Work and Labor: History of the Concept
some other possibility that is not articulated in the
previous alternatives? Answers to such questions await
a generally accepted and reliable logic of nonlinear
analysis, appropriate to cognitive performance, con-
nectionist models, and nonlinear dynamical systems
theory.
See also: Connectionist Models of Language Pro-
cessing; Lexical Processes (Word Knowledge): Psy-
chological and Neural Aspects; Priming, Cognitive
Psychology of
Bibliography
Carroll D W 1994 Psychology of Language 2nd edn. Brooks\
Cole, Pacific Grove, CA
Farmer J D 1990 A Rosetta Stone for connectionism. Physica D
42: 153–87
Forster K I 1976 Accessing the mental lexicon. In: Wales R J,
Walker E (eds.) New Approaches to Language Mechanisms.
North-Holland, Amsterdam
Frost R, Katz L (eds.) 1992 Orthography, Phonology, Mor-
phology, and Meaning. North Holland, Amsterdam
Plaut D C, McClelland J L, Seidenberg M S, Patterson K 1996
Understanding normal and impaired word reading: com-
putational principles in quasi-regular domains. Psychological
Re
iew 103: 56–115
Port R F, van Gelder T (eds.) 1995 Mind as Motion: Explorations
in the Dynamics of Cognition. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
Rayner K, Pollatsek A 1989 The Psychology of Reading. Prentice
Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ
Van Orden G C, Stone G O, Pennington B F 1990 Word
identification in reading and the promise of subsymbolic
psycholinguistics. Psychological Re
iew 97: 488–522
Van Orden G C, Pennington B F, Stone G O 2001 What do
double dissociations prove? Cogniti
e Science 25
M. A. Moreno and G. C. van Orden
Work and Labor: History of the Concept
The concept of work has at least three different but
complementary meanings in contemporary Western
societies. As an action, it refers to the content and the
performing of an activity; as a product, it is part of the
organization of capitalist societies; finally, as a status,
it constitutes a linchpin of social organization. Work,
as the mainspring of economic activity, is also at the
crux of the functioning of the political and social
world. Affecting the slightest aspects of life in society,
it can be viewed as a ‘total social fact’ (Mauss 1966).
This pivotal position has made work a notion that has
long been taken for granted as universal, to the
detriment of its variability in time and space (Kocka
and Offe 2000). Yet the contemporary meaning given
to the concept is the result of an eminently historical
process, including in capitalist societies in which work
constitutes the yardstick. Although various meanings
of the word ‘work’ existed in the nineteenth century
(Cottereau 1994), it is on the particularly restrictive
concept of labor, in the sense of quantifiable pro-
ductive activity, that Western capitalist societies have
been built.
The development of the concept was concurrent
with the evolution of the social sciences. Labor,
conceptualized in political economy after Adam Smith
in terms of value, came to be seen as the mediator
between the individual and the collective. It thus
became a focal point of sociological analysis. The
transformations of productive activity and their con-
sequences in industrial society have certainly contrib-
uted to shaping the main directions of development in
social sciences, but the descriptive as well as pre-
scriptive discourse of the latter has also played an
essential role since the early twentieth century in
establishing the social sphere on the basis of work.
The history of the concepts of work and labor will
be examined from this angle of a dual process in which
the social sciences and the societies they study mutually
engender one another. Thus delimited, the history will
not be a total one, but situated in time and space, that
is, confined to the question of the reduction of the
concept of work to the concept of labor in capitalist
European societies from the nineteenth century on-
ward. This rather Eurocentric history is also the
history of the statistic and legal codification of labor
into a social status, providing access to citizenship
within the welfare state. Finally, since the 1970s it has
been the history of re-examining the concept, closely
tied to a reassessment of paradigms of action in the
social sciences.
