Abstract
This article approaches work talk, a neglected but vital object of sociological inquiry, as a possible key to unlocking the mystery of the contemporary work ethic as it appears among male professionals living and working in the United States and Western Europe. This analytical task is carried out through a close examination of the contrasting rhetorics, scripts, and vocabularies anchoring French, Norwegian, and American forms of hard work talk. This comparative exercise capitalizes on material from over one hundred in-depth interviews with comparable French, Norwegian, and American male business professionals working in finance, law, consulting, engineering and other professional fields. Scrutinizing the scripts that members of these three groups use to address their motives for working hard in demanding jobs, this article maps a legitimation divide between the American respondents and their French and Norwegian counterparts. The hard work commentaries of the French and Norwegian respondents feature script repertoires that focus exclusively on the stimulating and enriching character of their work activities. By contrast, the commentaries of the American respondents incorporate overachievement scripts addressing both the extrinsic rewards of work and the personality traits that make hard work a natural expression of personality. These hard work commentaries invoke career success and moneymaking as inducements to hard work. But they also invoke personality traits such as drive and the innate aversion to leisure. This transatlantic divide reflects the greater cultural resonance of self-realization in the two European contexts and the fact that the French and Norwegians have embraced a more Maslowian approach to working life. As I argue in the article’s conclusion, these transatlantic differences in script repertoires can be viewed as the product of the societally specific cultural configurations at work in the three countries. Such cultural configurations define what it means—in terms of status and authenticity—to work hard in a remunerative and rewarding job.
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Notes
The ubiquity of this form of talk among American executives and professionals alongside practices such as long-hours work has led sociologists to identify a common syndrome among this group of workers, a syndrome which Hochschild has dubbed the “cult of workaholism” (Hochschild 1997) and Blair-Loy has called the “work devotion schema” (Blair-Loy 2003). This cult has cast a spell over managers and professionals from many corners of the business world, including industrial companies (Fraser 2002; Hochschild 1997), engineering and software companies (Sharone 2004; Rasmussen 2002; Meiksins & Whalley 2002; Cooper 2000; Casey 1995; Kunda 1992), financial firms and investment banks (Roth 2006; Blair-Loy 2003), and law offices (Fuchs-Epstein 1999).
Previous research has shown that professional men in the midst of their career launching years are more attuned to career goals than their personal lives, as they are still trying to establish themselves and prove their worth in a competitive and pressure-packed environment (Bartolomé & Lee Evans 1979).
This study grows out of a larger project dealing with differences in the ways that comparable populations of elite French, Norwegian, and American managers and professionals constitute working life and private life.
The interviews conducted in Paris were carried out by me and a French-speaking colleague in residence at the École Normale Supérieure who acted as a translator and interpreter. With respect to the interviews carried out in Oslo with the Norwegian interviewees, I developed my skills in Norwegian thanks to the support of a FLAS grant and a grant from the American-Scandinavian Foundation.
It is important to note at the outset that hard work rhetorics, scripts, and accounts can thematize either “self-regarding” motivations or “other-regarding” motivations. Some hard work rhetorics trace the motivation for working hard to the worker’s self-oriented desires (e.g., to be highly regarded by coworkers), while other rhetorics identify the motivation for working hard as originating in the worker’s other-oriented desires vis-à-vis family members and other indirect beneficiaries of his or her hard work.
While the breadwinner discourse so common among male workers of all classes and types (Orrange 2007, Gerson 1994, Weiss 1990) did surface whenever the respondents discussed the meaning and significance of gainful employment per se, it dropped out of sight whenever they addressed their reasons for exerting themselves at demanding jobs, as opposed to remaining merely gainfully employed. All of the respondents did mention their sense of obligation towards their loved ones and dependents, particularly their children, at some point during the course of the interviews.
Please note: 1) All names are pseudonyms and 2) These illustrative commentaries have been systematically compared with the larger body of talk in order to ensure that they exemplify the script patterns characteristic of the corpus in its entirety.
If moneymaking is mentioned by the French or the Norwegians, it is interpreted in an instrumental light as a means of procuring the goods of life, particularly economic security and a comfortable standard of living.
While the career success strand points outward, towards institutional self-anchorages in the social world of jobs and organizations, the drive strand gestures inward, towards the inner world of institutionally unmediated impulses and desires relating to personal identity projects and interpersonal relations (Taviss Thomson 2000, Turner 1976). The role of the overachiever, as Taviss Thomson remarks, straddles the occupational and the nonoccupational domains. It is relevant to working life, but it is also a nonoccupational role which children or adolescents embrace before they enter the workplace, as members of families or students (Taviss Thompson 2000, p. 96).
Here I follow other sociologists of culture and posit hard work talk as the explanandum in an ecological model of cultural causation. In this model ecological factors reign supreme as the decisive macrolevel sources of cross-societal variation in cultural patterns (Kaufman 2004, p. 336). These ecological factors shape the cultural opportunity structure faced by the individual who expresses and enacts particular “symbolic preferences” when he or she engages in specific forms of facework (Berger 1995; Lamont 1992) by determining whether and to what extent the already-socialized individual is exposed to particular cultural forms circulating in his or her cultural environment and how he or she receives these cultural forms. This type of ecological account was used to great effect in Lamont’s study of the boundary-marking discourses of French and American upper-middle class male managers and professionals (Lamont 1992, pp. 134–137). Seeking to advance beyond explanations rooted in differences between indefinable “national characters,” Lamont proposes a sophisticated ecological explanation for the discrepancies she observes between the cultural repertoires characteristic of her two groups of respondents. Because Lamont’s French and American respondents are exposed to contrasting macrocultural influences circulating within their respective social environments, Lamont argues, they confront contrasting cultural “supply sides” stemming from society-wide macrocultural and institutional factors. These factors generate different menus of cultural forms and diffuse these menus across the entire society.
