Selling the Work Ethic

Sharon Beder

Human beings need to find meaning in their work, and they also need a balance between work and leisure. But these needs are being increasingly thwarted by the imperatives of work and production. The resulting affluence is now accompanied by increasing levels of stress, insecurity, depression, crime, and drug taking, while escalating output and consumption are also destroying the environment on which life itself depends. In this major new book, Sharon Beder unearths the origins and the practices of a triumphant culture of work in which the wealthy are respected and inequality is justified.

Dr Beder shows that these values are neither natural nor inevitable. They have been actively promotedthrough religious preaching, corporate propaganda, the education system, and socialisationby those who benefit most from them.

Selling The Work Ethic provides an absorbing account and critique of an important aspect of modern capitalist society. Prompted by her conviction that humanity needs to unlearn and change these powerfully held but now pathological values if we are to reverse the declining quality of life in industrial society, Dr Beder illuminates the impasse we are now in.