1. The Semantic Reduction of Work to Labor
Labor, more precisely wage labor, a dominant form in
social–economic relationships in today’s societies, has
not always had this value as a standard. In the Middle
Ages, when idleness was the privilege of the aris-
tocracy, labor was synonymous with poverty and
social devaluation. Without going back over the
history of work (see Work, History of ), it is important
to underline the contradictory heritage that charac-
terizes the notion in the nineteenth century. On the
one hand, work was associated with the idea of
alienation. This association finds its origins in the
Greek conception of slavery, the function of which
was to satisfy the vital needs of reproduction of the
human species (Arendt 1958). It was further developed
by Marx’s critique of wage labor, a modern form of
alienation through work. On the other hand, work
rhymes with accomplishment and self-expression. This
opposite aspect, based on the Protestant formalization
of an occupation (Beruf ) as a vocation (Weber 1930),
drawing on the Hegelian conception of work as the
16561
Work and Labor: History of the Concept
essence of man (Hegel 1977\1805), considerably fed
the ideology of the welfare state. This tension between
alienation and liberation was to mark the concept of
labor in the long term and run through theoretical
debates in the social sciences even until today (Me! da
1996).
1.1 The In
ention of Abstract Work
The opposition between work considered as the
essence of human existence and the reality of alienating
labor provided, in particular, the basis of the Marxist
critique of the political economy (Marx 1968\1867)
that marked a major turning point in the concep-
tualization of work. Political economy, of which
labor is a key concept, produced an initial swing of the
concept of work toward that of labor. This swing
occurred in the context of liberalization of work,
consecrating the idea of the market through the
promulgation of a set of legal provisions abolishing
hereditary dependency, establishing the free circu-
lation of individuals, freedom of commerce and free
competition. On the theoretical level, Adam Smith’s
work (1776) some years earlier consecrated labor as a
value, as a source of national wealth, and saw freedom
of work as the means to maximize this wealth. From
Adam Smith to John Stuart Mill, British theorists of
political economy made labor a product, a commodity
sold according to the laws of supply and demand, on a
market held to be the dominant form of regulation.
Determined by the principles of economic liberalism,
this conception associates work with a manifestation
of individual freedom, it is a specific commodity
having an exchange value. Boiled down to a comm-
odity that each person theoretically should be able to
sell as he wishes by way of freely agreed contracts,
work became, through contractual mediation, a gene-
ral legal and abstract category, separate from the
individual who produced it. This was the invention of
abstract work, quantifiable and measurable in time
and money; this was labor, a founding principle of
capitalism (Biernacki 1995).
Marx embraced this conceptualization of abstract
work, but introduced at least two new elements. The
first was labor power. Marx viewed labor less from the
perspective of the resulting product but from the angle
of the labor power (Arbeitskraft) required to achieve
it. Biernacki (1995) sees in this shift the expression of
the structuring nature of the German work culture on
the development of Marx’s thought. But beyond
cultural specificities, taking into account labor power
provokes a considerable shift in the problematics of
work. Work is no longer reduced to the mere economic
dimension of selling and circulating goods, it is
henceforth associated as well with the condition of the
producer in a capitalist market system. The second
contribution of the Marxist critique is the introduction
of nonwork, a notion previously absent from political
16562
economy (Marx 1982, p. 208). Seen from the angle of
the economic dependence of the worker, who can only
meet his needs through the sale of his labor power,
labor cannot be envisaged independently from non-
work and its different individual consequences. Marx
thus contributed to a conceptualization of labor as
dependent work, that is, seen from the producer’s
rather than the product side. This Marxist critique of
political economy was to be, in the second half of the
nineteenth century, a fertile ground for the devel-
opment of the social sciences. Their particular con-
tribution was, among others, to objectify nonwork by
breaking it down into categories of social organization
such as old age, disability, illness, unemployment, etc.
1.2 Wage Labor: A New Expression of Dependent
Work
The concept of work mobilized in this endeavor for
social objectivation meets the dual criteria of quanti-
fication and dependence. The reformist social sciences
of the early twentieth century and the new categories
they contributed to producing thus reinforced the
process of dissociation between on the one hand
work\œu
re, characterized by the independence of the
producer and the quality of the product, and on the
other hand abstract work associated with dependence
and quantity. This social differentiation grew more
marked up until World War II, accompanied at the
same time by an increased hold of abstract labor over
work to the point of assimilating Work with Labor, to
the detriment of other possible meanings of the
concept. This process went along with the spread of
wage labor which was legally codified—in the form of
a contract or through labor legislation—and stat-
istically codified—in the form of socio-professional
categories—as a response to standardization and mass
production in economic activity.
