Work, Identity and Self: How We Are Formed by the Work We Do

Author(s): Al Gini
Source: Journal of Business Ethics , May, 1998, Vol. 17, No. 7 (May, 1998), pp. 707-714
Published by: Springer

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Work, Identity and Self:
How We Are Formed by
the Work We Do Al Gini
ABSTRACT. Because work looms so large in our
lives I believe that most of us don't reflect on its
importance and significance. For most of us, work is
well - work, something we have to do to maintain
our lives and pay the bills. I believe, however, that
work is not just a part of our existence that can be
easily separated from the rest of our lives. Work is not
simply about the trading of labor for dollars. Perhaps
because we live in a society that markets and hawks
the fruits of our labor and not the labor itself, we have
forgotten or never really appreciated the fact that the
business of work is not simply to produce goods, but
also to help produce people. We need work, and as
adults we find identity and are identified by the work
we do. If this is true then we must be very careful
about what we choose to do for a living, for what
we do is what we'll become.
No one is neutral about the topic of work.
Everyone has an opinion. The reason is simple.
Work, food and sex are the most commonly shared
behavioral traits of adult life. While the latter two
are subject to aesthetic taste and availability, and,
therefore constitute a discretionary choice, work,
for 95% of us, is an entirely non-discretionary
matter. Most of us must work.
Al Gini teaches in the Department of Philosophy and the
Institute of Industrial Relations at Loyola University
Chicago. He is the managing editor of Business Ethics
Quarterly, the Journal of the Society for Business
Ethics, and has a regular column in The Small
Business Journal. His most recent publications include:
Heigh-Ho! Heigh-Ho! Funny, Insightful, Encour
aging and Sometimes Painful Quotes About Work
(Gini, Sullivan) Acta Publications, 1994; Case
Studies in Business Ethics, Fourth Edition (Donaldson,
Gini) Prentice-Hall, 1995.
Journal of Business Ethics 17: 707-714, 1998.
? 1998 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
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As adults there is nothing that more preoccu
pies our lives. From the approximate ages of 21
to 70 - we will spend our lives working. We will
not sleep as much, spend time with our families
as much, eat as much or recreate and rest as much
as we work. Whether we love our work or hate
it, succeed in it or fail, achieve fame or infamy
through it, like Sisyphus we are all condemned
to push and chase that thing we call our job, our
career, our work all of our days. "Even those of
us who desperately don't want to work", said
Ogden Nash, "must work in order to earn
enough money so that they won't have to work
any more"!
So, work we must. And maybe if we're lucky,
as Voltaire pointed out, our work will at least
keep us from the jaws of three great evils ?
boredom, vice and poverty.
On the other hand, there are those who revel
in their work and find meaning in it for them
selves and others. There are also those who are
addicted to their work, in the best sense of the
term, and seek it out in ever increasing measure.
But alas, I believe, such individuals are but a
happy few. For most of us, as the poet Philip
Larkin put it, "Work is a toad that squats on my
life". Work is a given, a brute-fact of life, said
Larkin, and few of us are able to escape its
burden.
Of course, there is a pay-off for all of our years
of enforced labor, it's called retirement. For those
of us who live long enough and are no longer
able to work or wanted at work anymore - we
are pensioned off to rest and enjoy the life of a
"silvered senior citizen". Unfortunately, for at
least half of the population, there's a catch. As
Margaret Mead said: "In this society, women
retire, men die".
708
Let's begin with some basics. In its most benign
sense work can be defined as: any activity we
need or want to do in order to achieve the basic
requirements of life and/or to maintain a certain
life-style.1 Of course, there are other more loaded
definitions of work. The philosopher curmud
geon Bertrand Russell defined it this way:
Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position
of matter at or near the earth's surface relative to
other matter; second, telling other people to do so.
The first kind is unpleasant and ill-paid; the second
is pleasant and highly paid.2
Matthew Fox in his important but excessively
New Age book, The Reinvention of Work offers us
a more profound interpretation of our labor:
. . . work is the expression of our soul, our inner
being. It is unique to the individual, it is creative.
