Making a Living, Making a Life

Work, Meaning and Self-Identity

Sara James

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781472484659
• eBook ISBN: 9781317102601
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In a world in which individuals will undergo multiple career changes, is it possible any longer to conceive of a job as a meaningful vocation? Against the background of fragmentation and rationalisation of work, this book explores the significance and meaning of work in contemporary life, raising the question of whether people continue to feel motivated to dedicate their lives to their work, or must now look to other areas of life for meaning. Based on rich, in-depth interviews conducted with workers of different ages and across a broad range of occupations in the major city of Melbourne, Making a Living, Making a Life reveals that work continues to be a source of pride, passion and purpose, the author shedding light on the ways in which cultural narratives, collective meanings and structural factors influence people's feelings about work. An engaging and empirically grounded examination of the meaning and centrality of work to people's lives in today's 'liquid' modern world, this book will appeal to sociologists with interests in cultural sociology, social theory, ethics, the sociology of work and questions of identity.

1 Introduction

The significance of work in liquid modernity

The belief that hard work is an inherent social good and a sign of virtue in the individual is ingrained in Western culture. Max Weber famously argued that, while the Protestant origins of vocation as a path to salvation eventually died out, the idea of finding a calling and pursuing it devotedly “haunts our lives like the ghost of once-held religious beliefs” (2002: 313). But do workers today continue to be haunted by the work ethic? Is it possible to devote oneself to a calling when the companies of the new capitalism demand not loyalty but flexibility from their employees? What is the fate of the work ethic in a world increasingly shaped by neoliberalism and globalization? These are the questions I set out to answer in this book.

A number of social theorists have suggested that the significance of work in people’s lives is decreasing. Zygmunt Bauman (1998) has argued that, for many contemporary workers, occupation has become a temporary entertainment rather than a meaningful vocation. Consumption, he suggests, is now the key source of identity and fulfilment. The work ethic has been replaced by the “aesthetic” of consumption. For Richard Sennett (1998; 2006), contemporary work is characterized by short-termism and fragmentation. Work no longer provides a clear trajectory as flexible employees “drift” from one job to the next. Under these conditions dedication to a calling is virtually impossible. On an initial reading these arguments are compelling, but do they accurately describe what is happening in people’s lives? Drawing on in-depth interviews, this book investigates whether theories of contemporary work chime with the lived experience of people.

One of the most influential studies of the meaning of work in people’s lives is Studs Terkel’s classic, Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (1974, hereafter referred to as Working). In the early 1970s Terkel, a disc jockey from Chicago, travelled around the United States talking to hundreds of individuals about their work. Working received much critical acclaim. As Adam Cohen puts it, the book is “a path breaking exploration of what Mr Terkel described as ‘the extraordinary dreams of ordinary people’” (Cohen in Terkel, 1974: x). Working is, in essence, a collection of portraits. Terkel selects the most revealing parts of his interviews to create memorable characters; there is Delores Dante—a waitress—who sees every service as a performance, and ‘Lovin’ Al the Wizard’ who can park any car in one swing. But what is most impressive about the book is the way it reveals the depth of significance of work in the lives of the interviewees. Working is about a search “for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life, rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying (Terkel 1974: xi). Amidst considerable frustration and discontent, many of Terkel’s interviewees had been able to find meaning in their work “well over and beyond the reward of the paycheck” (Terkel 1974: xi).

The difficulty of making a life meaningful, in an era when many of the old certainties have faded and traditional constraints are less binding, has been a key question for sociology. We may have more freedom, but also less certainty. This book is informed by the argument that there is a crisis of meaning in the modern West and that many contemporary individuals are struggling to decide how to live (Carroll 2008). The works of Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Weber are seminal in this tradition. Weber argued that, due to increasing intellectualization and rationalization, the world had become disenchanted. Since science could now provide explanations for phenomena, there was no longer a place for “mysterious incalculable forces” (Weber 1991: 139) in the modern West. Without a religious framework to give direction, contemporary individuals may find it difficult to live with purpose: “it might be truly said of the ‘last men’ in this cultural development: ‘specialists without spirit, hedonists without a heart’…” (Weber 2002: 192).¹ With this reference to the “last men”, Weber evokes Nietzsche’s description of modern individuals in Thus Spoke Zarathustra; they are people concerned only with comfort and entertainment:

The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small … They have left the regions where it is hard to live, for one needs warmth … One still works, for work is a form of entertainment. But one is careful lest the entertainment become too harrowing … One has one’s little pleasure for the day and one’s little pleasure for the night: but one has a regard for health. ‘We have invented happiness,’ say the last men, and they blink.