The concept of employment, at the heart of the legal
codification of labor, is informed by a dual meaning:
from a macroeconomic standpoint it means trading a
given quantity of work for a given salary on the
market; from the political and social standpoint, it
means exchanging individual subordination for sec-
urity, that is, the worker’s subordination to his em-
ployer and the security offered by labor legislation and
social protection. From this standpoint, employment
is not so much determined by the nature of economic
activity as by the nature of the social relationships that
frame this activity. Employment can thus be defined as
socialized labor, insuring protection for the producer,
in response to the Marxist critique. But this protection
is highly variable geographically, reflecting the dif-
ferent avenues of society building around the inte-
grative virtues of work (Esping-Anderson 1990). As
Biernacki (1995) has shown in the case of England and
Germany, the historical forms of economic objec-
tivation of labor specific to each country—as a product

for the English, as labor power for the Germans—
affect the way in which the concept of labor has been
mobilized in the production of the political and social
order.
2. Labor and the Constitution of the Social World
Labor has become the nerve center of the social world.
As participation in the common good, it was used at
the end of the nineteenth century in the definition of a
link that could bind together individuals in the
broadened framework of the nation-state. Conse-
quently, it was codified as a vector of individual
belonging to the collective, thereby insuring the
group’s cohesion. But although the social world
reflects the actual organization of the group, it is also
the fruit of competing endeavors at formalization and
cannot be apprehended independently from the dis-
course and knowledge that institute it. Social science
discourse as it was institutionalized at the turn of the
century is in this respect exemplary. It played an
essential role in indexing the social world on labor and
in defining labor’s relationships to the public concern
(Durkheim 1964, Weber 1930). During the first half of
the twentieth century, this scholarly activity focused
on the production of general categories to organize the
industrial society on the level of the nation-state. In
other words, it was an activity mainly aimed at stating
principles of homogenization and generalization, as if
the transformations of the late nineteenth century had
at the same time generated social sciences with strong
holistic orientations and the organization of society
on a large scale, on the basis of principles of stan-
dardization referring to labor within the framework of
national institutions.
2.1 Labor as a Status
The close connection between work and social status is
one of the main features of the concept of labor. This
type of connection doubtless already existed in feudal
societies and guild organizations in cities, for instance,
but its specificity lies in its relation, since the late
nineteenth century, to demands of social justice,
political equality, and democracy. Labor has thus
become the democratic means of access to social status
and political integration, a function that for centuries
was ensured by property and heredity. As a provider
of income and the principle on which the redistribution
of wealth is based, labor has become the central social
relationship in capitalist societies. A powerful deter-
mining factor of each person’s position in the social
hierarchy, it helps produce individual identities and
shapes the ways in which citizenship is exercised. This
link between work and politics, in the sense of
organization and production of the society on the
whole, was not, however, a foregone conclusion even
Work and Labor: History of the Concept
two centuries ago (Arendt 1958). But it has become
such a natural fact within the European nation-state
that it today seems to be taken for granted historically
(Zimmermann et al. 1999).
2.2 Labor, Class and Nation
The socialization of work and nonwork, based on the
critique of a strictly economic conception of labor, has
been held up to be the promise of the nation-state’s
order and political legitimacy. This conjunction be-
tween providing security for wage-labor—through
social protection and labor legislation—and consoli-
dating the nation-state has led to a considerable
growth of the social value attached to paid work. The
established expression ‘social security’ suggests to
what extent the socialization of nonwork is as much a
question of collective as of individual security. This
collective security is based on the capital\wage labor
dichotomy, in a framework where the social regulation
of labor is a partner of economic regulation of the
market more than a substitute for it. The encounter of
the nation-state, economic organization and labor
institutions under the auspices of the welfare state thus
appears as the fruit of a historical compromise between
capital and labor. This compromise, at the basis of
Fordism, is founded on the norm of full employment
taken to be a constituent principle of the social world.