Work (is also) an expression of the Spirit at work
in the world through us. Work is that which puts
us in touch with others, not so much at the level
of personal interaction, but at the level of service
in the community.3
The paradox of work is that while many of
us wind up hating it, or are simply worn down
and exhausted by it, most of us start off eagerly
seeking it out. We want to work. Work in this
society is seen both as a means and an end in
itself. As a means, work is the vehicle by which
we can achieve status, stuff and success. As an
end, work allows us to conform with one of our
most cherished myths, the "Protestant Work
Ethic". This ethic holds that work is good. And
that all work, any work demonstrates integrity,
responsibility and fulfillment of duty. The social
imperative here is clear: not to work means
you're a bum!
In the long run work can prove to be a boon
or a burden, creative or crippling, a means to
personal happiness or a prescription for despair.
But no matter where a person winds up on this
spectrum one thing is clear, work is one of the
primary means by which adults find their identity
and form their character. Simply put: where we
work, how we work, what we do at work and
the general ethos and culture of the workplace
indelibly mark us for life. As Karl Marx has
argued:
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Al Gini
As individuals express their lives, so they are. What
[individuals] . . . are . . . coincides with their pro
duction, both with what they produce and with
how they produce. The nature of individuals thus
depends on the material conditions determining
their production.4
Assuredly there are other factors that enter
into the equation, for example: genetic inheri
tance, race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation,
religious training and family background. But
even with all of these, work remains an irre
ducible given, the most common experience of
adult life. The lessons we learn at work help for
mulate who we become and what we value as
individuals and a species. To use Gregory Baum's
handsome phrase: "Labor is the axis of human
self-making".
Perhaps John Paul II in his 1981 encyclical On
Human Work states the issue most clearly:
Work is a good thing for man ? a good thing for
his humanity because through work man not only
transforms nature, adapting it to his own needs, but
he also achieves fulfillment as a human being and
indeed in a sense becomes "more a human being".3
It is in work that we become persons. Work
is that which forms us, gives us a focus, gives us
a vehicle for personal expression and offers us a
means for personal definition. Work, argues John
Paul II, makes us human because we make some
thing of ourselves through our work. Individuals
need work in order to finish and define their
natures. Just as work is not a simple given or fixed
thing, said John Paul, so too human personali
ties. Both are facts continuously being produced
by human labor.
Novelist Elia Kazan has said that the one
absolute lesson he has learned in life, is that our
careers and our identities are inextricably bound
up. Indeed they are equivalent. People are what
they do, and what people do effects every aspect
of who they are. For good or ill, we are known
and we know ourselves by the work we do. The
meter and measure of work serves as our
mapping devise to explain and order the geog
raphy of life. Our work circumscribes what we
know, and how we select and categorize the
things we choose to see. The lessons we learn in
 Work, Identity and Self 709
our work and at work become the metaphors we
apply to life and others, and the means by which
we digest the world. As Samuel Butler said:
"Every man's work, whether it be literature or
music or pictures or architecture or anything else,
is always a portrait of himself".
Sociologist, Connie Fletcher in her best seller,
What Cops Know dramatically drives home this
point:
Cops know things you and I don't. It's knowledge
crafted out of years spent on the street, sizing up
and dealing with the volatile, cunning, confused,
comic, tragic, often goofy behavior of human
beings from every social, economic, and mental
level, and it's knowledge won as a by-product of
investigating criminal specialties such as homicide,
sex crimes, property crimes, and narcotics. A cop
who works traffic has peered deeper into the
recesses of the human psyche than most shrinks.
A cop who works homicide, or sex crimes, will
tell you things Dostoyevsky only guessed at.6
Or, as detective turned novelist, Joseph
Waumbaugh more elegantly phased it: "Cops see
people at their worst and the worst kinds of
people". Given these kinds of experiences, is it
any wonder that as a group their "portrait" is
hard edged and cynical.
