No literary form captures the pathologies of contemporary American work quite like the humble—honored, grateful, blessed—LinkedIn post. In the right light, the social network for professionals is a lavish psychoanalytic corpus, bursting with naked ambition, inspiration, desperation, status-seeking, spiritual yearning, brownnosing, name-dropping, corporate shilling, and self-promotion. Novels have been written about less, but no one is on LinkedIn for the prose. Recently, I visited the site after years of being away. A college classmate and talented artist was posting about the balancing act of being an “effective solopreneur”; a former business contact was sharing his professional journey, with the moral “don’t be afraid to change direction”; a person identifying as “ex-Meta” encouraged hopeful Meta interviewees to “show real connection to the mission and motivation”; a director at a multinational brewing company that was hiring wrote, “Our mandate is to dream, challenge, question and provoke.”
Baker is a lecturer in the history of science at Harvard, an associate editor of The Drift, and a freelance writer for various publications (including this one). He sees his book as a corrective to “conventional histories of midcentury American culture,” which he believes overemphasize bureaucracy and conformism. As a study in intellectual history, “Make Your Own Job” is less concerned with the chronological development of American entrepreneurship than with the idea of it—the ways in which “ordinary people have thought about their working lives” and how entrepreneurialism has become a value unto itself. Baker aims to track the anxieties and desires of a society undergoing epochal transitions and the evolution of what he calls “the entrepreneurial work ethic”: an orientation that is highly individualistic and competitive, and that operates on the level of personality. It is present in the pervasive compulsion to work harder, longer hours and to feel adrift or even “devoid of purpose” when there isn’t enough work—or the “right” work—to do.
The entrepreneurial work ethic, Baker writes, meets a “fundamental ideological need” by addressing a central tension of American capitalism: most people need to work to earn a living, but well-paid, stable, and fulfilling jobs are hard to find. In times of intensifying economic inequality, when many of the jobs on offer are precarious, underpaid, and spiritually deadening, the prospect of becoming your own boss holds a lot of appeal. Entrepreneurialism is “tenacious,” Baker maintains, in part because it has the power to “metabolize discontent with the present order of work.” It suggests the possibility of liberation or relief—an exit, or a workaround. The ethic, he also notes, tends to be popular during periods of acute unemployment. The result is too many people working much too hard because there’s just not enough work.
Before the entrepreneurial work ethic became widespread, in Baker’s account, what predominated was the “industrious work ethic,” in which labor of any kind was considered a moral good, and framed in terms of stoicism and duty. The industrious work ethic applied to workers in mills and on Henry Ford-style assembly lines, and echoes of it could be seen in middle-class “organization men,” who were loyal to their employers, and received loyalty in return. Workers submitted to a company, whether I.B.M. or General Motors, and slotted themselves into bureaucratic structures that discouraged risktaking and did not reward individualism. This orientation toward work was buffered, in part, by strong labor unions and a relatively sturdy social safety net. [ed. and a social compact - give me your all, and I'll give you economic security.]
If the industrious work ethic advanced a certain kind of “static moralism,” Baker writes, the entrepreneurial work ethic was “a dynamic philosophy of personal development.” The notion that one’s unique personality could be transmuted into prosperity and opportunity had broad appeal at a time of economic instability and cultural transformation. Baker identifies a number of practices and traditions from the first half of the twentieth century as embodying entrepreneurialism, from New Thought, an influential spiritual movement that championed the transcendence of the mind over material reality, to direct-selling networks. (“Now you are in business for yourself,” Avon told its salespeople.) But the industrious work ethic prevailed well past the mid-century mark, with many workers accepting mental or physical drudgery in return for security and predictability; it was not until the later decades of the century that the entrepreneurial work ethic came into full force. Though entrepreneurial capitalism might have been a bit onerous in its implicit mandate to both generate opportunities and fulfill them, it was also presented as a more creative, even kinder alternative to the industrial capitalism that preceded it. (...)
In 1997, Peters published an essay in Fast Company titled “The Brand Called You,” in which he coined the phrase “personal branding.” “We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc.,” he wrote. “To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You.” The marketing campaign for Me Inc. had to be relentless. “Your network of friends, colleagues, clients, and customers is the most important marketing vehicle you’ve got,” he wrote, encouraging readers to “nurture your network.” There was no room, in this vision, for employees who did their jobs but didn’t blow their bosses’ minds. The same year, another article in Fast Company—“Free Agent Nation,” by Daniel H. Pink, a former speechwriter for Vice-President Al Gore—celebrated the rising number of freelance workers as a new movement. No matter that many were casualties of downsizings, facing a leaner corporate world: Pink preached freedom, modernity, and “a beautiful synchronicity between who you are and what you do.”
[ed. A convenient excuse for capitalism/neoliberalism destroying the social contract between corporations and workers (laughable for a long time, but now about to get much worse, re: AI). Eventually everyone will be some kind of hustler, influencer or taskrabbit.]