From such a perspective, the social world can be seen
as a collective order produced on the basis of wage
labor and codified by a set of rights and duties attached
to the salaried class (Castel 1995).
The history of this collective order is, from 1890 to
1960, one of establishing a coherence between in-
dividual identities and economic and political
practices on the basis of the principles of class and
nation (Wagner 1994). It is a movement of widespread
standardization aiming to reduce uncertainty as well
as the variety of possible actions and interpretations.
Statistical and legal methods were the preferred
instruments of this standardization and establishment
of equivalences. Through the institution of nomen-
clatures, they gave shape to a national body made
homogenous that can be observed and planned thanks
to the objective nature of figures. By granting social
and political rights guaranteed by the state, they
stipulate individual belonging to this body. But today
these standardization principles are put to the test by
the demands of flexibility and the multiplication of
work statuses.
2.3 Transformations in Work and Reconfiguration
of the Social Sciences
The quest for generality a century ago has been
replaced by the quest for diversity. This holds true for
economic and social life as well as for the field of social
16563
Work and Labor: History of the Concept
sciences. Over the past few years, the issue has been
one of producing new equivalencies between situations
and persons, able to place increasingly individualizing
practices into a collective order that guarantees equity.
The demand for flexibility provides an exemplary
illustration. Whereas for the employer it is a powerful
tool for dealing with the ups and downs of the
economy, for the employee it introduces an uncer-
tainty that the rhetoric of risk and predictability at
the basis of social protection (Evers and Nowotny
1987) can no longer necessarily control. One of the
current challenges is thus to make individual careers
secure in the new context of uncertainty that weighs on
work (Supiot 1999). But the categories established on
the norm of full employment and the model of society
that goes with it are having difficulty integrating these
imperatives for diversity and flexibility. It is more
generally the reduction of the concept of work to that
of labor that should be incriminated, to such an extent
that an examination of the ongoing transformations
entails a need to rediscover the diversity of meanings
of work.
In 1958, Arendt undertook a radical critique of this
reduction that led to labor invading the political
sphere, eventually crushing it in favor of the ‘social.’
Against the institution of labor as a general category of
human action, Arendt reminds us that it is merely one
aspect among others of Vita acti
a. She emphasized
the major historical differentiation between:
(a) labor, an activity of anima laborans governed by
the human race’s needs of subsistence and repro-
duction, producing ephemeral things destined to be
consumed;
(b) work, an activity of homo faber, producing
lasting objects aimed at stabilizing human life;
(c) action, praxis, which produces things that are
inseparable from the actor and which only occur
through interaction. Action thus constitutes the emi-
nently public and political aspect of Vita acti
a.
Whereas Arendt deplored the progressive absorp-
tion first of work, then of action, by the reductionist
concept of labor, the topicality of the question of the
relationship between work and action has since been
renewed.
Along the lines of the revival of action theories in
the social sciences, the concept of work has opened up
toward action. Until the 1960s, continental European
sociology of work was mainly concerned with the
status conferred on individuals by their jobs. Today it
has developed the issue of work as action, mobilizing
a broader signification of the concept of work. The
paradigms of action lead to taking into account a
greater diversity of meanings of work (women’s
domestic work, voluntary and civic work, for in-
stance). They also lead to envisaging work from the
perspective of the interactions and conventions that
preside over coordination among agents (‘L’e! conomie
des conventions’ 1989). Such an approach indicates a
return to work in itself, to work as an action that refers
16564
to particular people and situations (Boltanski and
The! venot 1989). After the major movement of stan-
dardization that characterized the history of the
concept of labor and sealed its hegemony, the concept
of work today is being redesigned to integrate the
quality of products and people’s capacities, and has
opened up to the plurality and diversity of configur-
ations of action (Salais and Storper 1997, Boltanski
and Chapiello 1999).