Perhaps the easiest way to prove the point that
we are affected, labeled and formed by the work
we do is to consider its converse. Imagine the
now-too-common scenario of a 48 year old
bread-winner who has been "reengineered",
"downsized" or "five-plus-fived" out of a job.
With the anchor of adulthood ripped away, with
few prospects in sight, but with bills to be paid,
mortgages to be met and children to be educated
the "terminatee" is often reduced to adolescent
torpor. This person is forced to ask the questions:
Who am I now? What have I accomplished?
What can I do? Who will I become? Essayist
Joseph Epstein calls being out of work "the surest
path to self-loathing". People out of work, said
Rollo May, "quickly become strangers to them
selves." And without work, said Albert Camus,
"all life goes rotten."
Philosopher Adina Schwartz has argued, that
at the level of mental health, work is a basic
requirement of adult life.7 As adults we need
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work in the same way that children need to
play in order to fulfill themselves as persons.
Unfortunately this thesis applies even to those
of us who spend our lives laboring at "bad jobs".
Jobs that Studs Terkel refers to as "too small for
our spirit" and "not big enough" for us as
people. Jobs that are devoid of prestige. Jobs that
are physically exhausting or mindlessly repetitive.
Jobs that are demeaning, degrading and trivial
in nature.8 Even theses kinds of jobs - though we
are often loathe to admit it - provide us with a
handle on reality, an access to services and goods
and a badge of identity.
Whether we are lucky enough to have a "good
job" that we enjoy, or even if we are stuck in a
"bad job" that we despise, there are at least four
critical problems that lie at the core of the con
temporary work experience.
I. Our lack of vision about what we do, and
why we do it.
II. The rise of workaholism in all classes of
workers.
III. The "work, spend and debt syndrome":
We work, we spend, and we are forced to
work some more.
IV. The ethos of work and its influence on
the ethical values of the worker.
1. Lack of vision
According to E. F. Schumacher work should
provide us with three basic essentials: the material
goods and services needed for existence; a chance
to use our talents and abilities; and an opportu
nity to overcome our natural egocentricity by
working in conjunction with others.9
In fact, I believe that most of us only get the
first of Schumacher's three basic benefits of work.
That is, in our society ? whether we are
members of the blue collar, white collar or new
collar class of workers - work is regarded as little
more than a means to making money. One of the
underlying reasons for this is that so few of us
see, understand and participate in the whole
purpose, process and the final product of our
work. We are, to use Marx's term, alienated from
our labor.
710
Much like the story line of a classic Greek
tragedy, the root cause of this alienation comes
out of one of the central strengths and benefits
of modern industrial capitalism - Adam Smith's
principle of the division of labor. In The Wealth
of Nations, Smith reported on visiting a small pin
factory employing only ten people, each of
whom was doing just one or two of the 18 spe
cialized tasks involved in making a pin.
One man draws out the wire, another straightens
it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds
it at the top for receiving the head; to make the
head requires two or three distinct operations; to
put it on is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins
is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them
into the paper. . . . Those ten persons could make
among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins
a day. . . . But if they all worked separately and
independently . . . they certainly could not each
of them have made twenty, perhaps not one pin a
day.10
According to Michael Hammer and James
Champy, the reigning gurus of corporate reengi
neering, for better but mostly for worse, Smith's
prototypical pin factory will serves as a model for
the modern workplace.
Today's airlines, steel mills, accounting firms, and
computer chip makers have all been built around
Smith's central idea ? the division or specializa
tion of labor and the consequent fragmentation of
work. The larger the organization, the more spe
cialized is the worker and the more separate steps
into which the work is fragmented. This rule
applies not only to manufacturing jobs. Insurance
companies, for instance, typically assign separate
clerks to process each line of a standardized form.
They then pass the form to another clerk, who
processes the next line. There workers never
complete a job; they just perform piecemeal tasks.11
Sadly, such a model of work, in the words of
Schumacher, neither ennobles the product or the
producer. If both the process and the product of
our work affects who we are and how we view
the world, surely Smith's view of the workplace
produces workers who - as Smith himself
suggests - are both numb and dumb to what they
do and why they do it.
