roots in real life experiences, there are songs that can remind us of the imbalances that workers must navigate. Class-based inequalities are evident in Worker's Song by Dropkick Murphys:

      We're the first ones to starve, we're the first ones to die
      The first ones in line for that pie in the sky
      And we're always the last when the cream is shared out
      For the worker is working when the fat cat's about

Margo Price’s Pay Gap and Cher’s Working Girl address gender inequality. And Nina Simone’s Backlash Blues starkly reminds us of race-based inequalities and discrimination which must not be overlooked:

      You give me second class houses
      And second class schools
      I know you think that all colored people
      Are just second class fools
      Mr. Backlash, I’m gonna leave you
      With the blues, yes I am
 
      When I try to find a job
      To earn a little cash
      All you got to offer
      Is your mean old white backlash
      But the world is big
      Big and bright and round
      And it’s full of other folks like me
      Who are black, yellow, beige, and brown
      Mr. Backlash, I’m gonna leave you
      With the blues, yes I am

In conclusion, then, the economics assumption about work being lousy is richly illustrated in a wide range of songs about work. But as a society, we should challenge why work is so lousy while also questioning the implications of other longstanding hallmarks of traditional economic thought—seeing work as a commodity, defaulting to assumptions of competitive markets, and embracing self-interest as the fabric of societal interactions. Homo economicus has many reasons to be singing the blues, and we all pay the price.

The Divergence Between Work Songs and High-Road HR Strategies

Different HR strategies for managing people are founded, at least in part, on different ways in which we think about work. Is work simply an input into a productive process that’s tracked and traded like other commodities? Or something bad that individuals do primarily for income? Or a source of personal satisfaction? A way to serve others? A way to fulfill societal expectations?

Low-road, market-drive HR strategies are based on the depersonalized commodity view, incentive-based HR strategies are rooted in seeing work as a necessary evil to earn income, and high-engagement or commitment strategies are based on views of work that see the potential for personal and broader satisfaction. 

Ultimately, work is exceptionally complex and multi-layered, so I think it’s best to see these alternative perspectives as all being relevant—that is, we should see them as complements rather than competitors. But just for fun, I’ve noticed that it’s very difficult to find songs (or comics or other forms of pop culture) that celebrate any joys of working. One of the only songs with a positive view of work I can find is The Happy Working Song, which is from the Disney movie Enchanted (as an aside, I’ve seen Everything is Awesome from the Lego Movie suggested as a positive work song, but it might really be about conformity—and in either case, we’re still left with positive work songs only in kids movies).  

In sharp contrast, there are many, many songs about work being commodified, lousy, and something to avoid, from old folk ballads, blues, and disco to 2020s post-grunge with lots of genres in between. That is, work through the lens of songs definitely favors the economics views of work. Indeed, these views can be illustrated by a single artist: Bruce Springsteen.

In The River, we can see work as a commodity left in the hands of market forces:

      I got a job working construction
      For the Johnstown Company
      But lately there ain't been much work
      On account of the economy
      Now all them things that seemed so important
      Well mister they vanished right into the air
      Now I just act like I don't remember
      Mary acts like she don't care

In Factory, we see the daily punishment and toil of work:

      Early in the morning factory whistle blows
      Man rises from bed and puts on his clothes
      Man takes his lunch, walks out in the morning light
      It's the working, the working, just the working life
 
      Through the mansions of fear, through the mansions of pain
      I see my daddy walking through them factory gates in the rain
      Factory takes his hearing, factory gives him life
      The working, the working, just the working life

And hot (or cold) repetitive toil is evident in Working on the Highway:

      I work for the county out on 95
      All day I hold a red flag and watch the traffic pass me by
      In my head I keep a picture of a pretty little miss
      Someday, mister, I'm gonna lead a better life than this
 
      Working on the highway, laying down the blacktop
      Working on the highway, all day long I don't stop
      Working on the highway, blasting through the bedrock
      Working on the highway, working on the highway

