Erik Baker’s new book Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America traces its history from today’s grindset influencers back through a surprising collection of management consultants, Avon ladies, hippies, preachers, and radicals. Baker’s book charts the political and cultural discourses that result in both the ailment of modern life and its purported cure—what Baker calls “the entrepreneurial work ethic.”
Make Your Own Job is a valuable, highly readable, and unsettling resource, not only for understanding how the current landscape of labor has shifted and been manipulated, but for parsing what the next steps to change it might be. As Baker writes, “The promises of entrepreneurialism may be empty, but they respond to profound and ineradicable needs among working people that remain persistently unfulfilled under capitalist social relations.”
URL: https://defector.com/erik-baker-make-your-own-job-interview