What is work ethic? – My psychology degree project
Wednesday, 7 Jun 2023, 22:30
Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Samuel George Gaze, Wednesday, 7 Jun 2023, 22:31
‘Get
Britain back to work: The pandemic drove a big rise in inactivity and we must
restore our work ethic, says RUTH SUNDERLAND,’ Mail on Sunday, 21 November 2022.
‘Sunny
days off? Britain's work ethic has turned into a 'me' ethic,’ Scottish Daily Mail, 15 July, 2022
Since
February 2019, I’ve been studying psychology here with the Open University. On
Monday the 5th of June, I submitted my last two essays, and my
degree course is now over. I’m eagerly awaiting my results, but I feel an
incredible sense of relief after all the energy and time I’ve devoted to this
work. Compared to those who have completed it while raising kids or looking
after sick relatives though, I feel I’ve taken it at a pretty leisurely pace.
It’s absolutely right that we praise such incredible people for their tenacious
efforts to do something hard and worthwhile. Despite this, I think it’s still
important to think critically about the way we praise hard work, because I
don’t believe that the celebration of effort always works in our favour. This
is exactly what my degree project on “work ethic” was designed to investigate;
because while we rightly applaud those who do something good for themselves and
others, the moralization of effort can have a dark side.
What is work
ethic?
It’s a
phrase that is constantly in the headlines. In 2020s so far it is consistently
brought up in media discussions about the state of the UK economy. As far as I
can tell, it has been a major Conservative party talking point since the
publication of “Britannia Unchained” in 2012, which included contributions from
former prime minister Liz Truss, and former chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng. Truss
later publicly blamed Britain’s economic stagnation in part on the British
worker’s lack of ‘graft’. In short, the British lack work ethic, and that is
making the nation poorer.
This might
not be immediately obvious, but “work ethic” is a psychological construct.
Psychological constructs are forces, resources or objects that we imagine are
contained in people’s minds, such things as motivations, beliefs, fears,
intelligence, creativity or personality factors. Work ethic is a psychological construct that
is used to explain why some people show incredible devotion and commitment to
work, while others do not; the theory is that these people are motivated by a
hard-wired belief about the value of hard work for its own sake. It’s important
to remember though that psychological constructs are not “real” in the same way
that trees and bricks, or even the brain is real. You can’t look into someone’s
head and find their work ethic. This doesn’t stop psychologists from trying
though.
The main way
of measuring someone’s work ethic is to use an attitude survey, one famous work
ethic survey is called the MWEP (Miller, Woehr and Hudspeth, 2002) and asks
people to rate how much they agree with such statements as:
“Even if I
had a great deal of money, I would still work somewhere.”
“Hard work
makes one a better person.”
According to
the authors, if you score highly on the MWEP, you likely have a strong work
ethic. This sounds great, but the results of these studies are very boring.
Measuring different countries, different cultures, and even different
generations shows that wherever you come from, whatever generation you come
from, you are likely to share very similar attitudes towards work as others. Most
people see the value of work; but on the other hand, they also see the value of
leisure and relaxation.
But isn’t
there a massive difference between the working norms of different countries?
It’s true that the average Mexican worker does over 2000 hours of work a year,
(that’s still only ~38 hours a week on average), while the average Dane does
just under 1400 (~27 hours a week). Many Chinese workers apparently do a “996,”
9am to 9pm, 6 days a week. That’s 72 hours a week, 3700 hours a year, and if
that sounds a little unrealistic, then the statistics agree: on average, the
Chinese work a bit more than 2000 hours. Putting the data together, we could
ask why if work ethic doesn’t seem to vary much between Mexico and Denmark, but
their working hours do, what’s causing the difference? The predictable answer
is that this is almost certainly about global inequality. Our World in Data argues
that as a nation gets wealthier, that is, as the average income for people in a
country rises, people tend to work fewer hours (https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours).
It just takes more hours to put
food on the table when your wages are low.
Where does
that leave work ethic? We can all think of people who are absolutely devoted to
the “grind,” and others that are proudly and openly lazy, and that gives us the
intuition that there must be some internal, psychological difference, but there
are likely many more factors at work: different bodies, different
circumstances, different incentives. On the level of a population, we’d expect
these individual differences to average out anyway – it’s hardly likely that
different nations, even ethnicities, actually have significant bio-psychological
differences in work ethic. This kind of “science” invites racism. What the
economic numbers show us is that psychologically, work makes sense up to a
point. If you can meet your family’s needs and ambitions, on less
hours of toil, then that is far more appealing than trading off your work-life
balance for moderately better stuff.