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Al Gini
Although the division of labor is the proximate
and parochial cause of worker alienation and
distress, there are more profound philosophical
reasons as well. Matthew Fox argues that modern
capitalism has resulted in the lack of an eschato
logical overview of work. That is, we have no
goal, no hope, no belief in a future greater
purpose of our work and its contributions to
human kind. We are tied, says Fox, to the
Newtonian model of the machine. Within this
model we are all interchangeable parts and
replaceable cogs with no other purpose than to
produce and be productive. We are also tied to
the model of humankind as homo economicus,
driven solely by the goal of personal betterment
and well being. The primary meaning of our
work lies solely in what it allows us to get or
buy.12
Mirroring On Human Work Fox contends that
we have overlooked or forgotten that life is not
just a simple fact, a given, but an artifact con
tinuously being created by us. We have forgotten
that in work we are both the co-creators (for
good or ill) of our personal lives and all of human
destiny as well. We have forgotten that we are
not only citizens of the world, but that we are
needed by the world. The problem, says Fox, is
that we need a new "metaphysics of work". A
vision of work that takes into consideration other
needs and issues beyond the self. A vision of
work that allows us to distinguish and understand
the paradox of both the drudgery and meaning
of work; a view that sees work as both a neces
sity and a privilege.13
Fox argues that we need a vision of work that
allows us to overcome the destructive dualism of
the contemporary workplace. We need work that
does not separate our lives from our livelihood,
our personal values from our work values, our
personal needs from the needs of the community.
We need a vision of work which maintains that
"money is never a sufficient reason for work; nor
does money ever justify the immoral conse
quences of our work". A vision that understands
the subtleties and nuances of John Gardner's
famous admonition:
The society that scorns excellence in plumbing
because it is a humble activity, yet accepts shoddi
 Work, Identity and Self 711
ness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity,
will have neither good plumbing nor good phi
losophy, and as a result neither its pipes nor its
theories will hold water.14
2. Workaholism and the decline of leisure
At the end of the 19th century the major cry and
claim of the American Union moment was a
simple and distinct one: "Eight hour for work,
eight hours for rest and eight hours free for what
we will". For brief periods in the twentieth
century this goal was actually achieved. But
according to Juliet B. Schor in The Overworked
American the 40 hour standard week is either a
long forgotten memory or a still sought after
dream for most American workers. Except for
the excesses of the 19th Century, says Schor, as
a nation we are working more now than ever
before. Even the workers of Ancient Greece and
Rome and the serfs of Medieval Europe worked
less than we do - except for harvest time, they
averaged less than twenty hours per week with
150 to 175 officially sanctioned days off.lD
Mostly culled from the Department of Labor,
consider the following staggering statistics about
work:
- The national average for blue/white collar
workers is approximately 50 hours per
week.
- Middle and upper management work 58?65
hours per week.
- 11% of white collar workers put in slightly
over 60 hours per week.
- Americans work eight weeks more a year
than the Germans and French, and eleven
weeks more than the Swedes.
- Only the Japanese work more than us,
approximately six weeks more a year.
- 89% of Americans take work home on a
regular basis.
- 65% of Americans work more than one
weekend a month.
- 6 to 12% of the American workforce have
taken on a second full-time job.
- According to a recent special report by the
Department of Labor, Working Women Count,
there are a growing number of individuals
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who work multiple part-time jobs. Jobs
which exceed 50 hours a week, but barely
earn a living wage.
- The Families and Work Institute of New York
reports that both spouses in double-income
households with kids put in over 15 hours
a day on work, commuting, chores and kids.
- In 1992 less than 15% of married couples
with children lived the life of Leave It To
Beaver or Father Knows Best, i.e., dad at
work, mom home with the kids.
- By the year 2010, at this pace, the projected
average work week will be 58 hours.
