Sometimes it is necessary for employees to want to take control of their lives. In a time when society deems anyone who leaves at 5 p.m. on the dot as “lazy” or “uncommitted,” work-life boundaries start to come into question.
Claudia Strauss, the Jean M. Pitzer Professor of Anthropology at Pitzer College in the Claremont Colleges consortium, will deliver her lecture, “Weber’s Little-Known Second Work Ethic and Why it Matters,” at 2 p.m. today in the Hall of Philosophy for the Week Five Interfaith Lecture Series theme: “The Spirit of Capitalism: Prosperity and the Enduring Legacy of the Protestant Work Ethic.”
“What I want to do is talk about what (German sociologist Max) Weber meant by the Protestant work ethic and talk about the fact that when I read Weber’s Protestant Ethic, I see him referring actually to two Protestant work ethics,” Strauss said. “I call the second one his hidden work ethic.”
Strauss said she plans to talk about the distinctions Weber made among different stages in the Protestant reformation.
“(Weber) fixated on a more extreme version of it, which we would call a Puritan work ethic, living to work sort of taking over your time, your identity and interests,” Strauss said. “But, he talks about this earlier stage of doing a good job being a duty in the sense that you should be productive and do a good job, but it doesn’t have to take over your life.”
This distinction is what Strauss saw when she interviewed displaced workers in Southern California. She said she’s approaching her lecture from her place as a cultural anthropologist of the contemporary United States, looking at how Americans actually do think about their jobs.
“What I found is that most of them much more conform to this hidden second work ethic of wanting to do a good job, but not wanting work to take over their lives,” Strauss said.
There are important implications at play here, as “a lot of our national policies” make an assumption about human nature that people don’t want work, Strauss said.
“What I actually found is that if the time you have to devote to work is reasonable and the working conditions are good, we can’t really talk about work in the abstract,” she said. “We have to talk about particular jobs and what they’re like.”
Strauss said a third of her interviewees described work as “fun,” which can lead to a false premise of human nature and how people think about work.
“At a personal level, for people in the audience who may be employers, they should not be overlooking the employee who has that second work ethic, what I call a diligent 9-to-5 work ethic,” Strauss said. “They want to do a good job, but then they want to go home. They want boundaries on their work time. They don’t want to have to be answering emails at all hours.”
On the other hand, Strauss said for people who are employed by others, it’s “all right” to have this second work ethic, and it isn’t “anything new.”
“People see this as ‘Oh, this is Gen Z. This is something new,’ ” she said. “I don’t think it’s so new. I’ve seen this not only in my research, which is more than 10 years ago, but in earlier research I did in the 1990s. I suspect this has been around for a while.”
Overall, Strauss said she’d like to see policies to make jobs better, rather than talking abstractly about work ethics.
“Our national political discourse is that on the right, there’s a view of ‘Wow, we don’t have enough of a good work ethic in this country, so we have to force people to work.’ For example, people cannot have Medicaid unless they can prove they’re working so many hours a week,” she said.
On the left, Strauss said there’s a view of “Why should people be forced to earn profits for other people in order to sustain a living?” Curiously, she said, both views assume work is not “intrinsically enjoyable,” or it can’t be.
“They’re both assuming something about human nature, that people don’t really want to work,” she said. “The left would say, ‘Well, why should they have to?’ And the right would say, ‘We’re going to make them.’ ”
What came through to Strauss in her research was people of all different jobs, income levels, education levels and racial and ethnic backgrounds don’t have to be forced to work under the right circumstances, she said.
“I’m really hoping (the audience) will think about what the range of motivations they have, what’s important to them in a job and take heart from seeing there are an awful lot of people who see a good job is one part of a good life, but certainly not all of a good life,” Strauss said.
