Make Your Own Job

A sweeping new history of the changing meaning of work in the United States, from Horatio Alger to Instagram influencers.

How Americans think about work changed profoundly over the course of the twentieth century. Thrift and persistence came to seem old-fashioned. Successful workers were increasingly expected to show initiative and enthusiasm for change-not just to do their jobs reliably but to create new opportunities for themselves and for others. Our culture of work today is more demanding than ever, even though workers haven't seen commensurate rewards.

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." Policy experts embraced the new ethic as a remedy for urban and Third World poverty. 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. From the advent of corporate capitalism in the Gilded Age to the economic stagnation of recent decades, Americans have become accustomed to the reality that today's job may be gone tomorrow. Where work is hard to find and older nostrums about diligent effort fall flat, the advice to "make your own job" keeps hope alive.

Baker’s thesis is rousingly novel and ingeniously fine-grained…Make Your Own Job is not dry, insular or detached from everyday concerns. Although it is thoroughly researched and rigorously conceived, it is also gripping. This is history with urgent stakes and real consequences. -- Becca Rothfeld Washington Post
Argues that the imperative to imbue work with personal significance is part of a long-standing national preoccupation with entrepreneurialism. -- Anna Wiener New Yorker
A bracing reminder that our current work culture is neither natural nor immutable. [This book] challenges us to reconsider the reverence we assign to our working lives, and questions the purpose of valorizing entrepreneurship in a time of increasing instability. -- Christian Baba Zyzzyva
A comprehensive and sharply written intellectual history, the book traces the origins of several reputedly twenty-first-century maladies to an earlier age. -- Drew Calvert Commonweal
A thought-provoking, nuanced, well-written cultural, social, and intellectual history. Harvard Magazine
Baker’s lucid treatment of our predicament rightly concludes that there will be no map provided to us—but when we need something to follow, there is, at least, a kind of north star. -- Bradley Babendir Protean Magazine
Explores the American embrace of entrepreneurialism and why, for all the popularity of the approach, it can feel so exhausting. -- Jacob Sweet Harvard Gazette
Baker shows how American business culture and psychology have formed a crucible for the weirdest excesses of exploitation in the modern economy. -- Leif Weatherby The Baffler
[This book is] accessible, and even elegant in its presentation and prose. It’s a pleasure to read. -- John Warner Chicago Tribune
This book will be of interest to anyone interested in business culture and social trends…With solid authority, Baker examines the entrepreneurial idea and how it has shaped the nature of the work we do. Kirkus Reviews
A solid, detailed intellectual history of how work ethic and entrepreneurship developed in the United States. -- Shmuel Ben-Gad Library Journal
Traces the canonization of entrepreneurship…Baker shows that this idea is not new, and in his fascinating…history he follows its evolution, from the New Thought evangelists of the late 19th century to today’s gig economy. -- Sara Eckel It's Not Us
A brilliant exploration of the ideas and people shaping the American culture of work, from Henry Ford to Mark Zuckerberg. Sweeping, trenchant, and eye-opening. -- Margaret O’Mara, author of The Code
Superb. With deep research and fine craftsmanship, Erik Baker sheds new light on the valorization of the entrepreneur in the United States, from its unfamiliar origins in the 'New Thought' movement through the rise of icons like Ray Kroc, Sam Walton, and the Koch brothers. Make Your Own Job will interest intellectual and cultural historians as much as historians of business and capitalism, and its sparkling prose and wise insights will appeal to any reader. -- Lawrence B. Glickman, author of Free Enterprise
A fascinating journey into the ideology at the heart of American life. From the Fordist factory to gig work, the Dust Bowl to the Sun Belt, Erik Baker takes us deep into the minds of the snake oil salesmen of the hustle economy, as they work overtime to invent justification after justification for the precarity produced by capital. -- Sarah Jaffe, author of Work Won't Love You Back
Start-up culture and the gig economy are sometimes treated as novelties, but Erik Baker shows that making your own job is close to a modern American religion. Masterfully ranging across pop culture, pop psychology, and political economy, he uncovers and rethinks its history, from Fordist tip to Uberized tail. -- Quinn Slobodian, author of Crack-Up Capitalism
Deftly fusing cultural and economic history, Erik Baker digs into the unconscious of contemporary capitalism and its entrepreneurial spirit. Crucially, he shows how the drive to adapt and innovate captured workers, too, ultimately legitimating the extreme insecurity of the labor market. This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand why the entrepreneurial ethic holds so many in its grip today—and what to do about it. -- Melinda Cooper, author of Counterrevolution

Erik Baker is Lecturer on the History of Science at Harvard University. His writing has appeared in Harper’s, n+1, The Baffler, Jewish Currents, and The Drift, where he is Associate Editor.

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