In modern economic thought, work doesn’t need to be directly painful (or boring or stressful or…), it can simply be an opportunity cost. That is, work might be OK, but it’s a costly use of your time if non-work activities are better. We can (sort of) see this in Night, where night-time drag racing is a lot more enjoyable than working (though work here is negative, too):

      You get up every morning at the sound of the bell
      You get to work late and the boss man's giving you hell
      'Til you're out on a midnight run
      Losing your heart to a beautiful one
      And it feels right as you lock up the house
      Turn out the lights and step out into the night

In these Springsteen songs, we can also see the reason for working—to make money to support your family and your more pleasurable pursuits, which again is a theme in many other songs by diverse artists. It’s not a source of deep rewards, as sought by high-road HR strategies.

 We can question whether popular music accurately represents views of work across the population—maybe the mournful aspects of work just make for better songs—but the extent to which these songs resonate with so many people should cause us to question the match between the assumptions of high-road HR strategies and how significant numbers of people actually experience their work. Though by itself, this can't answer the question of whether high-road HR strategies are fundamentally flawed (e.g., due to inherent conflicts of interest between workers and employers) or are simply difficult to achieve in practice.

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

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).

Conceptualizing Work: A History of Powerful Ideas

What is work? Why do we work? How is work valued? These questions are fundamental to any human society. Without a written record, we cannot know with certainty how the earliest humans thought about work, but the importance of sharing food and other resources means that prehistoric work embodied at least an element of serving a community's needs rather than just the needs of an individual and his or her immediate family.

With the emergence of social differentiation in hierarchical societies, work continued to be a way to serve others, especially the ruling elite, as was the case for slaves in the ancient Greek city-states and for the conscripted peasants building the Egyptian pyramids or working for the emperors of the Tang dynasty. By claiming the divine right of kings, working to serve the elite was legitimized by portraying this work as serving the gods. And later, God. Within the early Christian church, work was seen as a way to serve God's kingdom by preventing idleness (and therefore sin), providing for one's family, and supporting charitable giving. But given the medieval power of the church and visions of royalty and feudal lords as varying extensions of God, doing the (Holy) Lord's work was often inseparable from doing the (feudal) lord's work in concept and in practice.

In indigenous societies, providing for the community is frequently seen as an activity in harmony with nature. But when one works many hours a day to slave for a ruler, make corvée payments to a lord, to tithe to a church, or to provide for more than a modest standard of living for one's household, then it is more difficult to see work as being in harmony with nature. Rather, work becomes a struggle to extract more than one needs from nature, and the idea of work is thus seen as a curse. This is seen quite starkly in the Judeo-Christian tradition in which humans are cursed with hard work "by the sweat of your brow" (Genesis 3:19) as punishment for human imperfection and weakness. In a related vein, the elite classes of some societies propagate an ideology in which lousy work is the curse of the lower classes. The caste system in India is rooted in a belief that it is the will of the gods that specific castes must endure lousy work. And Aristotle reasoned that nature creates humans of varying intellectual abilities such that the intellectually inferior are naturally suited to be slaves whose role in life is to carry out menial tasks. In contemporary societies, the marginalization of some tasks as "women's work" or fit only for minorities or immigrants can similarly reflect a belief in a natural social hierarchy, and the resulting cursed nature of work for members of these groups.

Thinking of work as a curse or as serving others are arguably the dominant pre-modern conceptualizations of work. While these powerful ideas continue to have relevance today--whether in the form of an unquestioned acceptance of work as a necessary evil, modern slavery, or serving others through volunteering--the ascendancy of the individual in Western thought between the 1500s and 1800s brought new complexities to the thinking on work. In particular, the importance of the individual in modern Western thought yielded multiple conceptualizations of work as an activity that serves the individual rather than someone else.

