Working In Everyday's Rethinking Work By Barry Schwartz

Swarthmore College Professor Barry Schwartz published an op-ed in last Sunday’s New York Times entitled, “Rethinking Work.” The essay begins by noting that a “survey last year found that almost 90 percent of workers were either “not engaged” with or “actively disengaged” from their jobs.” So 9 out of 10 “workers spend half their waking lives doing things they don’t really want to do in places they don’t particularly want to be.” But Why?

Perhaps human are lazy and just dislike work as Adam Smith maintained. This idea has been so influential that today most the structure of the workplace assumes we don’t really want to do our work. Thus workers are monitored to ensure they are actually working, and that they are as efficient and productive
(To be fair, Schwartz doesn’t mention that many work harder for more money too.) So there is a cost to what Karl Marx called alienated labor. “Too often, instead of being able to take pride in what they do, and derive satisfaction from doing it well, workers have little to show for their efforts aside from their pay.”

But is there an increase in efficiency that makes monotonous, unfulfilling worth the loss of satisfaction we might from our work, as Smith thought? Schwartz notes that the evidence doesn’t support this claim. For example, Stanford’s Jeffrey Pfeffer’s has “found that workplaces that offered employees work that was challenging, engaging and meaningful, and over which they had some discretion, were more profitable than workplaces that treated employees as cogs in a production machine.” (For more see Pfeffer’s book, The Human Equation: Building Profits by Putting People First. Similar results were also found by Harvard Business School professor Michael Beer in his book, High Commitment High Performance: How to Build A Resilient Organization for Sustained
But as this is self-evident, Schwartz wonders why we embrace Smith’s view of work. Schwartz answers that Smith’s view creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. The world of work is often so gloomy that people do hate it. Even highly skilled professionals like physicians, lawyers or professors may want to do good work, but find that only satisfying the bottom line matters to their employers. They are actively discouraged from spending time with patients, clients, or students. After a while, they start to work only for the money. But this is contrary to our