I think it is safe to say that as a society we are
suffering from a serious leisure-lag. Newsweek
Magazine reports that there is only one other
country that mandates by law,.contract or custom
fewer vacation days than America (10) and that's
Mexico (6).16 In 1988, the Harris Poll reported
that since 1973 Americans have lost 9.6 hours
of leisure per week (a loss of almost 1.4 hours
per day). Americans now average 16.6 hours of
leisure per week.17 Clearly, if this statistic is true
- recreation, relaxation, idleness and renewal are
on the decline.
We have become a society obsessed with time,
productivity and success. And yet in a quintes
sential American way, being busy, being over
worked ? conveys self-worth, even status.
According to Diane Fassel in Working Ourselves
to Death ? workaholism is an addiction, but it is
an addiction Americans praise, value and brag
about.18
As a society, in the last twenty years, because
of the advent of double-income family, global
competition, downsizing, rjghtsizing and reengi
neering ? we all work harder and longer. As a
result we have compacted time, changed time,
accelerated the use of time, squeezed time in our
attempts to compensate for our "poverty of
time". Hallmark Cards, that almost unerring
barometer of American mores, now markets
greeting cards for absent parents to tuck under
cereal boxes in the morning which say ? "Have
a super day at School"; or to place on a child's
pillow at night - "I wish I were there to tuck
you in".19
Leisure is no longer seen, in C. K.
712
Chesterton's terms, as the "noble habit of doing
nothing", but as an opportunity to recover from
exhaustion. We are a society suffering from
frenzy, frustration and fatigue. To turn around
the words of Thorstein Veblen: we have become
a harried working class rather than a leisure class.
3. The work, spend and debt syndrome
Since 1948 the level of production in America
has more than doubled. What this means is that
we now produce enough goods and services to
live at our 1948 standard of living (measured in
market available services and goods) in less than
half the time it took in 1948. Which in turn
means, if we chose to, we could work a four hour
day; or work a year of six months; or every
worker in America could take every other year
off with pay. So why ? given our "poverty of
time" and the burdens of work - haven't we
traded our prosperity for leisure?20
Simply put, we have become addicted to the
fruits of our production, i.e. consumer goods. We
have traded time for consumer products and
services. We have become a society of "conspic
uous consumers". Herbert Marcuse pointed out
that we have made a tautology out of the
equation. "The goods of life are equal to the
good life". We have deconstructed Aristotle's
adage ? "the purpose of work is the attainment
of leisure", to the far more base notion - "I work
in order to consumer and possess".
Juilet Schor contends that we now live in the
most consumer-orientated society in history.
Americans spend three to four times as many
hours a year shopping as their counterparts in
Western European countries. Once a purely
utilitarian chore, shopping has in America been
elevated to the status of a national obsession.
Shopping has literally become a leisure activity
in its own right. Going to the mall is a common
Friday and Saturday night entertainment, not
only for the teens who seem to live in them, but
for adults as well. Shopping is also the most
popular form of weekday evening "out-of-home
entertainment". Malls are everywhere. Four
billion square feet of our total land area has been
converted into shopping centers, or about sixteen
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Al Gini
square feet for every man, woman or child in
America.21
This "squirrel cage" of "work-and-spend" has
resulted in what can be refered to as "the dept
and dependency syndrome". That is, the more
we spend, the more we go into debt, the more
we are dependent on work to pay our bills. Or,
in the phraseology of a popular bumper-sticker:
"I owe, I owe - so it's off to work I go"!22
Czechoslovakian playwright and politician
Vaclav Havel warns us of the spiritual and moral
disease engendered by a consumer culture.
Consumerism, he says, is a desperate substitute
for living. When life becomes reduced to a hunt
for consumer goods, freedom becomes trivialized
to mean a chance to freely choose which washing
machine or refrigerator one wants to buy.
