Abstract
For decades, the self-help genre has amassed a repository of bestselling titles championing the merits of seeking passion and fulfillment at work. In her rich and provocative book, The Trouble with Passion: How Searing for Fulfillment at Work Fosters Inequality, Erin A. Cech turns this cultural narrative on its head, marshaling deep sociological inquiry to uncover the unexpected role that passion plays in systematically reproducing inequality. She weaves rich sources of theory and data to deconstruct the “passion principle,” the prioritization of self-expression and fulfillment in one’s career decisions, thus raising a series of inquiries that expose the insidious effects of passion (p. 39). Specifically, three key questions contour the book’s critical agenda: What role do social origins play in determining who benefits and who suffers from the passion principle? How does passion facilitate the acceptance of broader ideologies surrounding meritocracy and neoliberal individualism, thus helping to deny the systemic nature of inequality? Finally, how is passion weaponized to entrench the exploitation of employees under capitalistic work arrangements? Cech answers these inquiries with a compelling mix of theory and data.
The Trouble with Passion stands out for cutting against the grain of conventional wisdom, disrupting cherished beliefs, and rendering visible the hidden mechanisms that reinforce inequality, alienation, and exploitation under capitalism. As such, Cech is not as concerned with passion per se as she is with a broader critique of modern capitalism and its attendant effects. She uses the passion principle merely as “an illuminating example of how self-expressive processes that seem agentic at the individual level can serve as subtle but potentially powerful mechanisms of inequality reproduction” (p. 221; emphasis mine). In so doing, Cech adds to a rich tradition of critical scholarship that seeks to understand how social structures are rigged to reproduce inequality and how the beliefs and ideas that individuals cherish inadvertently help to maintain the status quo.
Cech anchors the theoretical claims of her book with a prodigious use of empirical data. In total, she relies on four broad waves of data. First, she interviews 100 college students from three colleges in the United States, backing this up with a racially representative survey of 522 students. She also conducts follow-up interviews with the original sample of 100 students five years after the first contact, yielding a final sample of 35 students. Second, she interviews 24 career counselors at various colleges and non-college-affiliated institutions. Third, she conducts an original Passion Principle Survey (PPS) with a sample of 1,750 U.S. college-educated workers through the MTurk platform. This sample was representative of the U.S. population on the axes of gender, race/ethnicity, age cohort, and occupation. To enhance its representativity, Cech also relies on data from national surveys, like the 2008 National Survey of the Changing Workforce, the 2016 Merit Principles Survey, and the 1986–2006 General Social Survey. Cech is transparent with her data, providing a detailed account of her methodology in Appendices A to C.
Cech’s book is structured into two halves, with the first providing the necessary definitional, empirical, and historical background for the critical arguments in the second. Chapters 1 and 2 make up the first half, and chapters 3, 4, and 5 make up the second half. In chapter 1, Cech provides a detailed exposition of how individuals interpret passion in the context of their career decisions. Here she outlines the various forms that adherence to the passion principle takes. Notably, Cech’s findings challenge the traditional scholarship on rational-choice and status-attainment models, revealing instead that passion seekers are fully conscious in their preference for the “expression of individualistic identities, values, and interests” (p. 74) over other traditional considerations (e.g., prestige, salary, stability).
In chapter 2, Cech combs finely through the various cultural meanings attached to the passion principle, unearthing two primary reasons why its adherents stand strongly by it: Career aspirants saw passion as either a key motivator for hard work or an indispensable precondition to a good life. The rich qualitative data that Cech employs lend itself extremely well to her goal of building vivid descriptions in these first two chapters. At the close of the first half, the book takes a subtle shift in tone as Cech’s critical leanings become more apparent.
Chapters 3, 4, and 5 all seek to answer the book’s titular question: How does the search for fulfillment at work foster inequality? In what appears, at least to me, to be an analysis drawing heavily upon Bourdieu and Marx, Cech argues that the widespread adherence to the passion principle leads to three pernicious effects, with each effect corresponding to its own chapter. First, it obscures the role of sociocultural resources in determining career choice, leading individuals to misrecognize occupational inequality as a pure function of “idiosyncratic” passions (p. 177)—a process that Cech coins “choicewashing” (p. 166). Second, it “scaffolds” (p. 186) and renders more palatable the ideologies of meritocracy and neoliberal individualism that, as Bourdieu (1998:36) observes, use a “logic of denial” to absolve social inequality from any systemic blame. Third, it enables employers to exploit the surplus value that passionate employees produce on their own volition, thus keeping workers locked into positions of subjugation under capitalistic work arrangements. In the last analysis, Cech argues that “the passion principle is an example of how a taken-for-granted, seemingly benign cultural belief might in fact bolster capitalist processes” (p. 30).
