Changing Contours of Work. Stephen Sweet
lives on 6th Street in Philadelphia. Aside from its concentrated poverty and predominantly black racial composition, there are two things to note about Mike’s neighborhood: few good jobs are to be found there and police surveillance is pervasive. Because of limited employment options, crime and the illegal work that operates in an underground economy are common. The hyperpolicing that attempts to control Mike and his friends operates with scant tolerance for illegal behavior, focusing on sorting the “dirty” residents from the “clean.” Those who are dirty—like Mike, who engages in the drug trade—face likely imprisonment. Not everyone on 6th Street is dirty. Compared to some other residents, Mike was not as entirely disadvantaged. His mother worked multiple jobs and kept a clean house.
Mike was first arrested at age thirteen for carrying marijuana, but unlike the lenient treatment that he might have received if the same infraction occurred in a middle-class community, he was convicted, given a record, and placed on probation. By the time Mike reached age twenty-two, he had two children with his girlfriend and was selling crack cocaine for extra money to supplement the limited income he earned in a part-time job at a pharmaceutical warehouse. Mike lost his job at the warehouse because he missed too much work while trying to also attend to the needs of his family, including the extra care demanded by his youngest daughter who was born with health problems. When he failed to find a replacement job, he turned to selling drugs as a primary source of income. The rest of his life has unfolded as a story of a life on the run, with incarceration and the prospect of jail time removing him further and further from the hope of ever attaining secure legitimate employment.
Note: Based on On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (pp. 14–19) by Alice Goffman, 2014, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
The six vignettes, all based on real people performing real work, give a sense of the diversity, opportunity, and constraint that exist in the new economy. For Meg and Kavita, economic changes have opened new opportunities, but they coexist with enduring sets of expectations about what mothers and daughters should provide to their spouses, parents, and children. These cultural orientations seem more appropriate to another era and lag behind what these workers ideally want for themselves and, in many instances, what they can provide for others. For Tammy, the moving platform of history has introduced new career tensions because the types of jobs she performed during her entire career have become more difficult to find. And as she tried to find security by investing in the new economy, her meager savings vanished. Emily is one of a new breed of contract workers, and she is figuring out how to create security in a context where employers are increasingly inclined to hire workers for short-term task assignments. Rain exemplifies the type of worker who is commonly cast as a social problem—the undocumented immigrant. On closer examination, his involvement in work is probably not displacing any American workers, and his commitment to work conforms to core American ideals of personal responsibility and effort. In contrast, native-born Mike is not integrated into an opportunity structure that lends itself to upward advancement. While he has made mistakes, even if he had not, the odds have been stacked against him from the start. All of these workers challenge archetypal images of the typical worker, someone who holds a secure 9-to-5 job.Taken together, these six individuals help establish the foundation of an important argument presented in this book: that in the new economy there is no “typical” worker.
The careers of these workers are influenced by demands and social ties off the job. All these workers are making career decisions in the context of their linkages to others. In some circumstances, children are the priority, whereas in other cases, it is the needs of spouses, aging parents, or both (Neal and Hammer 2006; Sweet and Moen 2006). These life-stage circumstances play an important role in shaping worker behavior, expectations, and needs. How people respond to these circumstances is heavily influenced by cultural scripts (e.g., assumptions about what parents should provide for their children) and the availability of resources, which varies from person to person and group to group. And beyond family ties, the contexts of neighborhoods and communities influence one’s ability to find work, the resources to prepare for work, and the security to engage in work (Bookman 2004; Sampson, Morenoff, and Gannon-Rowley 2002; Swisher, Sweet, and Moen 2004; Voydanoff 2007). In a word, a good characterization of workers’ lives on and off the job is complex. Work today introduces various strains and tensions, and strains and tensions experienced off the job affect the capacity to work.
Culture and Work
One of the core questions guiding the sociology of work concerns how much work should be performed and the amount of work that should be expected of individuals throughout their life course. Most classic theories of work embrace cultural perspectives that view labor, in and of itself, as a noble endeavor. Karl Marx (1964 [1844]), for example, argued that work is what distinguishes humans from other species, and he highlighted how it enables people to transform their environments to suit human interests. Sigmund Freud (1961 [1929]) argued that work is a socially accepted means by which humans can direct their sublimated sexual energies. As such, he saw work as a means of achieving satisfaction when fulfillment in other parts of life is lacking or is prohibited. Émile Durkheim (1964 [1895]) offered a different thesis, that work and the complex division of labor in society offered a means to create social cohesion. All these perspectives have in common the assumption that work has the potential to cement social bonds and advance the development of civilization. These perspectives suggest that the more work that people are able to perform, the more liberated their lives will be; they would evaluate the new economy in terms of its ability to enable people to work more. This proposition should not be accepted too quickly, however.
Is it a cultural universal that work should be praised and that commitment to work is an indicator of social health? Anthropological and historical studies suggest otherwise. In many cultures, work is defined as the means for day-to-day survival. Subsistence economies operate on the basis of cultural assumptions that work is primarily a means to an end, so that once individuals have enough food and shelter, labor is expected to cease. Such an orientation to work in today’s American culture would indicate a moral weakness and be perceived as a threat to social order. But from the point of view of many other cultures, our embrace of work could be considered pathological. If one can obtain enough to eat and gain sufficient shelter by working a few hours a day, so be it. Why should a hunter set out in search of game if the supply of food is adequate (Brody 2002; Sahlins 1972)?2 And even within geographic regions such as modern-day Western Europe, expectations regarding the age at which individuals are expected to embark on careers, or to retire, vary remarkably. These varied life course scripts result in some cultures expecting ten years (or more) of additional attachment to the labor force than others, with policies that match these expectations (Sweet 2009). When viewed through this lens, Mike’s loose attachment to work becomes more understandable and seems a lot less pathological. And note that Meg’s decision to exit the labor force at midlife to care for her children carries with it no stigma.
One important cultural question concerns why work plays such a central role in some societies but not in others. Part of the answer, according to Max Weber (1998 [1905]), is that the societies in the forefront of the Industrial Revolution had been swayed by changing religious doctrines. These religious beliefs, particularly those that underpinned the Protestant Reformation, created anxieties about one’s fate in the afterlife. In response, Western European and American culture advanced the value of the work ethic, a belief that work is not something people simply do—it is a God-given purpose. Devoting oneself to work and doing a good job were considered to be ways of demonstrating that a life of virtue reflects grace. And as members of these societies embraced the idea that work is “a calling,” they applied themselves to their jobs with greater vigor, creating wealth and affirming to themselves and others that God was looking favorably on their actions.
Although many now question Weber’s thesis that the Protestant Reformation was responsible for the emergence of capitalism, the centrality of the work ethic to the development of Western society is widely accepted. So deeply is it ingrained in contemporary American culture that nearly three-quarters of Americans report that they would continue to work, even if they had enough money to live as comfortably as they would like for the rest of their lives.3 Americans work to affirm to themselves and others that they are virtuous, moral individuals