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The Working Life: The Promise and Betrayal of Modern Work

Average customer rating:

Employer manipulation and arbitrariness (4.25*s)
Excellent book
Makes use of myriad areas to exemplify values and attitudes
A more optimistic 'Nickel and Dimed"
Provocative Overview of What We Often Take for Granted

The Working Life: The Promise and Betrayal of Modern Work
Joanne B. Ciulla
Manufacturer: Three Rivers Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0609807374
Release Date: 2001-03-20

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Work, for most of us, is something we do, not something we think about. We may wonder whether our work is sufficiently stimulating, whether it brings in enough money, or whether it makes a difference in the grand scheme of things, but we don't often question what, in fact, work really is, and why we work in the first place. In The Working Life, Joanne Ciulla asks these critical questions and others, taking a philosophical, sociological, and practical look at the nature of work and its role in our lives today.

As Ciulla points out, we live in a work-oriented society where, even though we have more freedom and flexibility than ever and more tools to increase convenience and efficiency, our work determines our lives. We have "gone beyond the work ethic," she states, to a point where our jobs have become our primary source of identity. To understand this, Ciulla looks at the values we reflect in our choice of jobs and professions, the attitudes we express in our language for work, and the sociohistorical journey that work has taken from cursed necessity to calling. She follows the path of work in our recent past, from unregulated labor and slavery, through unionism, to the rise of the all-encompassing corporation and today's blurred lines between private and public lives. In the final section, Ciulla investigates the role that work plays in our understanding and use of time and our search for meaning.

Now teaching courses on ethics, leadership, and critical thinking at Virginia's University of Richmond, Ciulla has examined and experienced the nature of work from both sides of the managerial divide. After supporting herself through the first nine years of an academic career with bar and restaurant work, she went on to study and teach business ethics at Harvard and Wharton. These varied experiences give the book a balanced and sensitive tone, adding credibility to her insights. She supports and refines her ideas about work with the comments of philosophers, writers, sociologists, economists, management theorists, and even the narratives of popular television shows. Her sources range from Aristotle and the ancient storyteller Aesop to the early-20th-century time-study engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor, the comic strip "Dilbert," and modern-day business gurus. The diversity of perspectives is inspiring and helps--together with Ciulla's own interpretations and clear, precise prose--create a thought-provoking and stimulating look at the nature of work. --S. Ketchum

Book Description

EXPLORING AND EXPLODING OUR NOTIONS OF WORK

Joanne B. Ciulla, a noted scholar in Leadership and Ethics, examines why so many people today have let their jobs take over their lives. Technology was supposed to free us from work, but instead we work longer hours-often tethered to the office at home by cell phones and e-mail. People still look to work for self-fulfillment, community, and identity, but these things may be increasingly difficult to find in today's workplace. Gone is the social contract where employees and employers shared a sense of mutual loyalty, yet many of us still sacrifice personal time for jobs that we could lose at the drop of a stock price. Tracing the evolution of the meaning of work from Aesop to Dilbert, and critically examining the past 100 years of management practices, Ciulla asks questions that we often willfully ignore at our own peril.

*When you are on your deathbed, will you wish you had spent more time at the office?

*Why do we define ourselves by our jobs rather than by other activities we do outside of work?

*What can employers and employees promise each other in today's business environment?

Provocative and entertaining, The Working Life challenges us to think about the meaning of work and its impact on our lives.

Customer Reviews:

Employer manipulation and arbitrariness (4.25*s).......2007-06-21

Never at any time in our past have work and workplaces been such an integral part of our lives - often forming our very identities. Because of the centrality of work in our lives, the author conducts a wide-ranging examination of work including basic definitions and a brief historical look even to ancient times, its potential for providing meaning to our lives, and the control that employers have over the nature of work and the organization of workplaces.

As the author points out, work was once under the control of craftsmen, who worked to produce a complete product irrespective of the specific time needed. With the industrial revolution that manner of working was completely undermined as factory owners gained control by breaking manufacturing into a sequence of simplistic, timed steps to be performed by workers with minimal training, in essence bypassing skilled craftsmen. But the high-speed, dead-end nature of that work was problematical, resulting in massive turnover and no commitment on the part of employees, not to mention the formation of unions. Employers in the 1920s began a counter offensive by adopting a human relations approach geared to inducing willing compliance to perform deadening jobs. As part of that approach, businesses provided increased benefits for employees. Consumerism was promoted as the means to produce the meaning in lives lacking in the workplace. Employers have in more recent times pushed such initiatives as creating a family-like corporate culture (IBM), work teams for purposes of employee participation and empowerment, and promoting total quality management (TQM) to closely bind workers to companies and their agendas, especially white-collar workers. Many social critics, including C. Wright Mills, view these programs as mere manipulation of employees, creating conforming, compliant organization men.

