Work, as Discussed in Choices

Work

After reading three essays relating to work from the collection Choices, it can reasonably be concluded that the ideal components and ideal conditions of work, along with a “definition” of leisure time, are largely personal and hard to generalize. Sayers, Csikszentmihalyi, and Hochschild each have different views on work, and they tell of others’ opinions as well. My view of work is more of a mixture of the three authors’ respective beliefs.

Dorothy Sayers, in “Why Work,” presents three revolutionary propositions about the ideal work situation, defining work as the “natural exercise and function of man” (370). She first proposes that “work is not, primarily, a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do” (370). Sayers believes that work should be the most important part of a person’s life and repeats this notion subtly in each of her propositions. Her second proposition asserts that “it is the business of the Church to recognize that the secular vocation…is sacred” (372). According to Sayers, the Church is the reason religion has become separated from work, and she states that this should not be the case. Any man must be able to serve God through his work, even if he is not in a typical religious vocation, such as the priesthood. Her final proposition, which she considers to be the most revolutionary of them all, explains that the “worker’s first duty is to serve the work” (375). She negates a popular saying that everyone’s first duty is to serve the community (375) by introducing a paradox about working to serve the community. She says, “…to aim directly at serving the community is to falsify the work; the only way to serve the community is to forget the community and serve the work” (376).

Sayers compares doing good work to teeing off while playing golf: “…you cannot do good work if you take your mind off the work to see how the community is taking it—any more than you can make a good drive from a tee if you take your eye off the ball” (375). She also reasons that the moment a person begins to focus on the community before the work is the moment that she begins to expect some sort of “repayment” for her work (376). She says that good work does not deserve repayment except the feeling of satisfaction that one gets from completing it. Finally, Sayers explains that those who set out to serve the community are often serving a need the community has. Because of this, they mostly end up not serving that need due to the fact that by the time their goal is complete the community has a new need (376).

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote the essay “Work as Flow,” in which he describes workers in relation to their work. He believes that the ideal components of a job are what make it “autotelic”. He tells stories of three people who autotelic jobs, Serafina, Joe, and Ting (22) to demonstrate jobs that have flow for their worker. Csikszentmihalyi describes hunting as a job that has “all the characteristics of flow…by its very nature” (22). It was a necessary job that was enjoyable to the hunter even after it was no longer the primary way of obtaining food. The people who agree hunting has the qualities Csikszentmihalyi attributes to flow are those who may still find it necessary or who did in the past, but find it enjoyable and challenging even though it is work. When talking about the English weavers, he says that “every member of the families listed weaving as the most enjoyable activity they did” and “the reason that working was so much fun is that it was continually challenging” (23). So, Csikszentmihalyi believes that ideal components of work are its challenging nature and its ability to make the worker feel as though his skills are being utilized.

“There’s No Place Like Work” by Arlie Russell Hochschild is written in plainer terms and is easier to read and understand than the previous two essays. He tells about a woman named Linda who works opposite shifts as her husband Bill to take turns caring for their children. Hochschild reports that Linda’s view of the ideal work environment is one in which it is more like leisure time than actual leisure time is. Linda’s ideal component for work is that it is nothing like home. Hochschild says that home for Linda “has come to feel like work and work has come to feel a bit like home” (100). Like so many other Americans, Linda replaces family time with overtime at work because she feels too burdened at home and work is her release.

Csikszentmihalyi believes that the ideal working conditions are those in which a person is continually challenged and never feels that her skills are being wasted by doing