Consumer bliss, Havel point out, has the effect
of diverting people's attention away from the
community to the self. A consumer culture
makes it easy to accept the slow erosion of social,
political and moral standards, because their
passing is hardly noticed - we're all too busy
shopping. At the very least, what Havel is sug
gesting is that - a lifestyle is not the same thing
as a life.23 Or, as comedian Lily Tomlin cynically
put it: "The trouble with the (consumer) rat race
is that, even if you win, you're still a rat"!
4. The ethos and ethics of work
Given the centrality of work in adult life and its
impact on the development of personality and
character, few students of business ethics and
organizational development will be surprised by
my contention that the ethos of workplace, cor
porate culture and the mores of management
influence the ethical norms and moral values of
individual workers both on and off the job.
Robert Jackall in his important book Moral
Mazes argues that no matter what a person
believes in off the job, on the job all of us, to a
greater or lesser extent, are required to suspend,
bracket or only selectively manifest our personal
convictions.
What is right in the corporation is not what is
right in man's home or his church. What is right
 Work, Identity and Self 713
in the corporation is what the guy above you wants
from you.24
Jackall contends that the logic of every orga
nization (any place of business) and the collec
tive personality of the workplace conspire to
override the wants, desires or aspirations of the
individual worker. For Jackall the primary imper
ative of every organization is to succeed. This
logic of performance leads to the creation of a
private moral universe. A moral universe that by
definition is totalitarian (self-ruled) solipsistic
(self-defined) and narcissistic (self-centered).
Within such a milieu truth is socially defined and
moral behavior is determined solely by organi
zational needs. The key virtues, for all-alike,
become goal-preoccupation, problem solving,
survival and success and, most importantly,
playing by the house rules. In time, says Jackall,
those initiated and invested in the system come
to believe that they live in a self-contained world
view which is above and independent of outside
critique and evaluation.
Jackall argues that all corporations are like
fiefdoms of the Middle Ages, where-in the Lord
of the Manor (CEO, President) offers protection,
prestige and status to his vassals (managers) and
serfs (workers) in return for homage (commit
ment) and service (work). In such a system, says
Jackall, advancement and promotion are predi
cated on loyalty, trust, politics and personalty
much more than experience, education, ability
and actual accomplishments. The central concern
of the worker/minion is to be known as a "can
do guy", a "team-player," being at the right place
at the right time and master of all the social rules.
That's why in the corporate world, says Jackall,
1,000 "atta-boys" is wiped away with one "Oh,
shit"!25
As in the model of a Feudal System, Jackall
maintains, that employees of a corporation are
expected to become functionaries of the system
and supporters of the status quo. Their loyalty is
to the powers that be; their duty is to perpet
uate performance and profit; and, their values can
be none other than those sanctioned by the orga
nization.
Although Jackalls theory is a radical one and
deals primarily with large corporations, the logic
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of his analysis can be applied to any place of
employment. We are a nation of workers, a
society of employees. Statistics indicate that over
80% of the workforce are employed in organiza
tions of twenty or more people. Every organiza
tion, corporation or place of business has a meter
and measure of its own. In a very real sense the
workplace serves as a metronome for human
development and growth. The individual work
place sets the agenda, establishes the values and
dictates the desired outcome it expects from its
employees. Although it would be naive to assert
that employees simply unreflectively absorb the
manners and mores of the workplace, it would
be equally naive to suggest that they are unaf
fected by the modeling and standards of their
respective places of employment. Work is where
we spend our lives, and the lessons we learn
there, good or ill, play a part in the develop
ment of our moral perspective and how we for
mulate and adjudicate ethical choices.
In claiming that workers can become func
tionaries of the logic of performance and orga
nizational ethics of the institutions they work for,
Jackall is in no way denying the value of a more
classic normative analysis of ethical decision
making or the importance and responsibilities of
individual moral agency. He is not claiming that
individuals are ethically absolved when they
capitulate to the status of being an organizational
toady. Rather, he is trying to explain how the
imperatives of the workplace and the require
ments of life facilitate and encourage the abdi
cation of personal responsibility and autonomy.
