Erik Baker, "Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America" (Harvard UP, 2025)

Mar 2, 2025

Erik Baker, author of "Make Your Own Job," explores the evolution of the American work ethic and how entrepreneurialism transformed it over the twentieth century. He discusses the shift from traditional job security to today's gig economy, linking it to historical movements like the New Thought. Baker critiques the constant push for self-actualization at work, arguing it has legitimized economic insecurity. He reveals how diverse figures, from Marcus Garvey to Henry Ford, shaped this ethos, ultimately reflecting societal anxieties about work in an unstable economy.

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INSIGHT

New Thought's Economic Transformation

New Thought movement transformed from spiritual healing to a doctrine of economic success using mental discipline.
It promised overcoming material obstacles by creating new opportunities, appealing broadly amid industrial anxieties.

INSIGHT

Entrepreneurial Leadership in Management

Management evolved to view firms as charismatic communities led by entrepreneurial leaders inspiring constant change.
This paralleled worker expectations to embrace change and creative energy for success.

INSIGHT

Depression Drives Entrepreneurial Ethic

The Great Depression intensified job precarity and boosted entrepreneurialism as a message to create work amid unemployment.
Direct selling expanded by promoting self-made jobs structured as independent contracts, echoing today's gig economy.

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How Americans think about work changed profoundly over the course of the twentieth century. Thrift and persistence came to seem old-fashioned. Successful workers were increasingly expected to show initiative and enthusiasm for change—not just to do their jobs reliably but to create new opportunities for themselves and for others. Our culture of work today is more demanding than ever, even though workers haven't seen commensurate rewards.

Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America (Harvard University Press, 2025) by Dr. Erik Baker explains how this entrepreneurial work ethic took hold, from its origins in late nineteenth-century success literature to the gig economy of today, sweeping in strange bedfellows: Marcus Garvey and Henry Ford, Avon ladies and New Age hippies. Business schools and consultants exhorted managers to cultivate the entrepreneurial spirit in their subordinates, while an industry of self-help authors synthesized new ideas from psychology into a vision of work as “self-realization.” Policy experts embraced the new ethic as a remedy for urban and Third World poverty. Every social group and political tendency, it seems, has had its own exemplary entrepreneurs.

Dr. Baker argues that the entrepreneurial work ethic has given meaning to work in a world where employment is ever more precarious––and in doing so, has helped legitimize a society of mounting economic insecurity and inequality. From the advent of corporate capitalism in the Gilded Age to the economic stagnation of recent decades, Americans have become accustomed to the reality that today’s job may be gone tomorrow. Where work is hard to find and older nostrums about diligent effort fall flat, the advice to “make your own job” keeps hope alive.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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