Abstract
A full century has elapsed since Max Weber died. In that time his scholarship has come to provide a requisite point of departure for the study of bureaucracy, the state, religion, and historical sociology more generally, to name but a few domains. In this essay I want to focus on only one of Weber’s contributions—his effort to problematize the meaning of work, which he viewed as harboring a massively consequential shift that functioned—and continues to function—as a central component in the workings of modern capitalist society. This element of Weber’s writings warrants particular attention now, in a time when the “future of work” has become the object of a widening debate, the course of which has the potential to call into question the place that wage labor has come to hold in the governance of the social order itself.
Ritual pronouncements to the contrary, Weberian thinking about work has exhibited an uneven trajectory. During the golden years of industrial sociology, analysts commonly based their conceptual frameworks on Weber’s corpus. But the rise of Marxist approaches toward the labor process consigned Weberian thinking to the margins of academic research, and sociologists of work came to overlook classic texts by such Weberians as Alvin Gouldner, Reinhard Bendix, and Michel Crozier. More recently, however, the limits of a purely materialist analysis have come into view, leading most sociologists of work to acknowledge the importance of the culturally resonant meanings, discourses, and identities that shape economic activity and the place that work holds within contemporary social life. The meaning of work has if anything assumed an increasing importance as the Fordist employment relation has begun to wither away. Now, employers increasingly expect workers not simply to comply with behavioral directives, but also to exhibit normative orientations toward work and self that happily mesh with capital’s needs and the demands of a market-driven society more generally. In its purest form this orientation requires successful workers to embrace the “passion paradigm”—the dictum that demands that you “do what you love” (Rao and Neely 2018)—which one observer has called the “unofficial work mantra of our time” (Tokumitsu 2014; cited in Sandoval 2018). How can we make sense of these newfound meanings of work, which seem to erase any boundary between work and self, and which elevate the ethical compulsion to work to newfound heights?
To address these questions, one naturally returns to Weber’s most famous text, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1992 edition), written in the opening years of the twentieth century. In this text Weber essentially constructed a genealogy of the ethical obligation to work that emanated from the Reformation. The key shift with which Weber is concerned is the historical process that managed to overturn the “natural” or “traditional” conception of work that had defined economic activity for much of human history. Here, the performance of labor was subordinated to the meanings that accompanied other social domains, as the moral economy that surrounded labor defined work as a subtraction from one’s life energies. With the emergence of Lutheran theology, however, there arose an entirely new conception of work that infused sacred meanings and obligations into the performance of one’s laboring activity, now demanding “restless, continuous, systematic work in a worldly calling,” partly to affirm one’s devotion to God, but also to provide an “outward expression of brotherly love” for one’s fellow worshippers. Calvinism deepened this consecration of work, but lent it a harsher and more highly individualized meaning, leaving each worshipper alone before his or her God, creating generalized anxiety about divine election. Though Calvinism condemned the pursuit of riches for its own sake, it portrayed the achievement of prosperity as providing “a sign of God’s blessing” (Weber 1992:116), assuaging the fears of eternal damnation that Calvinism itself provoked. In Weber’s telling, the Protestant ethic provided “the most powerful conceivable lever for the expansion of that attitude toward life which we have here called the spirit of capitalism” (p. 116).
Much of the voluminous debate over Weber’s text has viewed it in empirical terms, fixating on the validity of his analysis. The questions that have most often been asked are whether Weber properly represented the evolution of Protestant theology, how religious sanctions were actually experienced in everyday life, and whether the elective affinity between Protestantism and modern capitalism unfolded across the western landscape in the precise manner that Weber asserted. These are all interesting questions. But we need to view The Protestant Ethic as more than just an expression of historical sociology; it is also an effort to theorize the cultural apparatuses that have governed the performance of wage labor in modern life, and that do so to this day. Arguably, Weber invited precisely such a reading, as in his pithy observation that “the idea of duty in one’s calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs” (p. 124). To be sure, asceticism has lost its hold over social life, and concern with eternal salvation has dwindled away in many parts of the modern world. But the ethical compulsion to work, which construes the labor market as the central stage on which life must be performed, has if anything gained even greater force during the decades following Weber’s death.