The ranking should also associate success with a measurable “relativizing” indicator of personal worth and achievement (Simmel 1978 [1907]) such as money. Money earnings enable comparisons of one individual’s achievements with those of others working in different fields.
Even for successful professionals and managers (cadres and cadres supérieurs) working in the elite parts of the business world, occupational success has to compete with rival status currencies as a basis for legitimate claims to social status and personal worth. As Lamont notes, in the French and particularly the Parisian context, displays of cultural sophistication, analytical prowess, and verbal dexterity (i.e., “distinction”) perform better as status signals than ostentatious displays of wealth.
It is quite possible that particular work-content scripts, deployed in particular interactional situations, also serve their male articulators as cultural resources useful in establishing masculine workplace identities. Thus, the drive script may serve the Americans as a kind of cultural credential useful in establishing their identities as the “go-to-guys” or “iron men” in their workplaces (Kellogg 2011; Cooper 2000).
This experience reflects the more restrictive HR systems dominant in the more heavily regulated Western European context as against the laissez-faire American environment (Begin 1997).
These findings also call to mind the arguments made by McLelland, Swanson, Baum, and Parsons in the 1960s and 1970s and Jepperson in the 1990s about the cultural distinctiveness of the American versus the continental European models of selfhood and its implications for the relationship between the self and its occupational engagements. These scholars argued that the ideal-typical American makes his occupational pursuits a deeply personal affair even as he recognizes their intrinsically social character. However, while the ideal-typical American personalizes his occupational engagements in this way, the ideal-typical German withdraws the personal self from work, approaching his work self as a contrived "persona" created to satisfy social demands emanating from the coercive external environment (Baum 1979, pp. 100–101; Swanson 1967; Parsons 1954 [1949], p. 321). In the European context, then, the single-minded pursuit of occupational performance and success can betray an overinvestment in an inauthentic and artificial identity while in the American context such publicly visible occupational achievement validates claims to a distinctive and desirable kind of selfhood (Jepperson 1992, p. 141).
Not only do the modal American and the modal Western European gravitate towards different parts of the intrinsic-extrinsic spectrum of work orientations (Johnson et al. 2007) mapped by social psychologists, but the modal American assigns more importance and centrality to working life, regarded as a life realm opposed to leisure (Peterson & Ruiz-Quintanilla 2003).
Many of Lamont’s French respondents also looked askance at the idea of working hard as an employee working to achieve the goals of an organization. They did not see the point of exerting themselves in the service of their employer's goals. Among Lamont’s “anti-work” Parisian respondents, working to the bone as an employee is considered a particularly egregious exercise in foolhardiness. In the opinion of these Parisian professionals, the person who exerts himself at work and sweats blood for his employer is essentially donating his time and energy to an exploitative entity that will suck him dry without giving him anything back in return (Lamont 1992, pp. 43–44). Interestingly, this view was not voiced by any of her American respondents.
The outlook on working life as a self-realizing realm calls to mind the “therapeutic attitude” Bellah and his coauthors identify as a crucial ingredient in the self-perception of the American middle-class (Bellah et al. 1985, p. 123). It also bears a resemblance to what C. Wright Mills calls the "hedonistic vocabulary of motives" where individuals trace their reasons for action to its pleasurable or painful consequences (Mills 1940, p. 906, 913).
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Mary Blair-Loy, Stanley Brandes, Jean-Pascal Daloz, Cristina Flesher Fominaya, Neil Fligstein, Sigtona Halrynjo, Marion Fourcade-Gourinchas, Arlie Hochschild, Gabe Ignatow, Ron Jepperson, Michèle Lamont, Benjamin Moodie, Victor Nee, Trond Petersen, Laura Robinson, Jennifer Silva, Neil Smelser, Richard Swedberg, and Ann Swidler for their comments, close readings, and insightful feedback. The article has also benefited immensely from the close reading and constructive comments of the Editors and reviewers for Theory and Society. A special thanks goes to Laura Robinson for her invaluable assistance with the French-language interviews. I also wish to acknowledge the logistical support of the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology and the UC Berkeley Department of Scandinavian Studies, as well as the Centre de Sociologie des Organisations and the Department of Sociology at the University of Oslo where I was in residence while collecting some of the data. I would also like to thank the Labor and Employment Research Fund of the University of California and the American-Scandinavian Foundation for their financial support of the project. Finally, I want to express my deep appreciation to all of my interviewees who graciously and generously gave of their scarce time despite their extended work weeks and hectic schedules.
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Schulz, J. Talk of work: transatlantic divergences in justifications for hard work among French, Norwegian, and American professionals. Theor Soc 41, 603–634 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-012-9179-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-012-9179-3