History

Erik Baker, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America (Harvard University Press), 352 pp. Hardback, $35.00.

Erik Baker’s Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America is a prescient work, arriving as Donald Trump unleashed the twenty-first century’s most recognizable and comically villainous embodiments of the entrepreneurial spirit, Elon Musk and his memesquad, DOGE, to eviscerate the federal government—all in the name of conscientious efficiency and responsible cost cutting. As Baker contends in an op-ed for The New York Times, the modern expression of success is not Thorstein Veblen’s conspicuous consumption or leisure but Elon Musk’s “conspicuous work.” The brash live-to-work mantra that insists upon a dissolution between personal and work life has become the norm for influential CEOs and the common ethos for a generation of workers trained to survive in the precarity of a post-2008 economy.

Baker’s excellent examination of entrepreneurialism as the definitive work ethic of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries frames the “rise-and-grind” spirit as the holy successor to the industrial pneuma of the nineteenth century. If nineteenth-century industrialism depended on dutiful workers tirelessly completing their assigned tasks, entrepreneurialism relies upon imaginative workers who not only create their own work but imbue it with spiritual meaningfulness. “Happy workers,” so the entrepreneurial dogma goes, “make their own jobs. They find intrinsic rewards in their work, they do what they love, they invest their work with passion, vision, the very substance of their selfhood.”

Make Your Own Job begins where Daniel Rodgers’s seminal The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850–1920 (1978) ends—with Henry Ford as the herald of new industrial thought on work ethic in manufacturing. While Ford is often associated with the infamous assembly-line process and Frederick Taylor’s scientific management, both technologies faulted for the deskilling of American workers, Baker surprises by highlighting Ford’s embrace of the secularized New Thought philosophy to turn Ford Motor plants into freeform managerial networks. From here, Make Your Own Job tracks the evolution of the entrepreneurial spirit in American work culture across the decades of the twentieth century from a quasi-benevolent attempt at valorizing work to a malevolent “disruption” of the status quo by tech industries hellbent on offloading as much corporate responsibility as possible on gig workers. To achieve this, Baker looks past the purveys of economists and academic economics—the preferred subjects of the historical study of capitalism—to interrogate the impact of popular psychologists and so-called management experts on the public’s conception of work. In so doing, Baker charts the transformation of the American work ethic from devout industriousness to a cult of personality faithful to the entrepreneurial ethos of self-management and labor devotion.

What is striking about Baker’s book is how it frames the entrepreneurial work ethic—like its forebearer the industrial work ethic—as a kind of religious movement. Throughout the book, Baker captures the religious fervor of entrepreneurs eager to return the holy conviction of work to the working class. However, unlike industriousness, which was understood as a means of materializing spirituality through work, entrepreneurialism stands as a self-conscious divinity that centers the entrepreneur as the totem of right labor practice. For example, the early entrepreneur characterized himself as the sacred custodian of work’s joy “through the example of his own extraordinary and spiritually charged enthusiasm for work.” Additionally, in the dog days of the Great Depression, Baker explains, entrepreneurialism stood like a “pre-rational article of faith” for workers desperate to find employment. When traditional employers shuttered, direct-sales industries boomed as workers flocked to companies like Avon to become their own bosses. And perhaps the most overt decree of entrepreneurial excellence comes from Stewart Brand, the influential counter-culturalist who inspired Steve Jobs, who wrote of entrepreneurs, “We are as gods, and we might as well get good at it.” Baker’s observance of this pomposity provides an unsettling look into the self-righteous psychology of business leaders who often see themselves above common ethical and moral logic.

Baker’s book astutely captures the cultural abandonment of the worker for the celestial sheen of the CEO.

One disappointment is that Baker turns away from workers themselves and their beliefs in, or apprehensions toward, the new work ethic. As Make Your Own Job moves into discussions of more contemporary shifts in entrepreneurial culture, the focus draws in tightly on the business school philosophizers and the corporate idols who institutionalize the entrepreneurial ethos. While there is still space provided for the worker-turned-intrapreneur to articulate his or her feelings on the matter, Make Your Own Job emphasizes the echo chamber of business magazines quoting corporate bosses recycling theories proposed by business school theorists. This is not a dig at Baker’s research (which is superb) or at the scope of his project (which is robust and detailed) but an acknowledgment that Baker’s book astutely captures the cultural abandonment of the worker for the celestial sheen of the CEO.

In presenting the cultural shift toward corporate rather than labor interests as the driving ethos of modern American work, Baker (an editor at The Drift) underscores how exploitative workaholism endears these figureheads to a growing contingent of workers devoted to the sermons they preach. In this sense, Make Your Own Job is a singular reminder that America’s current crisis of work and politics is the product of powerful corporate and academic elites and their steady reformation of America’s social conception of work as a covenant of body, soul, and business.