If that is
the case, why is work ethic such a hot topic in the media? Instead of trying to
measure work ethic, my research asked the question, what do people like Liz
Truss and the Daily Mail mean when they use the phrase work ethic? This kind of
question is not something you can use surveys or social experiments to answer.
Instead, I used critical discursive psychology, which is a type of
psychological analysis that looks at how language works to create the world we
live in. I hope to write more about how discursive psychology works in another
post, but I want to share what I found in a way that will be easily accessible
without too much knowledge of the method. In order to answer the question, I
looked at seven news articles from the past two years on the subject of work
ethic from across the political spectrum and asked what talking about work
ethic did for their arguments. This is what I found:
“We
should work for the sake of our companies, or indeed our public services, and
not expect them to work for us.” – The Daily Telegraph, 17 December, 2022.
First, I
found that work ethic talk was part of a larger “discourse” or pattern of talk
that I called “work-centrism” after the work centrality construct used elsewhere. Work-centrism is the idea that we are morally
obligated to prioritize work above everything else. It is good and right to
work long hours and put in lots of effort at our job, not for our own benefit,
but specifically for the benefit of the company. Employers, in fact, have the
right to expect this from their workers. This means, in the context of contemporary
Britain, that working from home, period leave, well-being interventions, and
work closures on particularly hot days should be considered out of the
question. These work practices are framed by work-centrism to be dangerous to
the work ethic and must be stopped. The articles presented themselves as
defenders of an employer’s rights against the lazy British worker who just
wants to take advantage of these progressive policies.
“…there
is something rather serious happening in our workplaces which risks not just
undermining the economy but destroying the spirit of hard work for which
Britain has always been renowned.” - The Daily Telegraph, 17 December, 2022
However, the
articles faced a problem, which is that such policies are pretty widely
regarded as positive by large sections of the working public. I know quite a
few people who have been able to work from home, and not only has this provided
them benefits, but they haven’t seen a drop in productivity or value for the
company. To counteract this, the articles had another strategy: Nationalism. It
might be good for YOU to work from home, but it isn’t good for the country!
This follows the argument that Truss and other Conservatives made in Britannia
Unchained. The nationalist argument does more than just encourage
self-sacrificial work behaviour though; it is in effect saying that bad workers
(those who don’t put the company first) are bad citizens, and that means that
groups like trades unions and protestors that disrupt work schedules can be
painted as unpatriotic, and possibly seditious. It also puts the reader
themselves into the category of the morally righteous patriot, working hard,
sneering at unions, and not complaining about the falling wages and living
standards Britain is currently experiencing. Articles like this do political
work; they argue that in the face of such economic difficulties, the answer is
not solidarity between working people, but more individual graft and grind,
even as prospects for a comfortable life decline.
This
illustrates the dark side of moralizing effort. Though it is right to
congratulate one another for a job well done, especially after years of
exertion, our own tendency to validate effort can also be used against us in
the distribution of work and wealth. If you never even attempt to say no, then
you can always be pushed to do more, for less. Other studies have shown that
most people instinctually moralize effort (Celniker, 2022). All of us know the
value of a job well done, but crucially, we are also able to recognise when our
work is under-valued and we are earning less than we are putting in. Work ethic
does little to explain why some countries work longer hours than others; and so
work ethic exists as a kind of phantom haunting discussions about economic woe.
Using work ethic in this way creates a world in which working people as a whole
are blamed for the difficulties they face, and the unequal distribution of work
and wealth goes unquestioned.
Given the rise
of AI and the future of automation, we have to think critically about these
kinds of taken-for-granted, common sense ideas, so they don’t hold us back from
the benefits of the increased productivity that technology has granted us. For
this reason, I’m going to come back to this study and ask, can AI do discursive
psychology?
References
Celniker, J.B. et al. (2022) ‘The
moralization of effort’, Journal of experimental psychology. General
[Preprint]. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001259.
Miller, M.J., Woehr, D.J. and Hudspeth, N.
