Entrepreneurial: Management Expertise and the Reinvention of the American Work Ethic

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the development of the work ethic in the United States over the course of the twentieth century –– the cultural structure that impels people to work more than is strictly necessary to meet their basic material needs. Americans have historically performed surplus work for a variety of reasons. At times they’ve worked in order to ratify their piety before their neighbors, for example, and at times they’ve worked especially hard to accumulate fashionable possessions. Nonetheless, I argue that during the twentieth century, a historically novel version of the work ethic gained hegemony in the United States. This set of cultural norms enjoined people to devote themselves to work that would develop and express their personalities: their individual integrity or vision, and their ability to make a mark on the world by creating something new and leading change. Beginning in the 1910s and accelerating after World War II, this cluster of personal virtues was typically said to make someone “entrepreneurial.” The themes of the entrepreneurial work ethic, I argue, were formulated and disseminated primarily through the activity of people I call management intellectuals, working in universities, consultancies, and corporations. Management intellectuals, unlike other sorts of management experts who focused on the technical details of production processes and the maintenance of large organizations, were preoccupied with the question of managerial authority: what made it legitimate for a person to exercise the kind of power that came with being a boss? It proved impossible for management intellectuals to answer this question without engaging with the prior question of the work ethic –– why people ought to work enthusiastically and devotedly in the first place. Frederick Winslow Taylor and his colleagues promised workers that “scientific” management methods would allow them to reap the rewards of greater productivity as middleclass consumers. But Taylorism met with opposition from a rival school of contemporary management intellectuals, including economists such as Frank Knight and the psychologists who led the “personnel management” movement. They argued that legitimate managerial authority was a matter of the manager’s ability to provide workers with entrepreneurial work, work that would develop their own entrepreneurial virtues. This required the manager also to be entrepreneurial, they argued –– setting an inspirational example and opening up avenues for workers to participate in the creation of something new and important. Entrepreneurial management had a remarkable ability to appeal to managers and intellectuals from across the political spectrum. From the 1930s to the 1950s, the message was picked up both by business conservatives who associated Taylorism with New Deal bureaucracy as well as by New Deal liberals who perceived a relationship between entrepreneurship and their aspiration to “develop” the economies and workers of American South and West. In the 1960s and 1970s, denizens of the counterculture saw entrepreneurship as an alternative to what they saw as the soul-crushing “Organization Man” spirit of contemporary corporate culture, while conservative Christians in the New Right movement saw it as an antidote to the alleged cultural dominance of liberal East Coast bureaucrats. In the 1980s and 1990s, even the most mainstream management experts and executives in large American corporations came to blame bureaucratic hubris for declining growth and profitability and sought to develop new entrepreneurial corporate cultures that would restore their dynamism. The ultimate result was the inversion of prior cultural associations between work and class. By the dawn of the new millennium, the icons of hard work in America were already-wealthy entrepreneurs, while the traditional “working” class was increasingly consigned to precarious underemployment.