Claudia Strauss
What Work Means: Beyond the Puritan Work Ethic
Featured on Wharton Business Daily for Sirius XM, the Harvard Business Review, and at the labor organizing site, Power at Work.
“This book is smart, timely, and beautifully written. It offers a thoughtful, nuanced, always-accessible look at the various ways people understand work and being out of work in the contemporary US.”
Carrie Lane, Cal State Fullerton, author of A Company of One
Buy Now
What Work Means goes beyond the stereotypes and captures the diverse ways Americans view work as a part of a good life. Dispelling the notion of Americans as obsessive workaholics, Claudia Strauss presents a more nuanced perspective. While some live to work, others prefer a diligent 9-to-5 work ethic that is conscientious but preserves time for other interests. Her participants often enjoyed their jobs without making work the focus of their life. These findings challenge laborist views of waged work as central to a good life as well as post-work theories that treat work solely as exploitative and soul-crushing.
Drawing upon the evocative stories of unemployed Americans from a wide range of occupations, from day laborers to corporate managers, both immigrant and native-born, Strauss also explores how diverse Americans think about accepting financial support from family, friends, and the state, gendered meanings of breadwinning, and what the ever-elusive American dream means to them. By considering how unemployment experiences now diverge from joblessness earlier, What Work Means paves the way for a historically and culturally informed discussion of meanings of work in a future of teleworking, greater automation, and increasing nonstandard employment.
From HBR Editor Gretchen Gavett's essay on four new books about overwork: "The cultural anthropologist Claudia Strauss digs into this phenomenon in her book What Work Means: Beyond the Puritan Work Ethic. ... [I]t includes both theory and conversations with people of varying racial backgrounds and economic classes who were laid off during the Great Recession. The way Strauss frames “work centrality” in our lives is instructive, particularly when her interviewees try to make sense of their jobless selves. She explores the differences between those of us who live to work and those who have a 9-to-5 mentality and points out that “these two productivist work ethics may not be fixed orientations.” We learn and change according to our experiences, and “it is also possible for social and cultural values to change.” --"Getting Over Overwork," HBR, Nov/Dec 2024
Claudia Strauss and hosts Leon Garber and Alen Ulman debate whether we set our expectations too high for a meaningful job. They also discuss the four types of work ethic, how automation might impact our work lives, studies about the effects of a four day work-week, and the myth of people on government assistance programs not wanting to work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBGBsyMqsS4
In a conversation with host Tom Discenna about What Work Means, Claudia Strauss explains four key meanings of work in the United States today, why white picket fences are a symbol of appropriate consumption desires, continuity and change in traditional gendered meanings of being a breadwinner, problems with both post-work and laborist work politics, and why, in the end, the specifics of one’s job matter more than abstract work ethics.
"The Myth of the Obsessive American Work Ethic is Harmful to Workers and Worker Power," Power at Work, https://poweratwork.us/the-myth-of-the-obsessive-american-work
Cornell University Press 1869 podcast
Host Jonathan Hall interviews Claudia Strauss about her new book, What Work Means. The topics they discuss include:
*Why being an obsessive workaholic is not the American way
*The harm from not recognizing the diligent-9-to-5 work ethic
*What’s wrong with “Nobody wants to work anymore”
*Why you don’t have to love your work to enjoy it
https://soundcloud.com/1869thecuppodcast/1869-ep-150-claudia-strauss
Learn more:
"What Weber’s Protestant work ethic misses about Americans’ attitudes about work," Cornell University Press Blog, June 4, 2024,https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/protestant-work-ethic-max-weber-what-work-means-claudia-strauss-06-06-2024/
Discussion with Carrie Lane about What Work Means, CaMP Anthropology, August 26, 2024, https://campanthropology.org/2024/08/
What’s the 411 with Sharon Kay, WFSK, September 2024, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EzYA1N8960Rcc4F3FdeONA8MIMUOGr7J/view
Counterpoint radio, September 2024, https://btlonline.org/author-asks-do-we-work-to-live-or-live-to-work/
This Anthro Life podcast, September 2024, https://www.thisanthrolife.org/how-ai-and-technology-are-redefining-work-in-the-post-pandemic-world-with-claudia-strauss/