I outlined in a previous video, Marx's argument that work in capitalist society was defined by a systemic meaninglessness, an alienation of the employee from authentic connection with their work. I outline too how this intrinsic meaninglessness of work has plagued employees and been a major concern for managers, researchers, and allied experts throughout at least the last a 150 years. Ever since really, management as a recognizable discipline and body of knowledge began. Given this longer context, you can probably begin to appreciate the challenge that you or any other leader faces in trying to manufacture or make meaning that will endure for others. Marx, however, was not the only major figure to theorize the meaning of capitalism at a structural level. The great social theorists of the early 20th century, Max Weber, developed a different understanding to Marx. For Weber, work in capitalism was not in fact devoid of meaning. Weber argued there was from the outset, very strong meaning attached to the work that people did. There was a spirit of capitalism, no less. A spirit which motivated and connected people with the work they performed. This spirit, this wider meaning, however, didn't derive from the immediate process of buying, selling, making, investing, and the like that make up the day-to-day activities of work. In themselves these activities still had little intrinsic meaning. Rather, it was a meaning that derive from societies religious history. The religious history that has profoundly defined who and what people and societies are for thousands of years. For Weber, capitalism, at least how it was developed in America, it's most important formative site was intimately tied to two meanings that had a religious, particularly a Protestant Christian history. First, working, labor was tied to religious history that defined hard work is our earthly duty to God. Our religious history that in Weber's words, is saturated with the idea that faithful labor, even at low wages on the part of those whom life offers no other opportunities, is highly pleasing to God. For workers then, work in capitalism did have a meaning. There was a calling to labor, a deeply felt need on the part of people to work, to not be idle, to contribute through their work and labor to the making of the world. Second, for the businessman, the history of Protestant religious beliefs had inscribed in their hearts and minds the idea that earthly success might be an indication of God's favor towards them in the afterlife. Surely, if I'm blessed with success in the here and now, this shows I'm to be blessed in the hereafter. An imperative to be successful, to make money, combined with an ethical prohibition against spending and squandering this money wastefully came to be a dominant ethic of capitalist society. The spirit of capitalism for the businessman, was this calling to make money. Not so that it might be spent for enjoyment or used by luxury goods, rather the making of more and more money came to be a fundamental ethical duty in and of itself. Now, there are several things we might observe about Weber's arguments regarding the quasi-religious meaning attributed to work and to making money in capitalist society. First, we can perhaps see other examples of these two spirits of capitalism in society today. For example, how hard is it for you to sit idle doing nothing? I know for myself that if it's a workday and I'm not working, then I start to feel guilty. Whether I want to feel it or not, I like a suspect you do, I have a work ethic structured deeply into my conscience. If as Marx argued work is alienating in something that we try to avoid if not forced to do it, then why this guilt? Perhaps as Weber argued, this calling to labor, this work ethic, is a conviction that has over time become who we are. Similarly, why is it that senior business people, CEOs of large corporations, for example, don't simply stop working when they've amassed very considerable wealth? What is the compulsion that keeps top earning CEOs working when they have more money than they could possibly spend in several lifetimes? Here again, could it be that Weber's argument that the making of money has come to be an ethical duty in its own right explains this behavior? The second thing we might say about Weber's ideas and arguments is that they seem to tell us something really quite profound about the meanings that you, I, and others may apply to our lives. Weber's analysis reminds us that the meanings we attach to things, to working, for example, may be connected to influences and origins that are far removed from that immediate activity. What work means, what it really means for someone maybe very deeply embedded in their history, or indeed in a much older cultural history that predates and surrounds them. Again, this raises some profound questions regarding the scope that a leader or manager may have a seeking to manage such deep meanings for others. Finally, by connecting religious history with the economic realm of work and business, Weber's arguments might encourage us to look again at such connections in our present-day. In my own recently published book, Neoliberalism, Management and Religion, I have examined how religious concepts, languages and ideas are again entering into the management and leadership of American businesses and from there into global academic management and leadership texts. Theories such as spiritual leadership and servant leadership, notions of organizational mission and vision, ideas of organizations having souls, notions of leadership charisma, and more, have been surfacing in the practice and theory of management and leadership. Each of these concepts evokes a religious foundation, each implicitly and when I examined them from my book quite often explicitly referred back to religious predominantly Christian ideas. This raises a number of issues, here I will just mention two. First, if some of the ideas and theories being promoted in academic and other leadership literature occurring in values of a strongly Christian US context, and should these ideas and practices necessarily be promoted and adopted elsewhere? For instance, in places that might have quite a different cultural heritage. Second, our business leaders starting to think of themselves or being thought of by others as some kind of religious even godlike figure. Do leaders now have to save employees, lead them to higher purpose, provide some deeper spiritual meaning for them? If so, what kinds of pressures are we now putting on leaders on you? What risks are there for those who are being led?