There was the assumption that corporate and employee interests were one and the same and that loyalty and trust best described the new employment relationship. The superficiality of this new social compact was brought home in a devastating manner beginning in the early 1990s as corporations supposedly under the dictates of global markets unceremoniously shed thousands of loyal employees. These newly downsized companies were said to be re-engineered - more management speak for unilateral actions. Employee empowerment turned out to be a cynical ploy to be discarded at the first convenient opportunity.

Given the utter lack of concern on the part of employers to providing long-term employment, the author chides those who continue to look to places of employment to provide the fulfillment normally provided by family, friends, and communities. She notes that unions are the only the workplace organizations that have ever provided a basis for fairness and justice in contrast to the informality of implied agreements easily withdrawn by management.

The book is disappointing because having clearly assessed the state of employment in the US, the author does virtually nothing in recommending change, other than to state the obvious that employers are unreliable in terms of providing security and meaning. At the least, she could have outlined the European approach of works councils and active employment policies. European workers long ago realized that employers cannot be allowed to act with impunity when their economic well-being is at stake. The American system of employers arbitrarily turning workers' lives upside down with no avenue for effective worker input is unconscionable.

The book is a well-written, lively overview of the state of working in America. She notes others have described the internals of workplaces, most notably the Dilbert cartoons. She also notes the lack of community among workers, who prefer to adopt cynical self-coping approaches to modern work instead of collaborating to change it. In the face of the obvious employer disregard for employee well-being, the passivity of American workers is baffling.

Excellent book.......2006-10-15

Prof. Ciulla tackles this central component of Life from different directions. The book will make you think and maybe even change your preferences in life.

Makes use of myriad areas to exemplify values and attitudes.......2005-05-28

This book explores the over-worked state of Americans today and why people work at all. The author helps readers discover the values and attitudes expressed in their jobs using history, literature, popular culture, and personal anecdotes. Many good insights.

A more optimistic 'Nickel and Dimed".......2001-11-29

Sciulla's book avoids policy conclusions, and other theoretical certainties as other books like Fogels' 4th Awakening. She notes the interesting point that "Today, clock time measures events" in the past events measured time. For example, in Magadascar a half hour was measured by the time it took to cook rice. She became interested in the nature of work when she subsidised one job teaching philosophy with another as a waitress in a restaurant. Ms. Ciulla is particularly struck by the fact thatt wealth has not brought happiness. People continue to want to earn a living. Even when people have enough to live on, many of them continue to want to work, remaining perplexed at the fact that while life is supposed to be easier, many continue to seek meaning through employment. However, she notes, employment provides a schedule and a rythm for daily life and serves as an outlet ofr greater forms of community participation.

Provocative Overview of What We Often Take for Granted.......2001-02-06

Joanne Ciulla presents a very well organized, philosophically grounded overview of work -- its varying meanings, its historical evolution, and its paradoxes as found in modern institutions. She is very up front with the reader in her introduction, admitting that this book is not a scientific investigation, but rather a broad interpretation of the meaning of work and how it has come to both bless and curse us in present times. Accordingly, there are succint summaries of some of the major interpretations of work -- from the early Greek philosophers to contemporary management schools.

But this is more than just an overview, too. Ciulla has a way of getting her readers to look at work with unexpected insights every step of the way. She peels away the common sense and taken-for-granted interpretations of work (which are often based on promising the worker some sort of fulfillment, but at the price of surrenduring autonomy). She does a nice job of deflating recent management theories that tout "new" approaches (management theory is woefully a-historical, she asserts, and is always looking at recycled approaches as though they are breakthroughs). There is a tone of leariness here, rooted in a skepticism over those who apply new management theories in order to exert greater control over individuals, and encourage them to shift their focus more and more away from families, community, and individually expressed forms of self-worth.

Overall, if you're skeptical of the latest management promises of creating "fulfilling work" (or if you really think the "Dilbert" cartoon series is right on the mark), you'll like this book. If you are looking for something that offers a new twist to management technique, you will likely find this book impractical and overly alarmist.

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