First, work can be seen as a source of individual freedom. In Western anthropocentric societies, nature is something to be mastered for human needs. An increasingly scientific and decreasingly religious view of the natural world during the Middle Ages made nature seem conquerable. Work, then, became seen as mastery over nature, a way to create freedom from the vagaries of the natural world and unlock humans from the slavish pursuit of the food and shelter needed to survive. Today, we frequently think of this freedom as creativity.

In the 17th century, work also came to be seen as freedom not only from nature, but also from the coercion of others when John Locke asserted that labor establishes ownership of private property. This political liberalism thinking then laid a foundation for economic liberalism--if work is seen as one's own property, then you are free to sell your labor services for pay if desired. And thanks to Adam Smith's influence in the 18th century, work came to be viewed as an economic commodity--an abstract quantity of productive effort that has economic value traded in economic markets.

And once people achieved the liberty to trade their work--conceptually as well as in practice--work became seen as various forms of free activity distinguished by differing views on the nature of human self-interest. In mainstream economic thought, human behavior is characterized by a quest for the consumption of goods, services, and leisure, so work is thought of as an activity to support this quest. Work itself is not desirable--either because it is stressful and arduous, as was articulated by early economists such as W. Stanley Jevons, or because it is less fun than leisure as assumed by mainstream economists today--but is tolerated in order to directly or indirectly procure goods, services, and leisure. This is the often-unstated intellectual foundation for using hefty incentive payment schemes to motivate investment bankers, corporate executives, and many others.

If human self-interest is instead characterized by needs for achievement, mastery, self-esteem, and self-worth, then work can instead be thought of as a source of personal fulfillment and psychological well-being. In the 19th century, the ideal of achieving joy in work was reflected in the writings of the French utopian philosopher Charles Fourier and the French author Émile Zola, and was championed to the greatest extent by Karl Marx's exaltation of work as the highest form of human activity. In contemporary scholarship in psychology and related fields, this ideal of joy has largely been reduced to job satisfaction. Modern human resource management is also rooted is this thinking of work as personal fulfillment because effective human resource management practices are assumed to be those that satisfy workers' psychological needs and therefore enhance job performance.

The material self-interest emphasized in mainstream economics or the desire for intrinsic rewards emphasized in psychology fail to recognize that work is embedded in complex social phenomena in which individuals seek approval, status, sociability, and power. The social context also provides constraints, whether in the form of social norms that define the boundaries of acceptable behaviors or work roles, or in the form of power relations that define access to resources. This gives rise to another important way of thinking about work--that is, work as a set of human interactions that are experienced in and shaped by social networks, social norms and institutions, and socially-constructed power relations.

Beyond satisfaction and social approval, human self-interest might also be the search for an understanding of who we are and where we fit into the broader world. In this way, work can be thought of as a source of identity. This can occur on several levels, such as through biographical information that includes descriptors related to one's work, by identification with various groups such as occupation, employer, and class, or through the self-presentation and social feedback that comes from making our work roles public. At perhaps the deepest level, work can be seen as a fundamental aspect of creating a human identity not as individuals or classes, but as a species. This centrality of work for humanness was most famously advanced by Marx's argument that "In creating an objective world by his practical activity, in working-up inorganic nature, man proves himself a conscious species being, i.e., as a being that treats the species as its own essential being" (1844: 76-77). It is from this belief that self-directed work is the essential quality of being human that Marx further argued that the commodification of work under capitalism causes alienation, and then led him and others to search for alternatives to capitalism.

Marx, of course, was not the only critic of the conceptual commodification of work that has occurred over the past three centuries or so. Feminist scholars and activists challenge the prioritizing of paid employment and the devaluing of reproductive work that comes from the equation of work to the production of economic commodities. Rather, it is argued, care work--the physical, cognitive, and emotional effort required to attend to and maintain others--should be thought of as "real work" instead of purely instinctual activities done out of love and not worthy of workers' compensation, social security, recognition of full economic value in divorce proceedings, and other culturally-produced expressions of value.

