Harvard University Press
Review by Brian Tanguay
I read Make Your Own Job after hearing Erik Baker, a lecturer on the History of Science at Harvard University, on a podcast during which he talked about tech billionaires and the gig workers who use their platforms. Baker drew a comparison between Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, and Taskrabbit, to name just a few, with multi-level marketing companies like Avon and Amway. Like their digital successors, these companies promised liberation from the typical nine-to-five office grind, bad bosses, or the threat of layoffs. Be your own boss. Earn what you’re worth. Create your own security. Realize your true potential.
Be an entrepreneur.
For many decades now, the attributes of the entrepreneurial mindset have been held out as a means of personal and collective success: daring, risk taking, passion, and long hours. Developing this mindset was promoted as a way to thrive within a corporate structure or bureaucracy, but it could also be turned to social ills like poverty and urban decay.
“Entrepreneurship is the way,” Baker writes, “that capitalist society dreams of classlessness.”
What Baker does to good effect is chart the historical use of the concept of entrepreneurialism, the origins of its key values, ideas and assumptions, some of which date back to the Great Depression of the 1930s, when Americans were encouraged in the popular press to create their own jobs. For modern readers the names Napoleon Hill, Dale Carnegie, and Norman Vincent Peale might mean little, but these self-help, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps, positive thinking proselytizers were household names in their day. Norman Vincent Peale became world-famous when his book, The Power of Positive Thinking, was published in 1952. Peale was a friend to Fred Trump, the father of a future American president. From his church pulpit, Peale railed against the New Deal, labor unions, and secularism. Peale blurred the boundaries between theology and scientific psychology. Almost every human frailty or ill could be ameliorated, in Peale’s view, by an “attitude of faith and receptivity to divine energy.”
Early researchers affiliated with the Harvard Business School laid some of the groundwork of human relations theory in the workplace, studying things like rest breaks, compensation, various benefit schemes, and praising the intuitive power of top executives who, by force of personality, could inspire and motivate employees. Leadership was the key virtue. The intellectual tradition was carried on by Peter Drucker and Tom Peters, and before long programs for aspiring entrepreneurs could be found on every American university campus. Meanwhile, ideas about entrepreneurship were exported overseas. Developing a freelance mentality and thinking of oneself as a “business of one” led some companies to refer to their employees as “associates” or “team members,” implying, they hoped, that line workers would see themselves as more than mere cogs.
While I appreciate the context provided in Make Your Own Job, I’d hoped for more testimony from working people themselves, how, for instance, they feel about exhortations to act entrepreneurially, love their work and make it the center of their lives. Does this bring them more financial rewards and job security? Enhanced benefits? The link between productivity and compensation was broken years ago, with income and wealth accruing to CEOs and owners, not workers. So is an Uber driver really an entrepreneur? Baker doesn’t think so, writing: “All the platforms have done, ultimately, is to use the internet to lower barriers to entry even further, to intensify the atomization of their workforce, and to use algorithmic feedback to enhance firms’ capacity to discipline workers without direct managerial supervision.”
Does someone stitching three gig jobs together to make the same income once provided by a single job really buy the notion of enhanced freedom, self-actualization, and autonomy, or do they feel just as trapped as their ancestors were in brick and smokestack factories?
