Make Your Own Job
How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America
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Make Your Own Job
Narrated by:
Steve Menasche
Buy Now for $29.17
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Narrated by:
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Steve Menasche
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By:
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Madeleine Baker
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.
©2025 the President and Fellows of Harvard College
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