Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America

by Erik Baker Narrated by Steve Menasche

Overview

How Americans think about work changed profoundly over the course of the twentieth century. Successful workers were increasingly expected to show initiative and enthusiasm for change. Our culture of work today is more demanding than ever, even though workers haven't seen commensurate rewards.



Make Your Own Job 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." Every social group and political tendency, it seems, has had its own exemplary entrepreneurs.



Historian Erik 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. Where work is hard to find and older nostrums about diligent effort fall flat, the advice to "make your own job" keeps hope alive.

Editorial Reviews

Chicago Tribune - John Warner

[This book is] accessible, and even elegant in its presentation and prose. It’s a pleasure to read.

Zyzzyva - Christian Baba

A bracing reminder that our current work culture is neither natural nor immutable. [This book] challenges us to reconsider the reverence we assign to our working lives, and questions the purpose of valorizing entrepreneurship in a time of increasing instability.

Becca Rothfeld

Baker’s thesis is rousingly novel and ingeniously fine-grained…Make Your Own Job is not dry, insular or detached from everyday concerns. Although it is thoroughly researched and rigorously conceived, it is also gripping. This is history with urgent stakes and real consequences.

Quinn Slobodian

Start-up culture and the gig economy are sometimes treated as novelties, but Erik Baker shows that making your own job is close to a modern American religion. Masterfully ranging across pop culture, pop psychology, and political economy, he uncovers and rethinks its history, from Fordist tip to Uberized tail.

Sarah Jaffe

A fascinating journey into the ideology at the heart of American life. From the Fordist factory to gig work, the Dust Bowl to the Sun Belt, Erik Baker takes us deep into the minds of the snake oil salesmen of the hustle economy, as they work overtime to invent justification after justification for the precarity produced by capital.

Protean Magazine - Bradley Babendir

Baker’s lucid treatment of our predicament rightly concludes that there will be no map provided to us—but when we need something to follow, there is, at least, a kind of north star.

It's Not Us - Sara Eckel

Traces the canonization of entrepreneurship…Baker shows that this idea is not new, and in his fascinating…history he follows its evolution, from the New Thought evangelists of the late 19th century to today’s gig economy.

The Baffler - Leif Weatherby

Baker shows how American business culture and psychology have formed a crucible for the weirdest excesses of exploitation in the modern economy.

Lawrence B. Glickman

Superb. With deep research and fine craftsmanship, Erik Baker sheds new light on the valorization of the entrepreneur in the United States, from its unfamiliar origins in the 'New Thought' movement through the rise of icons like Ray Kroc, Sam Walton, and the Koch brothers. Make Your Own Job will interest intellectual and cultural historians as much as historians of business and capitalism, and its sparkling prose and wise insights will appeal to any reader.

Harvard Gazette - Jacob Sweet

Explores the American embrace of entrepreneurialism and why, for all the popularity of the approach, it can feel so exhausting.

Margaret O’Mara

A brilliant exploration of the ideas and people shaping the American culture of work, from Henry Ford to Mark Zuckerberg. Sweeping, trenchant, and eye-opening.

Harvard Magazine

A thought-provoking, nuanced, well-written cultural, social, and intellectual history.

New Yorker - Anna Wiener

Argues that the imperative to imbue work with personal significance is part of a long-standing national preoccupation with entrepreneurialism.

Drew Calvert

A comprehensive and sharply written intellectual history, the book traces the origins of several reputedly twenty-first-century maladies to an earlier age.

Melinda Cooper

Deftly fusing cultural and economic history, Erik Baker digs into the unconscious of contemporary capitalism and its entrepreneurial spirit. Crucially, he shows how the drive to adapt and innovate captured workers, too, ultimately legitimating the extreme insecurity of the labor market. This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand why the entrepreneurial ethic holds so many in its grip today—and what to do about it.

Kirkus Reviews

2024-10-12
The social impact of entrepreneurialism.

According to Baker, a Harvard lecturer, there has long been tension in the United States between corporate work—stressing systems, hierarchy, and a steady paycheck—and entrepreneurialism, with an emphasis on innovation, risk, and individualism. The valorization of the entrepreneur has moved in cycles, which Baker tracks through the 20th century and into the 21st. There was an acknowledgment that corporations could easily become stagnant and needed an occasional shot of entrepreneurial energy to thrive. One answer, pioneered by sales groups like Amway and Avon, was to minimize the number of employees and instead build an army of contractors. This strategy developed into attempts by corporate leaders to foster an entrepreneurial spirit among employees. It makes sense, but Baker sees clear downsides. “Entrepreneurialism, essentially, adds another set of obligations to the work ethic: creation as well as execution, passion as well as perseverance,” he says. “It’s exhausting.” At the same time, tiers of jobs were farmed out, creating the gig economy. Stability was exchanged for precarious autonomy. This does much to explain the epidemic of burnout and despair, according to Baker, even while the benefits of lower costs and increased productivity flow relentlessly upward. He is able to keep this sprawling narrative on course, although he offers no real solution, aside from suggesting that “our collective commitment toentrepreneurialism—the idea that everyone should strive to be entrepreneurial—isn’t helping.” Nevertheless, this book will be of interest to anyone interested in business culture and social trends.

With solid authority, Baker examines the entrepreneurial idea and how it has shaped the nature of the work we do.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940194097487
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	05/27/2025
Edition description:	Unabridged

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