Work as a Calling

From Meaningful Work to Good Work

Garrett W. Potts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780367724399
• eBook ISBN: 9781000577778
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Amidst the exponentially growing interest in "work as a calling," contemporary discussions have taken an individualistic turn away from the earlier prosocial character that once marked this orientation to work. Now, discussions about "work as a calling" mostly prioritize personal fulfilment via the pursuit of deeply "meaningful work."

Excessive focus has been placed on the experience of meaningful work in ways that are detached from the genuinely good workplace ends that allow for such a meaningful experience to ensue. This book provides a novel paradigm for reimagining the idea of "work as a calling," which serves as a corrective that better supports the individuals' search for meaning and their contribution to the common good, arguing that the two go hand in hand, and so they cannot be separated. Thus, the key idea captured herein is not simply that scholars have misunderstood the very notion of "work as a calling" by implying that it is essentially just synonymous with meaningful work, but, even more importantly, the point is that scholars and laypersons alike often fail to realize how true meaning ensues as a result of a genuine concern for contributing to human flourishing and the common good through one's work.

Providing a new perspective on "work as a calling" by examining the issue from the perspective of morality rather than self-actualization, this volume will be of interest to researchers, academics, professionals, and students in the fields of business ethics, management, leadership, and organizational studies.

1 Who Is Your Calling For?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003154815-3

The idea that work can provide a deep source of meaning for individuals is very prevalent in Western culture. Usually, notions of ‘meaningful work’ are couched within a conversation about the ‘pursuit,’ ‘finding,’ or ‘crafting’ of one’s calling. The work as a calling discourse now spans a variety of academic disciplines. Discussions about work as a calling, now as much as ever, thrive beyond the walls of universities, too. Since the early 2000s, an uptick in the number of self-help authors, counselors, coaches, popular news sources, and large consulting firms’ engagement in the conversation has been reported.¹ Some scholars speak of an “apparent tipping point” of burgeoning interest in the topic around 2007.² Others have recently published a graph indicating that “usage frequency nearly doubled between 1998 and 2008.”³ According to the same graph, however, “the steepest rise [in work as a calling literature] appears to be in just the past decade” from 2009 to 2019, with usage frequency quadrupling.⁴ Indeed, as one influential scholar within the discourse claims, “callings have stolen center stage in our imaginations as offering some sort of special gateway to fulfillment and meaning in work.”⁵

Amidst the exponentially increasing interest in the work as a calling literature, the anatomical structure of these conversations remains remarkably similar. Contemporary notions of work as a calling stress that work should provide individuals with a deep sense of meaning and personal fulfillment. Such notions demand that work ought to be a therapeutic source of individual happiness. There is an apparent centeredness on the self and personal preferences that characterizes much of the emerging literature on work as a calling in recent decades.

Perhaps surprising to some who are not familiar with the literature is the way that notions of contributing to the ‘common good’ even tend to be individualistically motivated. Such notions often place primacy on the therapeutic rewards that stem from doing good—especially the way that doing good makes one feel. Thus, what is argued throughout this book is that, in many cases, the notion of work as a calling tends to be rightly construed as meaningful, but notions of ‘meaningful work’ are often divorced from moral considerations about (a) good work (i.e., the production of excellent products/services), (b) the good of individual lives (including one’s very own), and (c) the common good of communities that one’s organization reaches. The link between meaningfulness and any strong degree of commitment to these three distinct moral concerns seems to have mostly dropped out of the literature since Robert Bellah, Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven Tipton first emphasized the connection in their seminal account of the calling orientation within Habits of the Heart. ⁶ Their account singlehandedly launched the ‘secular discourse on work as a calling’ that now reaches far and beyond the academic discipline of theology, and which attempted in a pluralist manner to link the meaningfulness of one’s calling to the achievement of three specific goals: (a), (b), and (c).

As we shall go on to see, the secular work as a calling literature after Bellah et al. tends to explore notions of calling and meaningful work apart from essential considerations about our profound dependence on others for individual and societal flourishing. Indeed, much of the literature is fundamentally beholden to narrative visions that prescribe a hyper-autonomous search for individual happiness and self-discovery through one’s work. Today finding oneself is a popular hobby that concerns many individuals in Western society. Such a project tends to be carried out by way of a thoroughly interior process of self-examination, which involves attending to one’s preferences.

One of the most voracious conversations of our day is the question of individual identity formation, and the subject of work as a calling is naturally seated in the middle of this discussion. It is often thought that one’s identity is either constructed or discovered through this process of acquainting oneself with what one prefers. Frequently, this search for the self culminates in the pursuit of subjectively ‘meaningful work’ (i.e., work that satisfies one’s feelings or desires). In this way, the emerging literature on calling stresses the affective dimension of the worker. One of the ways that culture teaches us to ‘feel’ our way to our identity is via our attitudes and emotions in the workplace. Hence, issues of subjective fulfillment now tend to overshadow the more prosocial dimensions of what having a calling historically entailed in earlier, tradition-constituted, conceptualizations of work as a calling (such as, by contrast, the Lutheran notion of calling, where one’s station in life also marked the social role by which one served the community).