(2002) ‘The Meaning and Measurement of Work Ethic: Construction and Initial
Validation of a Multidimensional Inventory’, Journal of Vocational Behavior,
60(3), pp. 451–489. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1006/jvbe.2001.1838.
What is work ethic? – My psychology degree project
‘Get Britain back to work: The pandemic drove a big rise in inactivity and we must restore our work ethic, says RUTH SUNDERLAND,’ Mail on Sunday, 21 November 2022.
‘Sunny days off? Britain's work ethic has turned into a 'me' ethic,’ Scottish Daily Mail, 15 July, 2022
Since February 2019, I’ve been studying psychology here with the Open University. On Monday the 5th of June, I submitted my last two essays, and my degree course is now over. I’m eagerly awaiting my results, but I feel an incredible sense of relief after all the energy and time I’ve devoted to this work. Compared to those who have completed it while raising kids or looking after sick relatives though, I feel I’ve taken it at a pretty leisurely pace. It’s absolutely right that we praise such incredible people for their tenacious efforts to do something hard and worthwhile. Despite this, I think it’s still important to think critically about the way we praise hard work, because I don’t believe that the celebration of effort always works in our favour. This is exactly what my degree project on “work ethic” was designed to investigate; because while we rightly applaud those who do something good for themselves and others, the moralization of effort can have a dark side.
What is work ethic?
It’s a phrase that is constantly in the headlines. In 2020s so far it is consistently brought up in media discussions about the state of the UK economy. As far as I can tell, it has been a major Conservative party talking point since the publication of “Britannia Unchained” in 2012, which included contributions from former prime minister Liz Truss, and former chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng. Truss later publicly blamed Britain’s economic stagnation in part on the British worker’s lack of ‘graft’. In short, the British lack work ethic, and that is making the nation poorer.
This might not be immediately obvious, but “work ethic” is a psychological construct. Psychological constructs are forces, resources or objects that we imagine are contained in people’s minds, such things as motivations, beliefs, fears, intelligence, creativity or personality factors. Work ethic is a psychological construct that is used to explain why some people show incredible devotion and commitment to work, while others do not; the theory is that these people are motivated by a hard-wired belief about the value of hard work for its own sake. It’s important to remember though that psychological constructs are not “real” in the same way that trees and bricks, or even the brain is real. You can’t look into someone’s head and find their work ethic. This doesn’t stop psychologists from trying though.
The main way of measuring someone’s work ethic is to use an attitude survey, one famous work ethic survey is called the MWEP (Miller, Woehr and Hudspeth, 2002) and asks people to rate how much they agree with such statements as:
“Even if I had a great deal of money, I would still work somewhere.”
“Hard work makes one a better person.”
According to the authors, if you score highly on the MWEP, you likely have a strong work ethic. This sounds great, but the results of these studies are very boring. Measuring different countries, different cultures, and even different generations shows that wherever you come from, whatever generation you come from, you are likely to share very similar attitudes towards work as others. Most people see the value of work; but on the other hand, they also see the value of leisure and relaxation.
But isn’t there a massive difference between the working norms of different countries? It’s true that the average Mexican worker does over 2000 hours of work a year, (that’s still only ~38 hours a week on average), while the average Dane does just under 1400 (~27 hours a week). Many Chinese workers apparently do a “996,” 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week. That’s 72 hours a week, 3700 hours a year, and if that sounds a little unrealistic, then the statistics agree: on average, the Chinese work a bit more than 2000 hours. Putting the data together, we could ask why if work ethic doesn’t seem to vary much between Mexico and Denmark, but their working hours do, what’s causing the difference? The predictable answer is that this is almost certainly about global inequality. Our World in Data argues that as a nation gets wealthier, that is, as the average income for people in a country rises, people tend to work fewer hours (https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours). It just takes more hours to put food on the table when your wages are low.
Where does that leave work ethic? We can all think of people who are absolutely devoted to the “grind,” and others that are proudly and openly lazy, and that gives us the intuition that there must be some internal, psychological difference, but there are likely many more factors at work: different bodies, different circumstances, different incentives. On the level of a population, we’d expect these individual differences to average out anyway – it’s hardly likely that different nations, even ethnicities, actually have significant bio-psychological differences in work ethic. This kind of “science” invites racism. What the economic numbers show us is that psychologically, work makes sense up to a point. If you can meet your family’s needs and ambitions, on less hours of toil, then that is far more appealing than trading off your work-life balance for moderately better stuff.