Struggling to understand this feature of contemporary capitalism, a number of recent scholars have begun to characterize the social landscape as constituting a “work society” (see Chamberlain 2018; Frayne 2015). This term, first popularized by Ulrich Beck (2000), refers to the centrality that paid employment has come to enjoy within contemporary culture, especially under neoliberalism. Only through the performance of wage labor can one expect to be included within civil society, to claim a measure of respectability, and to find personal fulfillment—all this quite beyond the pressure of economic necessity. Hence Beck’s observation, echoing Weber: “Having lost their faith in God, [workers] believe instead in the godlike powers of work to provide everything sacred to them: prosperity, social position, personality, meaning in life, democracy, political cohesion. Just name any value of modernity and I will show that it assumes the very thing about which it is silent: participation in paid work” (2000:63). In this telling, secularization has shifted our concern from the soul to the self, requiring workers to engage in perpetual bouts of self-improvement, to perform identity work in its various guises, and to enhance their bodies, minds, and productive capacity, the better to conform to social ideals (McGee 2005). To do less is to invite the shame of others, and of one’s self.
Implied here is a view of wage labor that in some respects favors Weber over Marx. The problem of the work society is not that it deprives workers of the capacity to control their own working lives: it does this, and more. It colonizes all domains of social life and imposes on workers a set of moral coordinates that are at least as consequential as any labor-control system that any employer has yet devised. The implication is that the liberation of the worker cannot be sought on the terrain of political economy, as Marx assumed (Baudrillard 1975). Rather, the worker’s freedom can only be sought by dislodging production from its privileged position at the center of the social landscape. The point is not so much to reclaim control over one’s own labor but to dismantle the “value imperialism” (Beck 2000) that work has imposed on human life more generally.
Perhaps the most theoretically sophisticated and ambitious exemplar of this approach is Kathi Weeks’s The Problem with Work (2011), which fittingly uses as its point of departure a critical reexamination of the Protestant Ethic itself. As the author notes, a key contribution of Weber’s work lies in its ability to “de-familiarize” the work ethic—to uncover the complex and contradictory processes that enabled it to gain purchase over modern life. As Weeks writes, “putting the analysis in a religious frame enables Weber to capture and effectively convey both the specificity and the peculiarity of this orientation to work” (see pp. 41–43). Weber’s point was to emphasize the fundamentally irrational origins of the now-familiar compulsion to work—a compulsion that is not only arbitrary and unnecessary, but one that also devalues all those domains (such as care giving, family life, learning for its own sake, or the arts) deemed less directly “functional” for contemporary capitalist society.
In Weeks’s view, however, the work ethic is far from the unalterably unified and rigid apparatus it appears to be. Rather, it is riven by internal contradictions (“antinomies”) that lend it an inherently unstable character. On the one hand, by inducing workers to internalize the need to prove themselves on the terrain of wage labor, the work ethic snares workers in a cultural “trap”—that is, it constitutes an “instrument of subordination” that “renders populations at once productive and governable” (p. 54). This effect is especially pernicious when it works to subjugate racial and ethnic minorities, whose members are so often vilified for their alleged unwillingness to work (as with the endlessly racialized debates over welfare and the “underclass”). At the same time, Weeks insists that the work ethic also serves as an “instrument of insubordination,” as when workers repurpose the sanctity of their labor, emphasize their worthiness as workers, and contrast their work with the unproductive and even parasitic role their overseers play (as when a producerist version of the work ethic emboldens workers to claim rights they were previously denied).
