It is interesting that you have shared Wolfe's essay on the Moral Meaning Of
Work. I have had access to this article for sometime now and cited it in a
final paper that I submitted one week ago to satisfy the requirements of the
online course, "Redefining the Workplace" offered by The Graduate School of
America. In this course we used both Jeremy Rifkin's End of Work and William
Bridges' JobShift as the core texts.
Gaylord Sprauve
Tom Walker wrote:
> Futureworkers may be interested in this review essay by Alan Wolfe from the
> September/October issue of American Prospect. In the article, Wolfe
> discusses works by Daniel Bell, Shirley Burgraf, David Gordon, Arlie
> Hochschild, John Hood, Benjamin Hunnicutt, Sanford Jacoby, Robert Lane,
> Myron Magnet, Edmund Phelps, Jeremy Rifkin, William Julius Wilson and Robert
> Wuthnow.
>
> http://epn.org/prospect/34/34wolfnf.html
>
> "The debate over the moral meaning of work begins with an argument about
> whether work is basically degrading or ennobling. Is work, as Herbert
> Marcuse argued in Eros and Civilization, such a restraint on people's
> capacities for freedom that, in a future utopia, it would become the
> exception and leisure the rule? Or has work, as Daniel Bell wrote in The End
> of Ideology, "always stood at the center of moral consciousness" in the
> West-either as a corrective to idleness in Christian doctrine, or as a
> necessity for genuine humanity in the ideas of Thorstein Veblen, John Dewey,
> or Hannah Arendt?
>
> "Prompted by such developments as the globalization of capitalism, corporate
> downsizing, welfare reform, considerations of gender equality, and the
> appeal of voluntarism, the United States is experiencing a revival of debate
> over the moral meaning of work. Unlike many debates, this one is not between
> left and right; one can find enthusiasts for, and critics of, work on both
> sides of the political spectrum. It makes more sense to understand the
> debate as one between moderates who appreciate work for encouraging people's
> moral capacities but also seek to enrich it and balance it with other
> commitments, and those who find work oppressive and stultifying. Liberals
> and conservatives who maintain the latter disagree only over whether the
> demise of work should be celebrated in the name of freedom or its extension
> encouraged in the name of discipline."
>
> http://epn.org/prospect/34/34wolfnf.html
>
> Regards,
>
> Tom Walker
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