After all, if work is the primary vehicle for the
achievement of personal success, status, prestige
and financial security, who of us is above the
temptation to cut corners, turn a blind-eye or
simply overlook the requirements and niceties of
ethics? But either way we choose, the lesson to
keep in mind is - "as individuals express their
lives, so they are". The "portrait" we paint of
ourselves at work is how we are known to our
selves and others.
714 Al Gini

Conclusion Marx on Philosophy and Society (Doubleday, New York,

1967) p. 409.
Because work looms so large in our lives I believe D John Paul II: 1982, Laborem Exercens, in Gregory
that most of us don't reflect on it importance and Baum, Tlxe Priority of Labor (Paulist Press, New York)
p. 112.
significance. For most of us, work is well ? work,
6 C. Fletcher: 1990, What Cops Know (Villard, New
something we have to do to maintain our lives
York) Preface p. ix.
and pay the bills. I believe, however, that work
7 A. Schwartz: 1982, 'Meaningful Work', Ethics 92,
is not just a part of our existence that can be 634-646.
easily separated from the rest of our lives. Work 8 S. Terkel: 1974, Working (Pantheon Books, New
is not simply about the trading of labor for York) p. 521.
dollars. Perhaps because we live in a society that 9 E. F. Schumacher: 1980, Good Work (Harper
markets and hawks the fruits of our labor and not Colophon Books, New York) pp. 3, 4.
the labor itself, we have forgotten or never really 10 Adam Smith: 1937, The Wealth of Nations, edited
appreciated the fact that the business of work is by Edwin Cannon (ed.) (The Modern Library, New
not simply to produce goods, but also to help York) pp. 4, 5.
11 M. Hammer and J. Champy: 1994, Reengineering
produce people.
the Corporation (Harper Business, New York) p. 12.
Descartes was wrong. It isn't Cogito ergo sum,
12 Matthew Fox, The Reinvention of Work, pp. 58?64.
but, rather, Laboro ergo sum. We need work, and
13 Ditto., pp. 91-112.
as adults we find identity and are identified by
14 T. Sullivan and A. Gini, Heigh-Ho! Heigh-Ho!,
the work we do. If this is true then we must be
p. 122.
very careful about what we choose to do for a 13 J. B. Schor: 1991, The Overworked American (Basic
living, for what we do is what we'll become. To Books, New York) pp. 43-48.
Paraphrase the words of Winston Churchill ? first 16 M. Levinson, 'Hey, You're Doing Great', Newsweek
we choose and shape our work, then it shapes us. Magazine, January 30, 1995, p. 42.
17 'Leisure Slips on Time Treadmill', Chicago Tribune,
April 29, 1991, Sect. 1, p. 1.
Notes 18 D. Fassel: 1990, Working Ourselves to Death
(Harper, San Franciso) pp. 4, 5.
19 N. Gibbs, 'How America Has Run Out of Time',
1 T. J. Sullivan: 1989, 'What Do We Mean When we
Time
Talk About Work'? in It Comes With The Territory, A. Magazine, April 24, 1989, p. 58.
R. Gini and T. J. Sullivan (eds.) (Random House, 20 J. B. Schor, The Overworked American, pp. 1, 2.
New York) pp. 115-117. 21 Ditto., p. 107.
22 Ditto., p. 64.
2 T. Sullivan and A. Gini: 1994, Heigh-Ho! Heigh-Ho!
Funny, Insightful, Encouraging and Sometimes Painful23 M. Fox, The Reinvention of Work, pp. 7, 8.
Quotes About Work (ACTA Publications, Chicago) 24 R. Jackall: 1988, Moral Mazes (Oxford University
p. 19. Press, New York) p. 109.
3 M. Fox: 1994, The Reinvention of Work (Harper, San
25 Ditto., p. 72.
Franciso) p. 5.
4 Karl Marx, 'The German Ideology', ed. and trans. Loyola University Chicago,
Lloyd Easton and Kurt Guddot, Writings of the Young U.S.A.

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