The Insidious Charms of the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic

No literary form captures the pathologies of contemporary American work quite like the humble—honored, grateful, blessed—LinkedIn post. In the right light, the social network for professionals is a lavish psychoanalytic corpus, bursting with naked ambition, inspiration, desperation, status-seeking, spiritual yearning, brownnosing, name-dropping, corporate shilling, and self-promotion. Novels have been written about less, but no one is on LinkedIn for the prose. Recently, I visited the site after years of being away. A college classmate and talented artist was posting about the balancing act of being an “effective solopreneur”; a former business contact was sharing his professional journey, with the moral “don’t be afraid to change direction”; a person identifying as “ex-Meta” encouraged hopeful Meta interviewees to “show real connection to the mission and motivation”; a director at a multinational brewing company that was hiring wrote, “Our mandate is to dream, challenge, question and provoke.”

When did people start talking like this? LinkedIn’s style of sanitized professional chatter—to say nothing of the robust cottage industry that exists to support it, from branding strategists and career coaches to software programs designed to generate shareable, safe-for-work content—is of a piece with mantras like “do what you love,” “follow your passion,” “bring your whole self to work,” and “make a life, not just a living.” (The linguistic trend extends beyond the domain of yoga classes and L.E.D. signage in co-working spaces; a recent Times article described Luigi Mangione, the twenty-six-year-old accused of murdering the C.E.O. of UnitedHealthcare, as possessing “an entrepreneurial spirit” in college, because he resold Christmas lights.) This discourse around work can seem like a distinctly modern phenomenon. But a new book, “Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America” (Harvard), by Erik Baker, argues that the imperative to imbue work with personal significance is part of a long-standing national preoccupation with entrepreneurialism.

Baker is a lecturer in the history of science at Harvard, an associate editor of The Drift, and a freelance writer for various publications (including this one). He sees his book as a corrective to “conventional histories of midcentury American culture,” which he believes overemphasize bureaucracy and conformism. As a study in intellectual history, “Make Your Own Job” is less concerned with the chronological development of American entrepreneurship than with the idea of it—the ways in which “ordinary people have thought about their working lives” and how entrepreneurialism has become a value unto itself. Baker aims to track the anxieties and desires of a society undergoing epochal transitions and the evolution of what he calls “the entrepreneurial work ethic”: an orientation that is highly individualistic and competitive, and that operates on the level of personality. It is present in the pervasive compulsion to work harder, longer hours and to feel adrift or even “devoid of purpose” when there isn’t enough work—or the “right” work—to do.

The entrepreneurial work ethic, Baker writes, meets a “fundamental ideological need” by addressing a central tension of American capitalism: most people need to work to earn a living, but well-paid, stable, and fulfilling jobs are hard to find. In times of intensifying economic inequality, when many of the jobs on offer are precarious, underpaid, and spiritually deadening, the prospect of becoming your own boss holds a lot of appeal. Entrepreneurialism is “tenacious,” Baker maintains, in part because it has the power to “metabolize discontent with the present order of work.” It suggests the possibility of liberation or relief—an exit, or a workaround. The ethic, he also notes, tends to be popular during periods of acute unemployment. The result is too many people working much too hard because there’s just not enough work.

Before the entrepreneurial work ethic became widespread, in Baker’s account, what predominated was the “industrious work ethic,” in which labor of any kind was considered a moral good, and framed in terms of stoicism and duty. The industrious work ethic applied to workers in mills and on Henry Ford-style assembly lines, and echoes of it could be seen in middle-class “organization men,” who were loyal to their employers, and received loyalty in return. Workers submitted to a company, whether I.B.M. or General Motors, and slotted themselves into bureaucratic structures that discouraged risktaking and did not reward individualism. This orientation toward work was buffered, in part, by strong labor unions and a relatively sturdy social safety net.

If the industrious work ethic advanced a certain kind of “static moralism,” Baker writes, the entrepreneurial work ethic was “a dynamic philosophy of personal development.” The notion that one’s unique personality could be transmuted into prosperity and opportunity had broad appeal at a time of economic instability and cultural transformation. Baker identifies a number of practices and traditions from the first half of the twentieth century as embodying entrepreneurialism, from New Thought, an influential spiritual movement that championed the transcendence of the mind over material reality, to direct-selling networks. (“Now you are in business for yourself,” Avon told its salespeople.) But the industrious work ethic prevailed well past the mid-century mark, with many workers accepting mental or physical drudgery in return for security and predictability; it was not until the later decades of the century that the entrepreneurial work ethic came into full force. Though entrepreneurial capitalism might have been a bit onerous in its implicit mandate to both generate opportunities and fulfill them, it was also presented as a more creative, even kinder alternative to the industrial capitalism that preceded it.

The idea of a workplace in which entrepreneurialism could be exhibited at every level was entrenched by self-help writers and what Baker calls “management intellectuals”—consultants, corporate executives, business journalists, and other predecessors of today’s TED-talk thought leaders. One of the most prominent of these was Peter Drucker, an Austrian-born American writer, consultant, and professor. His breakthrough book was “Concept of the Corporation” (1946), a sort of ethnography and appraisal of General Motors. In his view, the personal satisfaction of employees was essential to a company’s bottom line. Large organizations, run properly, could instill a sense of purpose and dignity even among rank-and-file workers—which would, in turn, maximize productivity and profits. Drucker was especially taken with the ideal of the entrepreneurial manager: an inspiring, creative, personable leader who cultivated loyal, productive, and enterprising employees. In an environment where American democracy was seen as inextricable from American capitalism, the entrepreneur could be a heroic figure. In 1949, Drucker wrote a column for Fortune in which he claimed that entrepreneurialism was a matter of “national interest.” He believed that corporations fulfilled a crucial political function: entrepreneurial managers could foster a sense of citizenship and national responsibility in their subordinates. Entrepreneurship, it would follow, was practically patriotic, a bulwark against authoritarian and totalitarian ways.