(Nietzsche 2006: 5)

For Nietzsche, the truth of is existence is that it is both horrible and absurd (1993: 39). With the decline of religious meaning, modern individuals have to face up to this truth, which is a “supreme menace to the will” (1993: 40). After the death of God, the question, as articulated by the Madman, becomes “How can we console ourselves, the murderers of all murderers!” (2001: 120). How is it possible to proceed with purpose in the knowledge that life is absurd?

In a lecture to a group of prospective scholars in 1918, Weber directly confronted his young audience with this problem:

Today the routines of everyday life challenge religion. Many old gods ascend from their graves; they are disenchanted and hence take the form of impersonal forces. They strive to gain power over our lives and again they resume their eternal struggle with one another. What is hard for modern man, and especially for the younger generation, is to measure up to a workaday existence. The ubiquitous chase for ‘experience’ stems from this weakness; for it is weakness not to be able to countenance the stern seriousness of our fateful times.

(Weber 1991: 149)

In facing up to these circumstances, Weber argued that individuals must make a “decisive choice” (Weber 1991: 152) about what they will devote their life to and get to work: “Nothing is gained by yearning and tarrying alone”, he suggests, “We shall set to work and meet the ‘demands of the day’ in human relations as well as in our vocation. This, however, is plain and simple if each finds and obeys the demon who holds the fibers of his very life” (Weber 1991: 156). Individuals must find their calling. For Weber, living in the service of one’s vocation was the most viable answer to the problem of meaning in modern life. Nonetheless, he predicted that many modern individuals, particularly the young, would struggle to find answers to the key questions posed by Tolstoy: “What shall we do, and, how shall we arrange our lives?” (Weber 1991: 152–153).

Like Weber, Tolstoy was hopeful that work might imbue life with meaning. Throughout his life Tolstoy struggled with the question of how to live, and while writing Anna Karenina (1878) he experienced deep existential and spiritual crises (Wachtel 2002). In the novel, one his central characters, the semi-autobiographical² Levin, meditates on the role of work. An intellectual aristocrat isolated on his estate, Levin spends the majority of his time before marriage studying the principles of farming. His work, Tolstoy suggests, was a “salvation from life for him … without it his life would have been too bleak” (2000: 483). Still, there is something Levin is lacking. Watching the peasants labouring in the fields, singing and working together, he envies their “healthy merriment” and community (Tolstoy 2000: 275). After joining them in the fields one day to help with the mowing he even considers renouncing his “utterly needless education” to find work that could provide the “satisfaction, repose and dignity” he painfully lacks (Tolstoy 2000: 276). The right work, he feels, would bring him purpose and respect. At this stage, the role of work for Levin is to provide meaning and dignity. After he marries his beloved Kitty everything changes. Suddenly it is love that Levin relies upon. Kitty for him now symbolizes “all the light and meaning of life” (Tolstoy 2000: 277). After the honeymoon period, Levin begins to realize that his work is still important. He is not disappointed in married life. On the contrary, he finds his marriage brings him such lightness that work becomes a necessary contrast: “so that the world would not be so uniformly bright” (Tolstoy 2000: 483). Happily married, work becomes a necessary balance, a dark contrast to his bright leisure. Later, on learning that his brother will die, and struck by his own insignificance in the face of death, Levin sees his work as a distraction from the meaninglessness of existence. “You spend your life”, he insists, “diverted by hunting or work in order not to think about death” (Tolstoy 2000: 376). Work, he feels, is a necessary diversion.

So what of work in our current era of liquidity and precariousness? Can one’s work function as an anchor, grounding individuals and thereby bringing dignity and purpose to their lives? Or is work today, at best, an absorbing distraction from a meaningless existence? Through an analysis of the experiences of a range of contemporary workers, the aim of this book is to discover what role work might play in answering Tolstoy’s questions and thereby making a meaningful life.

On ‘work’ and ‘liquid modernity’

Before moving forward, it is necessary to clarify two key terms. When I use the term work in this book I am referring to paid employment, and it is paid work that was the focus of the research. When the research participants speak about their work, they refer mostly to the activity that provides their income (usually referred to as their job) but there are also times when they refer to unpaid work including voluntary work, care work and domestic labour. I have made it clear when this is the case. While the more narrow definition of work as paid employment predominated in the participants’ accounts, there was also a broader understanding of ‘work’ as any productive activity.

