"Transformation and the Satisfaction of Work"

by Sanchez, A (2020)

Abstract

This article suggests a new conceptual framework for understanding why some types of work are experienced in more satisfying ways than others. The analysis is based on research in an Indian scrap metal yard, where work entails disassembling things that other people no longer want. In spite of the demanding conditions of the labor and the social stigma attached to it, employees express satisfaction with the work process. This observation raises questions about theories of labor, which see satisfaction as arising from work that is creative, skilled, and task-based. The article argues that transformation is a social process that should be used as the primary analytic for explaining work satisfaction. Theories of creativity, skill, and task are secondary analytics that describe subsets of transformative action.

Key Passage

The assumption that creation is integral to a subjective identification with one’s labor rests upon a selective reading of Marx’s writings on alienation that confuses the principles of skilled creation with those of transformation, and accordingly places a great deal of emphasis on the creative dimensions of artisanship. Comparative ethnography would suggest that those who perform creative artisanship do not in fact idealize it (Cant 2016: 21; Coombe 1998; Marchand 2010; Venkatesan 2010; Wood 2008). However, a more prevalent strand of thought posits that craft and industrial labor belong at opposite ends of a continuum of alienation (Sennett 2008). This model assumes that creative dimensions in the work process constitute the grounds for satisfaction, since it is these qualities that imbue the product of labor with the identity of 76 | Andrew Sanchez its maker (Errington 1998: 140–141). As such, the products of creative artisanal work process are deemed to be inalienable (J. Leach 2003; Myers 2001; Weiner 1992). The enduring presence of alienation in debates on artisanship stems from early references to Marxist principles in the Arts and Craft movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (cf. Cant 2016: 24, Greenhalgh 1997: 32–36). William Morris drew heavily on Marx’s writings on the form of alienation termed ‘self estrangement’ from the act of production (Marx [1844] 1970: 111). Deviations from the human urge to engage in creative, productive work, which Marx discussed using the concept of ‘species-being’ (see Marx [1844] 1970; Marx and Engels [1846] 1970), are assumed to be artifices of coercive political-economic forces, which engender lives of hegemony and ennui for their subjects: work that does not create is unnatural and therefore unsatisfying in a way that is hard to quantify. Morris ([1888] 1896: 117) regarded industrial wage labor as an imposition upon human will, distinct from the urge to create, which is central to the human condition. (p.75)

Keywords

Skill, Satisfaction, Creativity, Transformitivity, Rhythm, Heidegger

Themes

Links to Reference

• https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/social-analysis/64/3/sa640305.xml
• https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/social-analysis/64/3/sa640305.xml?utm_source=TrendMD&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=Social_Analysis_TrendMD_1

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