If that is the case, why is work ethic such a hot topic in the media? Instead of trying to measure work ethic, my research asked the question, what do people like Liz Truss and the Daily Mail mean when they use the phrase work ethic? This kind of question is not something you can use surveys or social experiments to answer. Instead, I used critical discursive psychology, which is a type of psychological analysis that looks at how language works to create the world we live in. I hope to write more about how discursive psychology works in another post, but I want to share what I found in a way that will be easily accessible without too much knowledge of the method. In order to answer the question, I looked at seven news articles from the past two years on the subject of work ethic from across the political spectrum and asked what talking about work ethic did for their arguments. This is what I found:
“We should work for the sake of our companies, or indeed our public services, and not expect them to work for us.” – The Daily Telegraph, 17 December, 2022.
First, I found that work ethic talk was part of a larger “discourse” or pattern of talk that I called “work-centrism” after the work centrality construct used elsewhere. Work-centrism is the idea that we are morally obligated to prioritize work above everything else. It is good and right to work long hours and put in lots of effort at our job, not for our own benefit, but specifically for the benefit of the company. Employers, in fact, have the right to expect this from their workers. This means, in the context of contemporary Britain, that working from home, period leave, well-being interventions, and work closures on particularly hot days should be considered out of the question. These work practices are framed by work-centrism to be dangerous to the work ethic and must be stopped. The articles presented themselves as defenders of an employer’s rights against the lazy British worker who just wants to take advantage of these progressive policies.
“…there is something rather serious happening in our workplaces which risks not just undermining the economy but destroying the spirit of hard work for which Britain has always been renowned.” - The Daily Telegraph, 17 December, 2022
However, the articles faced a problem, which is that such policies are pretty widely regarded as positive by large sections of the working public. I know quite a few people who have been able to work from home, and not only has this provided them benefits, but they haven’t seen a drop in productivity or value for the company. To counteract this, the articles had another strategy: Nationalism. It might be good for YOU to work from home, but it isn’t good for the country! This follows the argument that Truss and other Conservatives made in Britannia Unchained. The nationalist argument does more than just encourage self-sacrificial work behaviour though; it is in effect saying that bad workers (those who don’t put the company first) are bad citizens, and that means that groups like trades unions and protestors that disrupt work schedules can be painted as unpatriotic, and possibly seditious. It also puts the reader themselves into the category of the morally righteous patriot, working hard, sneering at unions, and not complaining about the falling wages and living standards Britain is currently experiencing. Articles like this do political work; they argue that in the face of such economic difficulties, the answer is not solidarity between working people, but more individual graft and grind, even as prospects for a comfortable life decline.
This illustrates the dark side of moralizing effort. Though it is right to congratulate one another for a job well done, especially after years of exertion, our own tendency to validate effort can also be used against us in the distribution of work and wealth. If you never even attempt to say no, then you can always be pushed to do more, for less. Other studies have shown that most people instinctually moralize effort (Celniker, 2022). All of us know the value of a job well done, but crucially, we are also able to recognise when our work is under-valued and we are earning less than we are putting in. Work ethic does little to explain why some countries work longer hours than others; and so work ethic exists as a kind of phantom haunting discussions about economic woe. Using work ethic in this way creates a world in which working people as a whole are blamed for the difficulties they face, and the unequal distribution of work and wealth goes unquestioned.
Given the rise of AI and the future of automation, we have to think critically about these kinds of taken-for-granted, common sense ideas, so they don’t hold us back from the benefits of the increased productivity that technology has granted us. For this reason, I’m going to come back to this study and ask, can AI do discursive psychology?
References
Celniker, J.B. et al. (2022) ‘The moralization of effort’, Journal of experimental psychology. General [Preprint]. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001259.
Miller, M.J., Woehr, D.J. and Hudspeth, N. (2002) ‘The Meaning and Measurement of Work Ethic: Construction and Initial Validation of a Multidimensional Inventory’, Journal of Vocational Behavior, 60(3), pp. 451–489. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1006/jvbe.2001.1838.