Secondly, the reader will have noted that I have opted for ‘liquid modernity’ as my descriptor for the era in which the interviews took place. This book is, in large part, a response to Bauman’s conceptualization of contemporary life as fluid and Richard Sennett’s discussion of the short-termism of the new capitalism that leaves individuals open to drift. It is this condition of drifting in liquidity, and the possibility of work as an anchor within it, that I am concerned with here. The modern/postmodern debate is not a focus of the book. It is sufficient to say that my preference is for the current era not as distinct from the modern, but as a continuation. For Bauman, in contemporary culture, the modern and the postmodern exist simultaneously. As Anthony Elliott summarizes, for Bauman “Contemporary men and women aspire to power, to modernist dreams of certitude, order and structure; yet they equally seek to live without guarantees, trading yesterday’s road maps to the sudden lurches of mood generated by today’s high-tech globalism” (Elliott 2007a: 11). Before moving to the ‘liquid’ metaphor, Bauman favoured “postmodernity” as a descriptor for our current era, defining it as “modernity minus its illusions” (Bauman and Tester 2001: 75). However, as Bauman himself notes, despite his disclaimers, postmodernity still implies that modernity is over (Bauman and Yakimova 2002). With postmodernity deemed insufficient, Bauman shifts to his famous metaphor, and with this “liquid turn” (Elliott 2007a: 12), begins to further emphasize the fluidity and uncertainty of many aspects of contemporary life, including work and relationships.

For Larry Ray (2007) Bauman’s reliance on the liquidity metaphor is problematic for a number of reasons. Firstly, his arguments about transformations in contemporary life lack specificity as to where they are taking place. As Elliott has pointed out, Bauman does repeatedly state that the trends he writes about are “most pronounced in the cities of the modern West” (2007b: 54). Similarly, Richard Sennett suggests that the culture of new capitalism he describes in his work is most developed in cutting-edge institutions. However, both Bauman and Sennett seem to convey that these cultural changes are already spreading throughout the world. Ray’s point, that Bauman has a tendency to generalize, is fair. As well as the location issue, another problem Ray identifies is that many of Bauman’s statements are too overarching and not supported with empirical evidence. The reader of Bauman is often left questioning: “how, amid all this transitory fluidity, social life gets done at all or what bonds of sociability might bind people together for long enough to be able to get from home to work” (2007: 67). Ray concludes that while metaphors may be an effective way of “stimulating imaginative enquiry” they should not become a substitute “for rigorous conceptualisation and research into the social” (2007: 77).

Bauman was a notably non-traditional sociologist. His work includes frequent references to literature, as he believed that understanding the problems of contemporary people was not simply the sociologist’s privilege (Tester 2007: 83). As Keith Tester (2007) has argued, while Bauman’s work is at times frustratingly ambiguous, this is intentional. Bauman is trying to be an irritant to the reader; in denying the reader certainty he is provoking them to engage. His provocation worked on me, and in the chapters that follow I take him to task. My hope for this book is that it will be a useful empirical contribution to understanding how people make sense of their lives in liquid modernity, and the role of work within this. In doing so, I am putting Bauman and Sennett’s theories to the test.

The study

In order to provide a rich and detailed account of contemporary work, this book focuses on the experiences of workers in one Australian metropolis—Melbourne. Between 2007 and 2009³ I conducted in-depth interviews with individuals, from a range of occupations, living in and around the city of Melbourne. The interviews were informal and lasted around two hours each. I met with the participants between one and three times (see Appendix 1 for a description of the methodology). In deciding whom I would interview for this study, I aimed for diversity of age, gender and occupation; I did not ask participants about their ethnicity, as this was not a focus of my research and outside the scope of the project (see Appendix 2 for a list of ages, genders, occupations and pseudonyms of participants).

Australia is an apt setting to explore the complexity of the meanings of work in liquid modernity; despite being geographica...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: the significance of work in liquid modernity
• 2 The fate of the work ethic
• 3 Work and self-identity: vocation, authenticity and passion
• 4 Seeking sensation and meaningful work
• 5 Conclusion
• Appendix 1: research methodology
• Appendix 2: list of participants, their ages and occupations
• Appendix 3: profiles of research participants
• Index