Heterodox economists, sociologists, philosophers, industrial relations scholars, theologians, human rights activists, and others also reject the thinking of labor as a commodity that treats workers simply as factors of production. Rather, it argued that workers are human beings and are therefore entitled to rights and standards of dignity and self-determination irrespective of what the market provides. This way of thinking is a descendant of the 19th century concerns with wage slavery, but the contemporary focus is on adding labor standards to make work consistent with citizenship rather than rejecting paid employment as incompatible with the independence required for full, participatory citizenship. This contemporary perspective, then, forms the intellectual foundation for labor market regulations that provide for minimum wages, mandated benefits, the promotion of labor unions, and other labor standards.

So what is work? Why do we work? How is work valued? The importance of these fundamental questions is reflected by the range of historical figures and intellectual giants who have wrestled with and shaped societal views on them--philosophers Aristotle and Confucius, sociologists Max Weber and Émile Durkheim, economists Adam Smith and Karl Marx, political scientist John Locke, psychologists Sigmund Freud and Abraham Maslow, theologians St. Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, and John Calvin, management experts Frederick Winslow Taylor and Mary Parker Follett, feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and others. As I illustrate my book The Thought of Work, the answers to these questions matter. Thoughts on work are not simply alternative perspectives on work; rather, how work is seen actively structures our understandings of and our experiences with work by providing frames of references, norms, values, and attitudes toward work that actors translate into specific practices.

Over two thousand years ago in ancient Rome, Virgil's poem The Georgics included the sentence:

labor omnia vicit
improbus et duris urgens in rebus egestas.

This has been popularized as "hard work conquers all" and labor omnia vicit is therefore the motto of schools, cities, labor unions, and even sports teams around the world. But this passage is a microcosm of the entire domain of work--the translation "hard work conquers all" is a gross oversimplification, and not the only possible interpretation. The phrase can be translated and interpreted negatively as "everything was toil, relentless toil, urged on by need" (Ferry 2005: 13), or more positively as "wicked effort has overwhelmed all things and oppressive need" (Putnam 1979: 33). And the fullest interpretations depend on the broader context of Virgil's milieu, and yield nuanced meanings in which work is intimately connected to the human condition, material progress, social beliefs, and visions of the good life as seen through the interpreter's eyes, and that also recognize the phrase itself as a beautiful piece of artistic work. Such is the nature of work--a complex, fully human activity that is experienced in many ways, that can only truly be understood by embracing a multiplicity of perspectives, and that can only be improved by recognizing the deep importance of how we think about work for how work is structured in practice.

References
Ferry, David (2000) The Georgics of Virgil: A Translation (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux).
Marx, Karl (1844) Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan (Prometheus Books, 1988).
Putnam, Michael C.J. (1979) Virgil's Poem of the Earth: Studies in the Georgics (Princeton University Press).
Note: This post original appeared on Berfrois.

Disposing of Workers, Flexible Work Practices, or Outdated Views on Work?

With many people still buzzing about Yahoo's termination of its telecommuting program, Best Buy has just announced the end of its Results Only Work Environment (ROWE) in which only job performance for corporate employees mattered, not time worked or time spent in the office. Like Yahoo last week, Best Buy attributes its decision to a need for greater collaboration among employees. According to a Best Buy spokesperson, "Bottom line, it's 'all hands on deck' at Best Buy and that means having employees in the office as much as possible to collaborate and connect on ways to improve our business" (Star Tribune, March 5, 2013). But there might be something deeper and more troubling at work (no pun intended).

According to a Star Tribune article, last November Best Buy CEO Hubert Joly indicated that he aimed to restore accountability and said "You need to feel disposable as opposed to indispensable." This is a very frank and revealing statement. The implication is that self-directed employees, as those working under Best Buy's ROWE program or Yahoo's telecommuting policy, have it too easy. Workers need to feel the threat of being replaced in order to be motivated to perform at a high level.