At its best, this book is a sharp attack against conventional wisdom, troubling the widely embraced belief that passion is a natural and unproblematic goal. Cech’s critiques are necessarily disturbing to passion adherents, implicating them in the aggregate for helping to perpetuate inequality, exploitation, and alienation under capitalism. Thus, Cech’s book is at once both disconcerting and compelling.
The Trouble with Passion also stands out for its industrious use of data. The book relies on an impressive array of cross-sectional, longitudinal, experimental, and interview data to ground its claims. That Cech’s theoretical arguments never appear unrealistic or conjectural owes chiefly to the fact that, sometimes within the span of a single page, she succeeds in surfacing the relevant empirical trends, statistics, or quotations to justify her claims. Cech is clearly serious about establishing sociology as an empirical science.
While the book may appear at times to have been written for a nonacademic audience, Cech remains faithful to sociological theory and research. She substantively incorporates the work of major social thinkers like Marx and Bourdieu into her arguments while frequently referencing relevant and contemporary scholarship from the literature.
Importantly, Cech writes with a blend of precision and clarity that renders her book an accessible yet insightful read for “scholars, educators, career aspirants, and workers” (p. xiv). Her arguments rely somewhat heavily on sociological theory, but even these are made penetrable through the use of appropriate metaphors in place of key concepts. For example, the analogy of a springboard is used to signify Bourdieu’s theory of capital (p. 140).
Despite the book’s numerous merits, it appears to leave unaddressed several important debates. Cech assumes in chapter 5, titled “Exploiting Passion? The Demand Side of the Passion Principle,” that regardless of the gains in psychosomatic well-being secured by passionate work (Burke and Fiksenbaum 2009), passion alone can do nothing to alter the objective reality of exploitation that workers find themselves in. In other words, no amount of passion disrupts the fact that work under capitalism is inherently exploitative. In my view, this argument fails to take seriously enough the counterclaim that passion, while appearing to exist on a different plane from exploitation, nevertheless can palliate it. Little room is given to explore this middle ground. Cech appears firmly convinced that passion and exploitation are immiscible, thus leaving insufficient space to explore the claim that passion can stage a legitimate defense against capitalistic exploitation.
This is evident when Cech argues that “paid labor, even when done with passion, is still exploitative” (p. 213; emphasis mine). Her use of the word still connotes a sense of inevitability, for example, that in the last analysis no amount of passion can cause a dent in the immutable reality of capitalistic exploitation. This is strongly echoed in the final paragraphs of her book, where she concedes, “We may find deep personal fulfillment in our work. But we are still workers, still participants in a capitalist labor force” (p. 232; emphasis mine). Given my own partiality to solutions that help individuals cope with the oppression of capitalistic work, notwithstanding the equally important need to find structural and collective solutions, I am of the view that Cech paid insufficient attention to the interaction between passion and exploitation.
Cech could have addressed this gap by attempting to establish a common denominator between passion and exploitation. She points to evidence that passionate workers enjoy higher levels of mental well-being (p. 211), but equally she could have theorized how exploitation also leads to a loss of well-being, perhaps by tracking an estimated loss of income and its attendant deprivation of subjective well-being. Doing so would have allowed her to adjudicate more fairly between passion and exploitation, rather than to treat the two concepts as fundamentally incomparable.
Alternatively, Cech could have dived deeper into her interviews with respondents who were located at the frontiers of passion and exploitation. For example, Cech cites the case of Andrew, who, despite being in debt, having no savings, and struggling to keep his small business (a fitness facility) at breakeven point, was nevertheless fulfilled from being “in charge of that little corner of the world” (p. 148). Respondents like these are potential goldmines for insight into the liminal space between passion and exploitation. Cech could have examined more deeply how respondents like Andrew negotiate their concrete exploitation on the one hand and their subjective fulfillment on the other.
Cech’s firm position that passion cannot destabilize the objective fact of exploitation risks coming across as deterministic or even fatalistic. It suggests that individual workers have little recourse against the inherent oppression of capitalistic work and that the passion they derive is ultimately powerless at changing the broader economic structure. Against this critique, however, Cech has a compelling rejoinder. She argues that “collective rather than individualistic solutions” (p. 31) are needed to tackle the problems of modern capitalistic work. Her final word against the passion principle rests on the belief that it is merely an “individual-level solution to . . . inherently structural issues” (p. 223). Thus, while Cech and I might disagree about the positive potential of passion, we converge in the belief that the capitalism’s largest problems—alienation, exploitation, and inequality—will ultimately require structural solutions involving the collective.
