What about Work?
Anthropologist Claudia Strauss has just published a book that should be required reading for — well, anyone who cares about work in America. And, that’s just about all Americans, for starters.
A respected cognitive anthropologist, Claudia has long studied personal and cultural meanings of work policies, immigration, government social welfare programs, and other social issues. She’s widely cited as a theorist of the way people mentally represent and express conflicting cultural messages. In 2025, she was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Psychological Anthropology. Claudia Strauss is the Jean M. Pitzer Professor of Anthropology at Pitzer College. You can read about her work here.
Her fantastic new book, What Work Means: Beyond the Puritan Work Ethic (Cornell University Press, 2024), harnesses the power of ethnography to explore how out-of-work Americans are (or are not) engaging with what we sometimes too-easily call the Protestant work ethic. While theoretically grounded, the book is chock-a-block full of stories of life-and-work experiences, and written in an engaging style that’s sure to appeal to students. You can find the webpage for the book here, and purchase options on Bookshop.org here, on Amazon here, and on ebooks.com here.
We recently talked about what went into the writing of the book, and the implications of Claudia’s research findings for work in America today and into the future.
Alma: These days, WORK is a major topic on pretty much everyone’s minds in the U.S., and for all sorts of reasons. What contemporary issues does your book speak to that might get readers thinking in new ways?
Claudia: Would you believe that when I started this research in 2011, I was worried there wouldn’t be general interest in the topic? Now, it’s hard to keep up with all the commentary about the pros and cons of working from home, the supposed epidemic of employee disengagement, and dramatic predictions of intelligent machines taking over jobs. These discussions raise basic questions: What is the place of paid work in our lives, especially in the U.S., where I did my research? How can we improve working conditions? What cultural changes (in the U.S. or in other societies) are likely or necessary, if most current jobs become automated? My research addresses these questions.
Alma: Can you say a few words about how you selected the people you spoke with?
Claudia: I found my interviewees at job fairs, career counseling sessions, and jobseeker support groups. At the time, the Great Recession had left high levels of unemployment, so jobseekers were not hard to find. I deliberately sought women and men in a wide range of occupations, from warehouse workers to corporate managers. As is typical in Southern California, they are racially and ethnically diverse as well. We talked about their occupational journeys, what work means for them, and what else matters in their lives.
Alma: In the book, you have a lot to say about Max Weber’s classic writing on what he called the Protestant Work Ethic. That phrase is so ingrained in American pop culture now that we hardly question it. Yet, you revisit our thinking quite dramatically.
Claudia: Yes, that is one of my central findings! I observed that few of my interlocutors have the extreme version of what Max Weber termed a Protestant (or productivist) work ethic. The stereotype of Americans is that they have a restless urge to work constantly—not just for the income it brings but also out of sense of duty, and because their work is central to their interests and identity. I call that a living-to-work ethic, but it characterized fewer than twenty percent of my participants. Far more common was a milder version of productivism that I term a diligent 9-to-5 work ethic. What I heard from most of my participants is that they took pride in being good workers, but they did not want their job to take over their free time. When employees set boundaries on their worktime, or request flexible hours or the option to work remotely, too many managers take that as a sign of disengagement—instead of supporting workers who want to do a good job, but not to the exclusion of everything else they care about in life.
Alma: The fascinating variety of perspectives on work that you chronicle is definitely one of the rich results of an anthropological approach—more inductive than approaches that are common in the other social sciences, which tend to range from deductive to polemical. Could you say a bit more about the theoreticians of work who you’re in conversation with, in the book?
Claudia: Current commentary about work often draws from one of two competing theoretical approaches. Laborist work ideology dignifies waged work as necessary for a morally good and fulfilling life. Interestingly, laborist values are shared across the political spectrum, from the Marxist Left to the conservative Right. By contrast, post-work theorists (who are usually on the Left) question why we should devote so many hours to others’ projects and profits. They call for a universal basic income and much shorter working hours. While laborists fear machines taking jobs, post-work theorists welcome this development so long as people have adequate financial support.
Neither side considers the perspectives of ordinary working Americans. Most of my interlocutors agree with laborists that a good job is part of a satisfying life—but they also agree with post-work theorists that their jobs need not be the center of their lives, and that working hours should be shorter. What is missing from both work ideologies is the potential for enjoyment at work, but it was common among my participants. To my surprise, many of them even described a past job as “fun.” Laborists and post-work theorists alike treat wage labor abstractly: for the laborists, working is morally good; for post-work theorists, it is soul-crushing.
My participants care more about specific working conditions than about work in the abstract. Are the tasks enjoyable, and are their contributions recognized? Is the physical atmosphere comfortable? Are there opportunities to socialize on the job, and are relationships with co-workers and managers pleasant? Are the demands on their time reasonable? When a job meets those conditions, it is not only a paycheck but also fun.
Alma: During the 2016 Democratic presidential primary season, I remember candidate Andrew Yang promoting a “universal basic income,” or UBI, as a serious proposition for Americans. Disturbingly, the pendulum has swung far in the other direction with our current administration, which is determined to make rich people richer and poor people poorer. But Trump won’t be president forever. After this nightmare White House, what do you think the future holds for the American workforce?
Claudia: I do not foresee a future without paid work, but we already see a shift underway from standard employment in the Global North to nonstandard jobs, such as temp work, gig work, and self-employment, which historically were and still are the norm in the rest of the world, not to mention for women and other marginalized workers in most societies. A future of irregular work is more likely than one of no work.
Still, suppose the extreme predictions are right, and waged work ceases to be the way adults occupy most of their waking hours. I distrust both the utopian post-work predictions of lives of enjoyable leisure and the dystopian laborist predictions of lives bereft of purpose. Both assume universal meanings of working and not working, but the experience would surely depend on alternative ways of sustaining a living (including a UBI); new ways of socializing and engaging bodies and minds; and shifting cultural expectations about a good and normal life. I found that few of my participants were as devasted by their long-term unemployment as were the workers displaced by deindustrialization in the U.S. in the 1980s. As anthropologists, we know that meanings of working and not working are neither timeless nor universal. I also disagree with commentators such as Derek Thompson, who have predicted that Americans would find the adjustment to a world of less work especially difficult. Most Americans do not live to work.
Alma: Okay, let’s continue with this turn to the immediate future. Given all that you’ve learned from your own research, imagine doctoral students in anthropology looking to conduct research on economic issues facing the U.S. today. What are some dissertation topics you might advise them to consider that emerged from your study?
Claudia: We need studies of how younger Millennials and Gen Z—now entering the workforce—understand work meanings, with attention to class and regional differences across the U.S. So much has changed since I conducted my research, including digital platform work, generative AI, new career possibilities as online content producers, increasing labor activism, and concerns sharpened by the pandemic about work-life balance and mental health. A continuing question is how extreme income inequality in the U.S. affects this cohort’s plans and images of a good life, including their consumption desires. Consumption desires could also be affected by shifts in family or household structures. Nearly all my participants either owned or wanted a single-family home for their current or future nuclear family. Is that changing?
Finally, I encourage anthropologists to continue research in other societies on these topics. As an anthropologist of the U.S., my imagination of other possibilities has been enriched by studies like Christine Jeske’s description of how Black South Africans find self-respect and meaning in an economy with chronically high unemployment rates (link here), or Kelly McKowen’s finding that unemployed Norwegians feel a moral obligation to work so they can pay the taxes that support the country’s generous social welfare system (link here). If any reader of this blog would like to study these topics, please get in touch with me at claudia_strauss@pitzer.edu.