This is certainly not a new attitude towards workers. Indeed, this was arguably the dominant approach to supervision in the steel mills, factories, and other industries 100 years ago. Workers were motivated by threats, verbal abuse, sometimes physical abuse, and a constant reminder that there were other workers massed at the factory gate poised to take their jobs. This has been called the drive system, and served as a rallying point for labor union leaders, reformers, progressive corporate leaders, and others to humanize the employment relationship (or in more radical circles, to replace capitalism with a system that treated workers with greater dignity).

One of the intellectual foundations of this perspective is the view that work is a lousy activity that we only endure to earn income. Without strong economic incentives or close supervision and monitoring, workers are believed to slack off and not work very hard. This perspective discounts intrinsic rewards, feelings of service, desires for a healthy identity, and other non-economic motivations for working hard. This perspective frequently goes hand-in-hand with an elitist view in which those higher in the organization are assumed to better know how work really should be done.

So to return to the termination of the flexible, self-directed employment practices at Yahoo and Best Buy, maybe the corporate leaders backing these decisions are sincere in their belief that the workers need to be physically present in the office to improve collaboration. But statements by these same leaders saying that workers "need to feel disposable as opposed to indispensable" suggest a more enduring motivation for the changes--that is, a perceived need to closely supervise workers, impose management's "one best way" of working, and drive them to work harder--that are rooted in longstanding views that degrade work and workers. Unfortunately, these views all too often seem indispensable, but they should be disposable.

UPDATE
In a March 17 Star Tribune commentary piece, Mr. Joly indicated that his remarks were misconstrued: "I was not talking about our employees; I was talking about myself being dispensable....Leaders need to remind themselves that they and their identities are distinct from their position and that they will leave someday, with the organization going on without them. That is why it is so critical that good leaders focus not on preserving their job but serving the organization and preparing the next generation to assume their role."

In that same commentary, he also explains the termination of the ROWE program: "This program was based on the premise that the right leadership style is always delegation....Well, anyone who has led a team knows that delegation is not always the most effective leadership style....Depending on the skill and will of the individual, the right leadership style may be coaching, motivating or directing rather than delegating. A leader has to pick the right style of leadership for each employee, and it is not one-size-fits-all, as the ROWE program would have suggested."

An online comment posted in response to this is quite insightful: "As a 15-year employee of Best Buy, and one that helped launch ROWE within the corporate campus, Mr. Joly's comments show that he truly does not understand what the Results Only Work Environment program is. He refers to it as a "one-size-fit-all" approach and seems to believe that it is only about "delegation". Neither one of these are even remotely true....He does correctly state that there is a failure of leadership execution. That is the real challenge of ROWE. You have to have strong leadership that fully understands the work that their team is responsible to produce. Too many Best Buy leaders don't understand what their teams do, nor could they step in and do it themselves. That gap makes managing and leading a team effectively, impossible."

To the extent that this leadership failure is rooted in elitist views in which those higher in the organization are assumed to (a) being doing more important work and (b) better know how work really should be done, then we are right back to longstanding views that degrade work and workers, irrespective of whether Mr. Joly's specific words were misconstrued.

Invisible Labor: The Eye Does Not See What the Mind Does Not Know

Earlier this month I had the pleasure of participating in a very stimulating conference on invisible labor hosted by Washington University's Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Work and Social Capital. My contribution was reflected in an old adage that states that the eye does not see what the mind does not know.

We only see and value work when it conforms to our mental models of what work is. In the public imagination, why is work less visible than other key aspects of human life? Because dominant ways of thinking about work reduce it to a curse or to a commodified, instrumental activity that supports consumption. So we do not think of work as having deeper value, and therefore we overlook work in favor of other human activities. Similarly, why are certain forms of work invisible? Because when we think of work in certain ways, especially as a commodified, instrumental activity, then forms of work that are thought of as different from or only weakly fulfilling these dominant conceptualizations of work are devalued and rendered invisible.

