Saronik Basu (4:33)

Right. So I know that we are going to talk about our own contemporary times and the way that. The way in which we immerse ourselves in work, but can I just stay a little bit longer on the history of it? A little bit? And can I ask you how to trace the history of the entrepreneurial work ethic in, you know, in American class relations, for example? Because not everybody historically has felt this urge.

Eric Baker (4:56)

Well, so it's. That's exactly right. It's never homogenous. There's always a great deal of contradictory ideological impulses in any culture. My kind of source base in the book is twofold. On the one hand, I spent a lot of time considering popular success literature. And, you know, this actually does cut widely across American class structure to an extent that surprised me when I began to do this research. But these are books that often kind of strike professional intellectual historians like myself as kind of lowbrow, kind of vulgar. But this is exactly what makes them, I think, interesting and important sources for reconstructing genuinely kind of popular cultural history. I also spend a lot of time considering the work that's coming out of American business schools. It's being pushed by professional management consultants. You know, what I call Management expertise. And what is striking to me, again, something that really surprised me over the course of doing the research, is exactly how much harmony there is between the dominant ethos prescribed by management experts and the kinds of ideas that are circulating in a much more popular sort of mass market kind of setting. You know, often similar, similar slogans, similar ideas, a similar kind of diagnosis of the challenges that the development of modern capitalism poses to the worker. And the concept of entrepreneurship that crystallizes over the course of the 20th century is also something that almost kind of paradoxically transcends class hierarchy in this way. If you ask someone to, like, picture an entrepreneur, chances are they'll either picture someone like Elon Musk or they'll picture an Uber driver. I mean, these are the kind of paradox that these two sort of opposing figures in the sense of wealth and power, you know, nonetheless are sort of both kind of icons of this idea of entrepreneurship.

Saronik Basu (6:56)

Yeah, yeah. My second question is how do we use the entrepreneurial work ethic? And I really want to know how different, I don't want to say different constituencies use them because, you know, how does the capitalist use them? How does the, I don't know, the freelancer use it? And how do intellectual historians use it to talk about American history?

Eric Baker (7:18)

Again, depending on where, on where you fit this, this concept can do different things for you. You know, for a lot of people, the entrepreneurial work ethic is kind of a solution to the problem of economic precarity. And again, I think that this is true not just at the. At the bottom of American class structure, but often, you know, in many sort of fairly remunerative professional sectors. I think that there's a lot of advice that academics get to be entrepreneurial, for example, that I think is pretty clearly correlated with the scarcity of, of work that many of us confront. The idea here is that if you, if you can't count on the work that's here today being there tomorrow, then it becomes necessary to somehow stay one step ahead of the curve. And the idea that this involves cultivating a certain set of personality traits or kind of mental habits, which is really the kind of substance of a lot of the advice that I trace in the book. This can be reassuring news to people, you know, even if those hopes are often frustrated. You know, for managers, the entrepreneurial work ethic is a way of presenting oneself as, you know, something more than a kind of normal, boring manager. If styling yourself as an entrepreneurial manager, someone who's kind of creating new work, you know, management experts have. Have long argued that this can help managers sort of transform the vibe of a company. In some ways it makes it more like a kind of charismatic community. People are sort of looking, looking to the future. It's driven by some sort of transformative mission rather than just sort of executing in a routine bureaucratic manner. So management experts argue this, this makes workers more loyal. It makes them likely to sort of take on entrepreneurial attributes in their own right, to sort of figure out how to solve problems themselves. And so a lot of the advice that's geared at managers, it encourages them to model the entrepreneurial virtues for their workforce. The hope that workers will really kind of buy in, and this will make them both more loyal and more productive simultaneously, more generally. My hope with this book is that by naming this concept, by telling its history and giving people the resources to see it in action, that people can acquire a, a bit of critical distance from it. I think that this is something that the intellectual history can be really good at, is sort of picking out these ideas that are often taken for granted or sort of tacit, or are thought to be kind of timeless, just kind of commonsensical and showing that they're contingent, they have a history, and that means that they can be rethought.

Saronik Basu (10:10)

I'm really interested in the rhetoric of the advice literature that you are reading. And I'm wondering, in order to kind of score rhetorical points, what are the kind of obverses of entrepreneurial work ethic that are, I don't know, demonized? Like, is it leisure? Is it like sticking to a 95 thing?

Eric Baker (10:29)

All of the above, you know, really the ultimate villain in the world of the entrepreneurial work ethic is the bureaucrat. And, and right now we see Musk going into Washington and railing against the bureaucrats and his kind of entrepreneurial project. His spirit is going to replace the spirit of the bureaucrats. But yeah, in general, there's a sense of complacency. This is really the, the sort of ultimate whore in the mind of the advocates of, of entrepreneurialism. There's one management theorist I discuss in the book who's writing about the origins of McDonald's and the role of Ray Kroc, who is the CEO that really turned it into a big business. And he's distinguishing between Ray Kroc and the McDonald's brothers who founded the first restaurant and developed its kind of fast food system and the first couple of franchises. And he essentially says they never aspired to turn McDonald's into a billion dollar business. They were basically content with their couple of stores making hamburgers. It's that kind of contentment, the fact that they weren't aiming to turn McDonald's into an American institution, even though they were business owners, they weren't true entrepreneurs. Whereas Ray Kroc, you know, even though he was not technically the founder of McDonald's, he was the driving force who aspired to keep McDonald's constantly growing, scaling it up, constantly coming out with new products and new techniques and new, know, marketing schemes and everything. And it was that insatiable spirit that, that made him a true, the True Entrepreneur of McDonald.

Saronik Basu (12:11)

Final question. How will the entrepreneurial work ethic save the world?

Eric Baker (12:16)

Well, I'll give a kind of paradoxical answer to this, which is that I hope that my, my critique of the entrepreneurial work ethic can help help save the world by challenging our kind of culture of striving to save the world, setting that expectation for ourselves as individual workers. There's a tweet I quote from before he acquired the platform where Elon Musk says something like, no one ever changed the world on 40 hours a week. And this to me really kind of cuts to the heart of the entrepreneurial work ethic and I think also is a great illustration of what I see is its kind of toxic, exhausting character, as the subtitle has it. And so I think that the lesson of the entrepreneurial work ethic, in some sense, the fundamental irony is that in a culture where sort of changing the world becomes the expectation that we all place on ourselves as individuals and work, this ultimately has kind of pretty profound socially and politically conservative effects that kind of locks people in. It helps to actually kind of stabilize our economic system to keep people locked in the same economic roles chasing this kind of dream. So if we are to change the world, it has to be together. It has to be collectively. And I think that means challenging the entrepreneurial work ethic that all of us, to some extent, I think, have internalized.

Saronik Basu (13:53)

Yeah, I honestly can't think of a better note to end on. Eric, thank you so much for coming to High Theory and talking to us about the entrepreneurial work ethic. Thank you again and we look forward to your future work.

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