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EH.NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by EH.NET (August 1997)
Paul Bernstein, _American Work Values: Their Origin and Development_.
Albany: SUNY Press, 1997. 368 pp. $59.50 (cloth), ISBN: 079143257.
Bernstein surveys a massive literature about work values and attitudes,
including a wide array of primary sources. The bibliography alone is some
66 pages and runs the gamut from original Puritan expositions of the
"Protestant ethic" through some of the most recent opinion surveys on work
attitudes. Someone interested in this field should check this book if for
the bibliography alone.
As the bibliography makes clear, this is a book with a wide sweep.
Bernstein documents the development of American work values, attitudes, and
practices from the earliest colonial years through the 1990s. He organizes
his material around four "continuities" or themes: 1) the search for job
security; 2) the belief in work as opportunity; 3) the evolving work ethic
(starting with the religious view of work as "calling" and ending with the
contemporary "worth ethic"); 4) the debate over the community's obligation
to those without work.
Perhaps as interesting are the "discontinuities" that mark the transitions
between the several stages of development that Bernstein delimits. The era
of the Puritan ethic, Bernstein says, lasted into the first part of the
eighteenth century; this was when work was understood as a divine calling.
The second era, work as opportunity, began with Benjamin Franklin and
lasted through much of the nineteenth century; one worked for utilitarian
goals, and virtues became means to an end. As Bernstein surveys the present
century, he discovers at least three distinct eras: the era of efficiency
(Taylorism), the "human relations" era, and a new "human resources" era.
Common to all the eras are the four "continuities," which play out in ways
unique to each era. For example, the Puritan notion of the "deserving and
undeserving poor" shares much with the welfare-reform concepts of the
1990s, including similar perceptions of the motives of the poor.
For each of his eras, Bernstein describes both the work values articulated
by the dominant members of society (whether Puritan clergymen or top
business managers) as well as the counter values of the economically weak
members of society. This is an intriguing approach, but it has its
weaknesses. The articulate members of society leave a rich lode of writings
to be mined. The poor, unemployed, or enslaved, leave far less of a record,
and Bernstein often is forced to infer their values. This problem gets
worse the further one goes back in time. In the present era, Bernstein can
rely on opinion surveys and the like to get a reading of the values of the
otherwise inarticulate; however, in the colonial era it is much more
difficult to infer the values of those without a voice. Would the
economically weak have held the counter values Bernstein has inferred, or
might they have internalized the dominant values after all?
Value systems are important in understanding human behavior (probably as
much as maximization models), and Bernstein makes a meaningful contribution
in expositing them. However, his work suffers from some weaknesses. It is
ironic that Bernstein writes more clearly and is more convincing in his
analysis of earlier centuries than the present one. In dealing with values
in the twentieth century, Bernstein becomes unclear and much less
convincing. He tends to equate changing management practices (Taylorism,
welfare capitalism, etc.) with changes in values. Surely value systems are
more fundamental than passing management practices and are rooted more
deeply in the society at large; consequently values should have more
staying power than management strategies. Does management's adoption of, or
giving up of, say, time-and-motion studies really represent a change in a
whole society's values? Or are management practices merely an adaptation at
the margins of more enduring societal values? It is difficult to believe
that there have been at least three different major values eras in the
twentieth century; surely values have more staying power than that. The
management practices and philosophies that Bernstein equates with
twentieth-century American work values seem to be far less deeply rooted in
the culture than, say, the utilitarian values of a Benjamin Franklin, which
some commentators argue are with us still.
Another weakness of the book is that Bernstein allows the abundant data of
the twentieth century to drown his ideas. He writes more convincingly of
the dominant values of earlier centuries, it seems to me, precisely because
he sticks to values clearly articulated by good representatives of their
times. In his discussion of recent years Bernstein seems to get bogged down
citing almost any court case, election result, opinion-survey result, or
researcher's observation that has any relation to work. The result is
somewhat disjointed and unconvincing.
Bernstein' treatment of Affirmative Action in the workplace provides a good
example of the weakness of his treatment of the present century. After
pages of details about Affirmative Action's genesis and evolution,
Bernstein ends with a seven-line paragraph that concludes that Affirmative
Action simultaneously affirms and denies key American work values; hence,
presumably, the mixed response to Affirmative Action and its mixed
prospects. This reader would have expected the emphasis to be reversed:
Bernstein should have given a short explanation of Affirmative Action, then
have given a detailed analysis of why the program both taps into and
simultaneously rejects central American values.
In sum, this book provides a solid overview of the development of American
work values, attitudes, and practices over several centuries. Bernstein
does a very good job until he reaches the twentieth century. In fact, his
chapter on the Puritan work ethic is superior. The unstated thesis of the
book, that fundamental values are central to understanding economic
behavior, is indisputable. Therefore, works like this one enhance our
understanding of economic behavior, and complement other, more abstract,
methods of analysis. Finally, the bibliography alone makes the book
worthwhile.
(Paul Bernstein is currently adjunct professor of management at Rochester
Institute of Technology. He is former dean
of graduate studies and former dean of liberal arts there, too.)
Donald E. Frey
Department of Economics
Wake Forest University
Donald Frey is professor of economics and has taught courses on ethics and
economics in both the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program and the
economics department at Wake Forest University.
He is author of "The Good Samaritan as Bad Economist: Self-Interest in
Economics and Theology," in _Cross Currents: Journal of the Association for
Religion and Intellectual Life_ (Fall 1996).
Copyright (c) 1997 by EH.Net and H-Net, all rights reserved. This work may
be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit is given to the
author and the list. For other permission, please contact
[log in to unmask] (Robert Whaples, Book Review Editor, EH.Net.
Telephone: 910-758-4916. Fax: 910-758-6028.)
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