In these ways, then, how we think about and conceptualize work have real consequences for what is seen and valued as work. Unfortunately, conceptualizations of work are frequently narrowly-conceived and typically unstated. To better understand issues of invisible work and questions of what forms of work are valued and why, it is important to explicitly consider the diverse ways in which work can be conceptualized.

I have written about these conceptualizations in my book The Thought of Work, and in earlier blog posts (e.g., What is Work, and Why Does It Matter?), so I will summarize my ideas in the following table:

Work as...	Definition	Implications for Invisible Labor
1. A Curse	An unquestioned burden necessary for human survival or maintenance of the social order.	All work is devalued; other human activities are more important and receive more attention.
2. Freedom	A way to achieve independence from nature or other humans, and to express human creativity.	Work that fails to achieve economic independence or lacks creativity is less likely to be valued and visible.
3. A Commodity	An abstract quantity of productive effort that has tradable economic value.	Visible work is exchanged in primary labor markets; high pay required to indicate economic value.
4. Occupational Citizenship	An activity pursued by human members of a community entitled to certain rights.	All forms of work should be valued more highly with rights provided to all types of workers.
5. Disutility	A lousy activity tolerated to obtain goods and services that provide pleasure.	Work that does not support high levels of consumption is less likely to be valued and visible.
6. Personal  Fulfillment	Physical and psychological functioning that (ideally) satisfies individual needs.	Work that does not provide intrinsic rewards is less likely to be valued and visible.
7. A Social Relation	Human interaction embedded in social norms, institutions, and power structures.	Invisibility of work reflects socially-created institutions and power structures.
8. Caring for Others	The physical, cognitive, and emotional effort required to attend to and maintain others.	Though frequently invisible, caring work should be valued as real work.
9. Identity	A method for understanding who you are and where you stand in the social structure.	All forms of work should be valued more highly and more visible.
10. Service	The devotion of effort to others, such as God, household, community, or country.	Though frequently invisible, service towards others should be valued as real work.

By making these conceptualizations explicit, we have a better foundation for thinking more clearly about how we define work and for gaining a deeper understanding of why all work or some forms work are invisible. By broadening our thinking on work, this framework can further provide a foundation for crafting inclusive definitions of work that recognize not only the deep importance of work for individuals and society, but also the value of diverse forms of human activity that should be fully embraced as work rather than overlooked or marginalized. In short, in order for the eye to recognize wider forms of work, we need to train the mind to think more broadly and deeply about work.

The Roots of Words for Work

An article in yesterday's Guardian correctly revealed the negative associations in language that have long been associated with words for work:

Words indicating labour in most European languages originate in an imagery of compulsion, torment, affliction and persecution. The French word travail (and Spanish trabajo), like its English equivalent, are derived from the Latin trepaliare - to torture, to inflict suffering or agony. The word peine, meaning penalty or punishment, also is used to signify arduous labour, something accomplished with great effort. The German Arbeit suggests effort, hardship and suffering; it is cognate with the Slavonic rabota (from which English derives "robot"), a word meaning corvee, forced or serf labour.

Unfortunately, experiencing work in arduous ways and seeing it as something that we have to do rather than as something we choose to do is all too frequent, not only in today's society, but in many societies stretching back to ancient Greece and presumably before. But this shouldn't be the entire story.

While travail is rooted in torture, another French word for work, œuvre, comes from the Latin opus relating to accomplishment and creativity. The word work itself is rooted in the ancient Indo-European word werg meaning, simply, "to do." Etymologically, therefore, work is related to energy ("in or at work"), lethargy ("without work"), allergy ("oppositional work"), synergy ("working together"), liturgy ("public work") and organ ("a tool" as in "working with something").

Words for work and related to work, then, need not only have negative connotations and, in the words of the Guardian article, "tortured roots." Work can also be taken as a neutral term, or in positive ways, as in a work of art.

