The Thought of Work in Employment Relations
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The Thought of Work in Employment Relations John W. Budd
Published online: 26 January 2013 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
The December 2012 issue of this journal included three essays by Marion Crain, Tim Strangleman, and Charles Whalen commenting on my 2011 book The Thought of Work (Budd 2011). I am grateful to Victor Devinatz for commissioning these essays and I am deeply honored that these distinguished individuals devoted some of their scarce work time to engage with my work. The three essays contain precisely the type of reflections on work and analyses of workrelated institutions that I hoped my book would stimulate. In particular, The Thought of Work seeks to bring together diverse perspectives on work to promote a fuller multidisciplinary understanding of this essential part of the human experience, and aims to demonstrate the importance of how we think about work for how work is experienced. Tim Strangleman’s essay engagingly reveals the deep complexities of work. Workers’ oral histories are a vivid reminder that we experience work in many different ways; indeed, work is so richly layered that these experiences are frequently contradictory. As captured by one of the oral histories, it is easy to both love and hate your work at the same time, and to find it enriching while also wishing you didn’t have to do it. Marian Crain’s essay insightfully demonstrates that how we think about work matters for how work-related institutions are structured, in this case, labor and employment law. And again, the complexities and tensions inherent within work are evident in that the National Labor Relations Act’s embrace of work as what I call occupational citizenship rests uneasily in a broader legal system underpinned by the employment-at-will doctrine’s embrace of work not as occupational citizenship but as a commodity.1 Charles Whalen’s essay importantly reminds us of the enduring nature of our struggles with conceptualizing work while also questioning whether The Thought of Work could have further developed an integrative framework. The framework developed in The Thought of Work consists of ten fundamental conceptualizations of work—work as a curse, freedom, a commodity, occupational citizenship, disutility, personal fulfillment, a social relation, caring 1
Also see Befort and Budd (2009) for a discussion of the contradictory intellectual foundations of U.S. labor and employment law. J. W. Budd (*) Center for Human Resources and Labor Studies Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota, 321 19th Avenue South, #3-300, Minneapolis, MN 55455-0438, USA e-mail: [email protected]
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Employ Respons Rights J (2013) 25:61–65
for others, identity, and service. Each of these conceptualizations affects how work is understood, experienced, and analyzed. Individually, the conceptualizations fundamentally shape who and what is valued in society, perceptions of freedom and social integration, identity construction, evaluations of worker well-being, the legitimacy and design of human resource management prac
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