"What is a "work ethic"? In its most common usage, the phrase connotes a personal quality: the capacity and enthusiasm for hard work, claimed in countless cover letters and celebrated in graduation speeches. In the hands of politicians, capitalists, and certain members of the chattering class, it is a collective phenomenon at the heart of a society and economy: a set of ideas and attitudes about work, centered on the inherent moral and social value of toil, that both fuels and legitimates accumulation."
"Articulated most famously by Max Weber in 1904's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (written after his visit to the St. Louis World's Fair that same year), the work ethic as a social good has been used to explain-and justify-inequalities at many scales for nearly a century, from the relative success of different groups of immigrant workers to the making of global empires."
"Despite its determinative role in much political and economic thinking, the work ethic is often a remarkably static, up-or-down proposition: Workers, or nations, either have it or they don't. Work, however, has changed dramatically over the past two centuries, and so too, we might surmise, has its meaning. Looking at the title of Erik Baker's new book, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America,"
A "work ethic" commonly denotes individual capacity and enthusiasm for hard work. In collective form it becomes a societal ethos assigning moral and social value to toil and legitimizing accumulation and inequality. Early twentieth-century sociological accounts linked the work ethic to broader capitalist development. Capitalist systems cultivate personal industriousness while imposing a collective ethic that requires both labor and belief in its constructed meaning. Popular and political usage often treats the work ethic as a static binary, even though labor and its meanings have changed dramatically over the past two centuries.
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