More importantly, this should be more than an esoteric, intellectual exercise. Rather, the linguistic features of work reflect the realities of human work--it is embedded in many elements of the human experience and occurring in many ways. Yes, it can be negative and it is something that often needs to be done when we'd prefer to be doing something else. But it need not always be so negative. As a society, we need to re-connect with the deep meanings of work not only for individuals but also for democracy, develop new norms that value work that is not rewarded by the labor market, and create institutions for improving how work is experienced.

Celebrating Work...By Not Working?

On Thanksgiving, we give thanks. On Memorial Day, we memorialize those who have sacrificed for us. On religious holidays, we worship. But today, Labor Day, we celebrate work by NOT working. Therein lies the complexities of work. It's important enough to celebrate. Yet in an odd twist of irony, we celebrate through avoidance.

There are many reasons to want to work less rather than more. Work can be a four-letter word. It can be physically, mentally, and emotionally stressful. It can be dangerous, or just plain dull. For centuries, then, work has been seen as a curse. In the opening verses of the Bible, humans are cursed with hard work as God's punishment for human imperfection. There is a long history of using work as the state's punishment of criminals, dissidents, and enemies. Aristotle viewed work as interfering with the desired activities of citizens, and today work commonly conflicts with more desirable pursuits such as spending time with family and friends, pursuing a hobby, or simply just relaxing.

So why work? We obviously work to survive--directly by caring for others and by producing food and other necessities, indirectly by earning money that can be used to obtain these things. But by only seeing work as an arduous means of survival and money, it becomes, in the words of Mark Twain, "a necessary evil to be avoided" that we prefer others do for us. In economic theorizing, work is viewed as a lousy activity endured solely to earn income, and thus corporations and sports teams use incentive packages to elicit effort, old-fashioned supervisors and new technologies are used to monitor workers to prevent shirking, and unemployment and welfare benefits are reduced so that the unemployed and impoverished have greater motivation for enduring the burdens of work experienced by the "productive members of society."

As a result, it is easy to lose sight of why work is cause for celebration. When structured appropriately, work can be a key source of personal fulfillment. It can promote physical health and psychological well-being by satisfying human needs for purpose, achievement, mastery, self-esteem, and self-worth. On an even deeper level, our work helps us and others make sense of who we are and is thus a source of identity; hopefully not our only source of identity, but an important one nevertheless.

When we work, we also create, care, and serve others. We free ourselves from the slavish pursuit of food and shelter, and build culture in a harsh natural world. We expend the physical, cognitive, and emotional energy necessary for raising children and caring for loved ones. Work provides the critical means for serving our communities and nations, whether rooted in humanitarianism, patriotism, or a desire to serve God's kingdom. Even though frequently unpaid, these forms of work merit celebrating. Unfortunately, these important forms of work are frequently devalued by the tendency to only see work as a traded commodity and to determine the worth of work by the salary it commands.

In these and other ways, work is fundamentally important. When we work, we experience our biological, psychological, economic, and social selves. Work locates us in the world, helps us and others make sense of who we are, and determines our access to material and social resources. It is time to reevaluate how we think about work, and by extension, what forms of work are valued or devalued, what defines acceptable employer practices or working conditions, whether there is a need for institutional safeguards, and who is able to craft a positive, healthy identity from their work. Work is too important to be dismissed as a curse, treated as a just another commodity, or seen solely as a source of income. Environmental degradation means that we need to rethink how Western civilization considers work as the domination and mastery of nature. And the need for greater social inclusion of marginalized groups demands a wider embrace of work that goes beyond paid employment.

On Labor Day, the last holiday of the summer, the last thing many people probably want to do is think about work. But that's exactly the problem. We've taken work for granted, and let it become nothing more than the daily grind.

A version of this was published on Labor Day 2011 in the Star Tribune. Read more about different ways of thinking about work, good and bad, in my book The Thought of Work.