This book is well positioned to spark meaningful discussions in a variety of undergraduate classes. In my view, it is quintessentially suited to courses on the sociology of work, especially if educators cover topics like capitalist critiques of work, passion and fulfillment, and occupational inequality. The book is also relevant to courses on the sociology of inequality, particularly if its syllabi feature the theories of Pierre Bourdieu. Cech’s third chapter illustrates, though sometimes implicitly, the relevance of Bourdieusian concepts, like symbolic misrecognition, reflexivity, and the habitus–field duo. Finally, courses on classical sociological theory could use chapter 5 as an empirical case to discuss Marx’s concepts of exploitation and ideology.
Kleinman and Copp’s (2009) article in Teaching Sociology (“Denying Social Harm: Students’ Resistance to Lessons about Inequality”) serves as an extremely useful guide for educators seeking to incorporate The Trouble with Passion into their classrooms. The notion of a social harm comes up prominently in Cech’s book despite not being explicitly named. Her core argument implicates adherents of the passion principle, exposing how even everyday acts that embrace and propagate this cultural belief contributes, in the aggregate, to oppression and structural inequalities. In other words, what occurs to unreflexive individuals as a neutral and unproblematic cultural schema, for example, “pursuing your passion is good,” can inadvertently produce social harms. Students confronting this fact are unlikely to affirm their complicity in perpetuating social inequalities, much less criticize the beliefs they take for granted. On this matter, Kleinman and Copp provide useful strategies for educators to help their students overcome this resistance. For further ideas on how to help students appreciate the reproduction of inequality at the interactional or social-psychological level, educators may also consult Parrotta and Rusche’s (2011) teaching note.
Kleinman and Copp (2009) identified four common folk beliefs that students hold and how these beliefs impede them from understanding inequality, its causes, and its attendant social harms. First, students believe harm must be enacted with explicit and direct intention. Second, they believe the origins of social harm are found within individual psyches rather than structural systems. Third, students believe that the origins of harm can be traced back to identifiable persons. Finally, and perhaps most relevant to Cech’s book, students believe that the “practices, desires, and opinions they are invested in” cannot be harmful (p. 289). In total, these faulty beliefs prevent students from recognizing that something as macroscopic as social inequality can arise out of seemingly individualistic beliefs like the passion principle.
Kleinman and Copp (2009) offer several suggestions to combat students’ folk beliefs. Of these, two stand out. First, the authors encourage educators to “analyze examples of false power—social arrangements or practices that make members of oppressed groups feel powerful or otherwise in control, but do not offer real power or control” (p. 291). It is possible to interpret the passion principle as a form of false power. Cech has shown that despite the satisfaction it brings, passion can misdirect underprivileged individuals to pursue careers that increase their socioeconomic precarity, thereby entrenching their oppression.
Second, Kleinman and Copp (2009) stress the importance of emphasizing “the relationship between privilege and oppression” by identifying “how unearned advantages accumulate for members of privileged groups, just as disadvantages accumulate for members of oppressed groups” (p. 291). This relates strongly to the third chapter of Cech’s book, where she uncovers how preexisting inequalities in social, cultural, and financial resources, which she terms “springboards” and “safety nets” (p. 135), become reproduced through the ubiquity of the passion principle. Cech is unequivocal about this, arguing that passion seeking “may help entrench patterns of economic privilege and disadvantage that accompanied students when they entered college” (p. 159). Taken together, Kleinman and Copp’s two strategies can be incorporated into the following classroom activity, which has been inspired by Cech’s critical commentary on the question that children are frequently asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” (p. 214).
Instructors should divide the class into two halves, a “working-class” group and an “upper-class” group. Students should then be asked to imagine how a 4-year-old, a 10-year-old, and a 16-year-old might answer the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” based on stereotypical understandings of the dispositions, resources, and information available to people from working- and upper-class groups. After both groups are finished, they should come together and read the opposing group’s responses. The activity should conclude with discussion of the following questions: (1) What resources do upper-class children have over their working-class peers? (2) How do these social class resources shape individual ambitions? (3) Why would the passion principle eventually result in occupational inequalities between the upper- and working-class groups? To conclude, educators can revisit Kleinman and Copp’s (2009) fourth folk belief, that students’ personal beliefs and practices cannot be harmful, and ask students how convinced they are with this belief after having gone through the activity.
The Trouble with Passion is an insightful read for academics, educators, and undergraduates alike. Its pointed critique of the passion principle raises the crucial need to reassess how we talk about work and fulfillment, both as individuals and as a society.