The latter possibility of course depends on the political conditions that workers can employ. Yet this is precisely Weeks’s point. For if, as Weber wrote, “the Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so” (1992:123, my emphasis). This “force” is not only moral but also political, for it stems from an inherently coercive regime in which life is made to depend on labor. This political critique of the work society insists that simply providing “good jobs,” or even securing equal rights at work for women and minorities, can only ever serve as a half measure. The point must be to weaken the grip of economic necessity that the dominant class has imposed on working people; to contest the economic discourses that help enforce this regime; and thereby to open up possibilities for the re-valuation of all those human activities—including housework, childcare, and the work of social reproduction more generally—that have long been residualized as mere “non-work” (as feminists lament). This is what is meant by the “refusal of work”—a broad cultural rejection of both the moral trappings and structural apparatuses on which wage labor has historically relied.
Much the same view has been advanced in the writings of Peter Fleming, a British organization studies scholar whose work deserves a wider American audience than it has received (see Fleming 2014, 2015; Cederström and Fleming 2012). Like Weeks—and also like Weber—Fleming problematizes the moral compulsion to work, viewing it as a source of power that is no longer tethered (if ever it was) to economic necessity and that must be suspended if notions of freedom and democracy are to count for more than cynical tropes.
Citing Nietzsche, Fleming views the work ethic as amounting to a clever “ruse” (2015:3) that if anything grew in power during the twentieth century. “In ways that it never did to factory workers under Fordism,” the need to define ourselves through our work has “infiltrated our everyday lives and sensibilities” (2015:29). Fleming dubs this fixation the “I, Job” complex, which essentially allows work to colonize life in ways that employers find endlessly convenient. The consequences of the “I, Job” complex take their toll on all of us—not only those who are consumed by our work but also those who cannot find enough work. Because the former are induced to incorporate the structural tensions that neoliberalism itself creates, “what ought to be basic class politics is displaced onto moments of stress, personal alienation, secret fears, and so forth” (2014:125). And because work is a moral imperative, those who cannot find work are relegated to a stigmatized condition as damaged goods, all too often immobilized on the political stage.
Fleming’s work is filled with instances in which workers are pushed to their limits and beyond. Thus we read of programmers who confess to “dreaming in code,” or who actually long for bouts of illness as a way to sidestep the need to work. Emblematic are instances of “failed escapes,” such as the epidemic of suicides among London bankers in 2008 and the Foxconn suicides of 2010, which are especially well discussed in the aptly named Dead Man Working (Cederström and Fleming 2012). Here the argument is that “we have become our jobs, so the obvious way to end the tyranny of work might be to end ourselves” (2012:61). Interestingly, Fleming’s work predates the opioid crisis in the United States, but the linkage should be clear. In a society where work is a moral compulsion, economic marginalization can only elevate the incidence of what Case and Deaton (2020) have termed “deaths of despair.” Ironically, the work ethic often finds its most powerful adherents within rural and exurban communities, where economic marginalization condemns a growing proportion of residents to stigmatization in far-reaching and persistent ways (Sherman 2009).
Perhaps because of workers’ demands for greater control over their working lives, management in the 1990s adopted what Fleming calls the “just be yourself” approach toward workplace culture, a successor to control systems of the sort that Kunda (1992) called “normative control.” In this newer approach, which encompasses “liberation management,” Results Only Work Environments, and “no collar” workplaces, one encounters forms of control that only seem to relax the strictures of the work ethic or to adjust it in the direction of the worker’s needs. In fact, what such developments imply is the emergence of a more expansive set of expectations that are no longer confined by space (the boundaries of the workplace) or by time (working hours); as such, they begin to envelop the totality of the worker’s life. Projects are never actually done, or done sufficiently well, since they expand or proliferate without limits, and the working day never really ends. As Fleming puts it, “porous boundaries help perpetuate the illusion of freedom while extending the logic of production deep into society” (2014:98). As work colonizes life, workers nonetheless seem freer and more self-directed, even as firms abandon any responsibility for them—a point nicely captured in a comment Fleming quotes from a CEO, who noted that “if you need me to motivate you, I probably don’t want to hire you” (2014:96).