How an Economics Thought of Work Influences Research and Practice

Much has been written about the changing nature of work, but frequently overlooked is the more fundamental question of what is work in a conceptual sense. This is a troubling oversight because unstated definitions of work shape research and practice. As an example, mainstream economic thought implicitly sees work as a lousy activity tolerated only to obtain goods, services, and leisure that provide utility. Early economists saw work as a painful physical or mental exertion while modern economists are more likely to simply assume that whatever the actual nature of work, leisure is more desirable. In either case, work itself is assumed to reduce utility. So why work? To be able to obtain goods, services, and leisure.

Though frequently unstated, this definition of work underlies economic scholarship on work-related topics. Research on labor supply assumes that workers will sell their labor in the labor market until the additional pain or opportunity cost of additional work hours exceeds the additional utility generated by the additional work income. What about economic research looking at work-related topics within organizations? As recognized by Karl Marx, an employer buys the potential effort of workers and must figure out how to get workers to exert this effort. In the absence of perfect contracting and monitoring, economic scholarship focuses on the role of monetary incentives to elicit effort because work is seen as only tolerated to earn income.

Specifically, using basic economic analysis it is straightforward to show that if an employer pays a fixed wage independent of effort, employees will exert the least amount of effort that avoids being fired--that is, employees are predicted to shirk. This assumption of shirking is so pervasive in economic thought that we ought to call this the First Fundamental Theorem of Personnel and Organizational Economics. As a consequence, economic research is full of rich models analyzing the optimal incentive schemes under various assumptions. For example, if workers are risk neutral then the optimal compensation scheme is to sell the worker a franchise in his or her job for a fixed fee, and allow the worker to capture the entire output s/he generates. This is what happens when a hair salon rents chairs to stylists or a taxi company rents taxis to its drivers and allows the stylists and drivers to keep all of the income they bring in.

When such an arrangement is not feasible, the optimal incentive scheme is a commission-based system with revenues shared equally. But if workers are risk-averse, then this is an excessively-risky compensation scheme, and some combination of a fixed salary and variable pay is better. Another incentive mechanism prominent in the economics literature is tournaments. If a prize such as a promotion is awarded to the employee with the highest performance relative to his or her peers, then the prospect of enhanced income can provide an incentive to exert additional effort.

These theoretical approaches guide a rich empirical literature that analyzes a variety of pay-for-performance and tournament situations. Perhaps the most famous is Edward Lazear's study of an auto glass company that switched from hourly wages to piece-rate pay. A careful examination of worker output before and after this change found that changing to piece-rate compensation increased the average output per worker by 44 percent. Other research has looked at pay-for-performance and tournaments among bus drivers, school teachers, tree planters, fruit pickers, shoe makers, military recruiters, and professional athletes in many sports. This research provides important insights into the importance of monetary desires and alternative uses of one's time when employees decide how much and how hard to work.

Whether or not one agrees with the need for incentives for eliciting work effort, it is important to recognize that a specific definition of work underlies economists' almost religious promotion of incentives--that is, work as a lousy activity tolerated only to obtain goods, services, and leisure. Alternative definitions of work focus attention in other directions. Sociological scholarship on work effort focuses on the role of social norms and social dynamics, while psychological scholarship emphasizes eliciting effort through job satisfaction.

And these definitional choices are not purely intellectual affairs. Rather, they have important consequences for how work is experienced in practice. The widespread use of incentive pay packages is rooted in the economics view of work and fear of shirking. The idea that workers are prone to shirking also justifies hierarchical work structures and deflects pressures for granting workers greater autonomy over their work. In the public policy arena, the economics definition of work yields concerns that unemployment benefits and government welfare programs create incentives for people to withhold their labor supply and avoid working. Unemployment insurance programs therefore provide partial income replacement for a limited duration while
workfare has replaced welfare.

Whatever one's views on work, the definitions of work need to be explicitly identified and debated. Definitions of work matter for how work is analyzed, legislated, adjudicated, and experienced, so these definitions are too important to be taken for granted. It is time to think more carefully about work.

I initially published this as "What is Work?" in the Winter 2012 edition of the American Bar Association's Labor and Employment Law newsletter.