What I argue is that this literature upholds an incoherent and individualistic conceptualization of meaningfulness that is, ultimately, self-defeating. The self-defeating nature of this individualistic search for fulfillment is largely to blame for rising rates of spiritual emptiness that is coupled with anxiety and depression today, according to one of the twentieth century’s most influential psychologists, Viktor Frankl. In the opening pages of Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl beseeches readers to consider the following:

Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.⁷

All of Frankl’s work wrestles with the “existential vacuum” that was inculcated by the navel-gazing individualism of twentieth-century Western culture.⁸ The emphasis on individually meaningful work within the twenty-first-century calling literature is an extension of this navel-gazing. Like other important thinkers of this era, such as Philip Rieff, Tom Wolfe, and Christopher Lasch, Frankl believed that this vacuum is representative of a void, or a crisis of meaning, that one experiences when individualistic concerns become tantamount to happiness and one no longer looks beyond the self for connection, fulfillment, purpose, meaning, and salvation.

While the work as a calling discourse and late modernity more generally are characterized by the double concern for success and happiness by Western standards of material progress and self-empowerment, Frankl’s theorizing about a flourishing human life is intended to replace the individualistic pursuit of happiness with a pursuit of the good life together within our communities and within our society more broadly. Like Bellah et al., who initiate the secular discourse on work as a calling, Frankl’s psychological research intended to reconnect experiences of personal meaning to good and worthy ends that contribute to the flourishing of human life. This connection between meaningfulness and good ends, Frankl argues, is foundational to our quest for the good life.

Frankl maintains that the perception of one’s life as meaningful or successful “ensues” as a result of aiming at other ends beyond the self’s unregulated preferences and impulses.⁹ His account of logotherapy further argues that striving together with others for the achievement of good and worthy ends changes our desires as well as our very understanding of what it means to lead a successful and happy life. As we aim at good and worthy ends, understood together within our communities, personally meaningful experiences are realized as a byproduct of our self-transcendent visions of finding and living our calling. I begin with Frankl’s account of important goods worth pursuing and the flourishing human life in the opening pages of this chapter because it is much nearer to the narrative vision that Bellah et al. call us to via their calling orientation than much of the contemporary work as a calling discourse tends to be today.

Specifically, Frankl’s research represents a stark contrast to narratives about the successful and happy life, which are frequently proffered by the emerging literature on work as a calling presently. This growing body of literature rests on linguistic patterns of individualism and thus seems to prioritize the achievement of one’s preferences at work. Yet, our modern obsession with navel-gazing, as Frankl says, often causes people to feel like they have “missed” the happy and successful life that they so desperately yearn to find.¹⁰ What Frankl argues is that individuals’ notions of meaningfulness should not become detached from the achievement of good and worthy ends. The divorce of meaning from notions of good and worthy ends, such as good work, the life worth living, and the needs of communities that one’s organization supports, has resulted in the anxious culture of meaninglessness that impacts individuals young and old throughout the West today.

What if Frankl is right? While the late modern search for a personally satisfying life heavily emphasizes individualistic visions of success and happiness, could it be the case that many modern people prevent themselves from experiencing the fulfillment that they hope for by focusing so much on themselves? In other words, could an individualistic construal of one’s calling not only be incoherent but also self-defeating?

Interestingly, Andreas Hirschi offers some empirical validation that should cause us to take Frankl’s suggestion more seriously. His findings from a sample of young professionals found that those study participants who devoted themselves to a sense of work as a calling primarily for their self-enhancement were, on the whole, much more likely to experience “negative views about themselves” than those who prioritized prosocial values in their pursuit of work as a calling.¹¹ Hirschi’s words about the self-enhancement group capture a discovery that is similar to Frankl’s: “Apparently this calling group consists of self-centered and insecure students whose primary goals in work are gaining personal benefits. This indeed constitutes a peculiar type of calling.”¹² Hirschi confirms that individualistically oriented conceptualizations of one’s calling are self-defeating by nature and that they result in a fragile and hollow sense of personal identity.

Without knowing it, Hirschi is actually suggest...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue: Discovering My Calling
• Introduction
• 1. Who Is Your Calling For?
• 2. Why Every Calling Must Resist Workplace Individualism
• 3. How to Discern between ‘True’ and ‘Fake’ Callings
• 4. Why ‘Fake’ Accounts of Calling Exist and Make People Unhappy
• 5. A Reason for Hope: Servant Leaders Who Exhibit ‘True’ Callings
• Postscript
• Index