Both Weeks and Fleming are aware that their efforts to advance anti-work theory and politics can only seem utopian. To her credit, Weeks in particular embraces this label, arguing that seemingly impossible demands (e.g., abolition or women’s suffrage) have long informed progressive movements for social justice and political change, in effect prefiguring the course that social relations must eventually take. (Luther’s theology itself seemed heretical when it first arose.) Though their orientations differ in important ways—Weeks’s interests are more firmly rooted in feminist thinking, while Fleming is concerned with the link between organizations and the exercise of class power—their approaches overlap considerably. The material crux of their demands rests on the unconditional support for a universal basic income at a livable rate, as well as substantial reductions in working time (a three-day working week, voluntary for those seeking supplementary income, along with a shortened working day). To this, Fleming adds a stringent wage policy that provides both a floor and a ceiling for annual income. What is perhaps most important, though, is the ethical orientation both advocate, which would in effect transcend the moralized view of work that capitalism has so firmly established. In its place, anti-work theory advances an ethical disposition in which life is no longer held hostage to work. Only by dismantling this moralization of labor can the possibility of human freedom even be conceived. Only then can support for care-giving, for family life, for deliberative participation in community forums, and for what Habermas called communicative rationality begin to take shape.
The question that must be raised—one that Weber himself would insist on—concerns the historical conditions that might or might not favor a left-wing Reformation such as this. Here three observations must be made. First, we must remind ourselves that Weber himself acknowledged the impermanence of industrial capitalism, even if its end might rest only in the forces of entropy (i.e., when “the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt” [Weber 1992:123]). Weber’s comment may in some ways be prescient. For if and when contemporary societies adopt post-carbon climate policies, the hyper-mobility of capital may experience newfound limits. If capital can no longer use offshoring as a weapon with which to impose labor discipline, the balance of power between capital and labor may change in appreciable ways. A less consumerist culture, too, may weaken the grip of work on life, opening up new conceptions of virtue and relationality than are less conducive to relentless economic growth.
Second, the environmental movement is not the only force that is likely to condition the future of work. Feminism too must be taken into account. For centuries now, the work society has devalued the performance of labor outside the cash nexus, as is most clearly evident in the “male breadwinner” norm, which historically infused the work ethic with masculine ideology. The women’s movement has oscillated between demands for full inclusion within the work society, on the one hand, and extending the cash nexus into the home, on the other (the “wages for housework” movement, which Weeks ably dissects). But the contemporary situation is arguably different. Neoliberalism has not only infused precarity into the wage-labor relation; in addition, it has imposed sharp cutbacks on public support for care-giving, burdening family caregivers (read: women) at precisely the moment when wage stagnation and labor market uncertainty make reliance on wage labor for benefits an increasingly bad bet. The crisis of the work society of which Beck spoke has therefore combined with a crisis of social reproduction, making restoration of the social order that much more difficult to foresee. The pandemic has simply brought these twin crises out into the open, conceivably expanding the policies that might be discussed.
A third consideration is the changing structure of the employment relation itself. Though rigorous data have been missing in action for years, there can be little doubt that the job rewards that work now offers have deteriorated to the point where a declining proportion of the labor force can access jobs that support the norms that the work ethic established. For workers who possess little economic, social, or cultural capital of any kind, the field of work has come to resemble a game that is no longer worth playing. (Hence the ferocity of workers’ support for anti-elite politics.) And for more privileged workers, the game now demands an obsessive devotion that is all but impossible to sustain over the course of a working life. As the gap grows between the culturally defined expectations workers have been led to embrace and the structurally impoverished positions they actually confront, a reservoir of resentment is likely to expand. Status anxieties abound; ressentiment among white men spills over institutional controls; and educated workers compete ever more fervently for a vanishingly small pool of desirable jobs. Addressing these tensions will require more than improved job security or a better quality of employment. Those ships have sailed. Needed is a more radical rethinking of the privileged position that the work ethic—Weber’s “ghosts of dead religious beliefs”—has been allowed to enjoy for generations. It is to Weber’s credit that he identified a major site on which capitalism exercises its most furtive forms of coercion over social life. Can humans envision a compelling reason to live that is not tethered to the moral economy of work? The future of humanity may depend on the answer to this heretical question.