Just Work
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- $30.99
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- $30.99
Publisher Description
This elegant essay on the justice of work focuses on the fit between who we are and the kind of work we do. Russell Muirhead shows how the common hope for work that fulfills us involves more than personal interest; it also points to larger understandings of a just society. We are defined in part by the jobs we hold, and Muirhead has something important to say about the partial satisfactions of the working life, and the increasingly urgent need to balance the claims of work against those of family and community.
Against the tendency to think of work exclusively in contractual terms, Muirhead focuses on the importance of work to our sense of a life well lived. Our notions of freedom and fairness are incomplete, he argues, without due consideration of how we fit the work we do.
Muirhead weaves his argument out of sociological, economic, and philosophical analysis. He shows, among other things, how modern feminism’s effort to reform domestic work and extend the promise of careers has contributed to more democratic understandings of what it means to have work that fits. His account of individual and social fit as twin standards of assessment is original and convincing--it points both to the unavoidable problem of distributing bad work in society and to the personal importance of finding fulfilling work. These themes are pursued through a wide-ranging discussion that engages thinkers from Plato to John Stuart Mill to Betty Friedan. Just Work shows what it would mean for work to make good on the high promise so often invested in it and suggests what we--both as a society and as individuals--might do when it falls short.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Offering much more of a practical survey than the sort of academic criticism that typifies manifestos on workers and labor, Harvard government professor Muirhead confronts often contradictory elements of the modern working life, from the frustration of slaving away in order to merely survive in a meaningless consumerist cycle to the questionable justice of outsourcing labor that pays foreign workers pennies. In focusing on a consideration of "fit," the author's uniquely comprehensive bit of moral vocabulary that encompasses a concern for "work that fits" and "fitting work," Muirhead reveals that the question of just work, even in our modern capitalist society, is still very much aligned with the ancient question of "the good." Much of the book shows that the debates throughout history over varieties of the social, material, intrinsic and personal good are mirrored in philosophical observations on labor. Drawing from a historical study of perspectives on work from Plato and Aristotle, Marx and Mill, and modern thinkers like Rawls and Friedan, the book lends a powerful perspective on how human history comes to define what is important about work. This relationship is revealed in the story of slavery, domestic servitude and women as unpaid household laborers within American history. Muirhead's deft sketch is as much a sort of therapeutic exploration of the working life as it is hopeful social theorizing.
