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I have the good fortune of spending a month in France, serving as a visiting professor at Institut National d'Etude du Travail et d'Orientation Professionnelle in Paris. After devoting so much time in the past few years to writing a book about the psychological meaning and experience of working in contemporary American life, having an opportunity to spend so much time in a somewhat different culture has been enriching. In addition to this visit to Europe, I spent a week in Hong Kong in early March. These experiences, coupled with a lot of travel over the course of my life, provide the impetus for this reflection about work and culture.
In writing The Importance of Work in an Age of Uncertainty: The Eroding Work Experience in America, I made an intentional decision to focus on work in the U.S. That decision reflected my hope to use a psychologically in-depth narrative analysis of 58 interviews to derive meaningful inferences about how people are faring in their work lives at this particular moment in American life. The overarching goal of this book is to provide a compelling counterpoint to the traditional focus on economics and statistics as the driver of public policy about work. Of course, the U.S. is comprised of many cultures and regions, which provides a means of understanding how our cultural heritage and belief systems shape our experiences. A major takeaway in my book was that social class and access to opportunity served as the most potent lens that defined how people understood and make meaning of their work lives. I did observe the painful legacy and contemporary experiences of racism, sexism, heterosexism, and other forms of oppression and marginalization that functioned as an external barrier to decent and dignified work. In addition, there were pronounced differences in the extent to which people approached work, with culture playing a major role in how individualistic or collectivist values shaped decisions about work.
Traveling abroad has the capacity to widen and deepen one’s perspectives. When my friend and I traveled from a suburban hotel in Hong Kong to the downtown section for site seeing, I was surprised that we did not see any traffic in either direction at 5 p.m. on a weekday. When I asked our very gracious host, I learned that people generally work from 8:30 to 6:30 without many exceptions; it was shocking for me, coming from Boston, where the commuter traffic is gradually encompassing the entire day.
My experience in France parallels life in the U.S. in some notable ways. In relation to this essay, both the U.S. and France have very complex multicultural societies that are undergoing stresses that have always been present, but now seem more explicit. The causes of the rising tensions are complex and multifaceted but are present in obvious and subtle ways in both France and the U.S.
One of the most obvious manifestations is in inequality and constrained opportunities in the workplace. As I detail in my forthcoming book, several major public policy initiatives are needed to equalize the playing field and provide access to the antecedents of decent work, such as excellent education, government-sponsored job creation and training programs, access to health care and other forms of social and economic support.
What I find most distressing about the forces that are tearing at the fabric of our societies is that work has the potential to help our societies and cultures cohere. Throughout research that my colleagues and I have done over the past few decades, we have demonstrated that work has the potential to fulfill important needs, some of which are likely fundamental to who we are as people. For example, the need for survival, relatedness, social contribution, and self-determination are evident across culture and historical periods. From a more personal perspective, I have felt the cohesion that work provides when I travel in places that feel very different from my home—seeing people do the same tasks in similar ways across the globe provides a sense of being grounded and held.
As we seek to create a more just and fair set of policies about work, I hope that we embrace the cohesive elements of work as a source of greater connection to each other. Cultural differences and similarities about work provide lessons for us in being kind and fair to each other. We can learn from our neighbors, whether they are across the street or across the ocean about the common and disparate experiences of work. The common bond that has emerged for me in over three decades of research and practice is that work is a human birthright and should be accorded the same dignity as other human endeavors.