By the eighties, Drucker had become one of the most prominent management intellectuals in the U.S. That decade brought corporate restructuring, deepened inequality, and waves of consultants and career “business gurus.” Among them was Tom Peters, an ex-McKinsey consultant who emerged as a public figure with the 1982 mega-best-seller “In Search of Excellence.” Peters and his co-author, Robert Waterman, took stock of the previous decade’s flailing economy, identified companies that had survived inflation, high interest rates, global competition, and corporate bloat—3M, Johnson & Johnson, Frito-Lay—and explained to readers how American industry might learn from such success stories and recover. The book highlighted the importance of “corporate culture,” a workplace identity that could enable employees to feel a sense of agency, ownership, and purpose in their day-to-day work. As a management book, “In Search of Excellence” ostensibly spoke to the executive class—but, as its success implies, it also struck a nerve with readers more likely to toil for a dysfunctional company than to run one.

In 1997, Peters published an essay in Fast Company titled “The Brand Called You,” in which he coined the phrase “personal branding.” “We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc.,” he wrote. “To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You.” The marketing campaign for Me Inc. had to be relentless. “Your network of friends, colleagues, clients, and customers is the most important marketing vehicle you’ve got,” he wrote, encouraging readers to “nurture your network.” There was no room, in this vision, for employees who did their jobs but didn’t blow their bosses’ minds. The same year, another article in Fast Company—“Free Agent Nation,” by Daniel H. Pink, a former speechwriter for Vice-President Al Gore—celebrated the rising number of freelance workers as a new movement. No matter that many were casualties of downsizings, facing a leaner corporate world: Pink preached freedom, modernity, and “a beautiful synchronicity between who you are and what you do.”

Drucker, Peters, and Pink were among the many prophets of today’s hustle-and-grind economy, public thinkers whose arguments reflected a broader national turn toward individualism and privatization. Some of Baker’s examples of this shift are more convincing than others: even Henry Ford is described as exhibiting entrepreneurialism in a transitional state. (Ford was interested in New Thought; given his violent anti-unionism, it is perhaps no surprise that a philosophy centered on forceful individualism would appeal.) “Make Your Own Job” does avail itself to conceptual expansiveness. Reading Baker, you sense that the entrepreneurial work ethic, once named, can apply to any number of things: conversations about poverty or homelessness, mandates to “manage up,” the meritocracy myth, children’s entertainment. At times, in Baker’s book, the idea becomes vaporously all-encompassing. Still, viewed more narrowly, it can be helpfully diagnostic.

Silicon Valley may well represent the apotheosis of the entrepreneurial work ethic, particularly in its development of the so-called platform economy, which both relies on and perpetuates widespread precarity. Entrepreneurialism is at the core of the tech industry’s founding myths, reaffirmed in its workplace rhetoric and unqualified belief in meritocracy. Anyone who has worked at a contemporary startup will be familiar with what Drucker enthusiastically described as the “managerial attitude”: the employee whose self-conception is “as a partner in the enterprise,” in Baker’s words, and who is fully committed to the enterprise, regardless of pay or position. Bosses, it would seem, have wanted this sort of employee for a century; Silicon Valley has been good at producing them.

At the same time, the industry is leery of the entrepreneurial workers on whom it relies. Better to fetishize the founders. In recent decades, the tech sector has produced a string of high-profile bosses so devoid of charm as to be beguiling. Many of them will be in direct contact with the White House in coming years; several had front-row seats to Trump’s Inauguration. (A postwar “intimacy” that Baker describes between “ideas about work and management and ideas about American political culture” seems almost chaste by comparison.) That corporate leaders would want to protect their own interests is not surprising, but there is more at play. Far from being just a band of small-government libertarians, tech executives see an opportunity to shape the world in their image.

Entrepreneurialism, Baker writes, is cyclical, and benefits from “ritual amnesia.” The perpetuation of the entrepreneurial work ethic depends on proponents “denouncing the quality of the work that capitalism has given us to date and in the next breath asking for more.” But what, if anything, could come after it? In the final pages of his book, Baker suggests a few notional antidotes: organized labor, mutual aid, “all those places where the poor and precarious organize to give themselves a foretaste of utopia.” Elsewhere, there are other ideas. Last fall, Paul Graham, a founder of Y Combinator and a sort of management intellectual for the startup set, published a short blog post titled “Founder Mode,” in which he discussed a style of leadership that is intensely micromanaging and, in his view, more effective than the common practice of trust and delegation. The alternative, Graham writes, is to “hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground.” Gone is the figure of the inspirational, motivational, democratic boss. Farewell to rizz. In this paradigm, the ideal worker is less like a corporate ally or a trusted collaborator and more like a subject of an authoritarian regime. (At the bottom of the post, Graham thanked its early readers: a handful of venture capitalists and tech C.E.O.s, including Elon Musk.)