By the same token, the uncertainties that weigh on
national employment institutions today, under the
pressure of globalization and the constitution of
supranational political entities (Habermas 1999), have
found considerable resonance in debates on post-
modernity that run through the social sciences. After
the supremacy of the national level, today new scales
of regulation and organization of the collective sphere
are being explored, both from a practical and theor-
etical standpoint. Here again, the connection between
economic and political transformations and para-
digmatic changes in the social sciences is a close one.
To such an extent that, where some see the end of work
(Rifkin 1995) or the nation-state approaching, others
announce both the end of society and the social
sciences. But far from this alarmist diagnosis, today
seems rather to be an era of revising both the categories
of organization of society built around work and the
nation, and their principles of intelligibility as they
were defined by the social sciences.
See also: Alienation, Sociology of; Arendt, Hannah
(1906–75); Capitalism; Class Consciousness; Class:
Social; Differentiation: Social; Durkheim, Emile
(1858–1917); History and Memory; Labor History;
Labor Movements and Gender; Labor Unions; Marx,
Karl (1818–89); Smith, Adam (1723–90); Social Class
and Gender; Social Security; Weber, Max (1864–
1920); Work: Anthropological Aspects; Work, His-
tory of; Work, Sociology of; Working Classes, History
of
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Press, Chicago
Biernacki R 1995 The Fabrication of Labor. Germany and Britain,
1640–1914. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA
Boltanski L, Chiapello E 1999 Le nou
el esprit du capitalisme.
Gallimard, Paris
Boltanski L, The! venot L 1989 Justesse et justice dans le tra
ail.
Presses Universitaires de France, Paris
Castel R 1995 Les meT tamorphoses de la question sociale. Une
chronique du salariat. Fayard, Paris
Cottereau A 1994 The! ories de l’action et notion de travail. Note
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action and the notion of work – Difficulties and prospects].
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Durkheim E 1964 Di
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Esping-Anderson G 1990 Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism.
Polity Press, Cambridge, UK
Evers A, Nowotny H 1987 Uq ber den Umgang mit Unsicherheit.
Die Entdeckung der Gestaltbarkeit
on Gesellschaften.
Suhrkamp, Frankfurt\Main
Habermas J 1999 Der europa$ ische Nationalstaat unter dem
Druk der Globalisierung. BlaW tter fuW r Deutsche und Inter-
nationale Politik 4: 425–36
Hegel G W F 1977\1805 Phenomenology of Spirit. Clarendon
Press, Oxford, UK
Kocka J, Offe C 2000 Geschichte und Zukunft der Arbeit.
Campus, Frankfurt\New York
Mauss M 1966\1950 Sociologie et anthropologie. Presses univ-
ersitaires de France, Paris
Marx K 1968\1867 Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen O= ko-
nomie. In: Marx K, Engels F Werke. Dietz, Berlin, Vol. 23
Marx K 1982 Oekonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte. In:
Marx K, Engels F Gesamtausgabe Dietz, Berlin, Vol. 2
Me! da D 1996 New perspectives on work as value. International
Labor Re
iew 135: 633–43
Rifkin J 1995 The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor
Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era. G P Putnam’s
Sons, New York
Salais R, Storper M 1997\1993 Worlds of Production. The Action
Frameworks of the Economy. Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, MA
Smith A 1776 An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the
Wealth of Nations. Whiteston, Dublin, Ireland
Supiot A (ed.) 1999 Au-delaZ de l’emploi. Transformations du
tra
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B. Zimmermann
Copyright # 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd.
All rights reserved.
Work: Anthropological Aspects
Work is defined as a continuous human activity aimed
at producing goods and services. It is a phenomenon
that exists in all human societies. In contrast to
sociologists, anthropologists primarily have studied
work in nonindustrial\noncapitalist societies (hunters
and gatherers, cultivators, pastoralists, craftsmen).
Unlike historians, they are interested mainly in con-
temporary societies. Anthropologists recently have
started studying work in capitalist enterprises, and the
transformation from noncapitalist to capitalist work.
Key concerns of the anthropology of work include the
interaction between humans and nature, tool use, and
the institutional and cultural embeddedness of work.
In these contexts, work is treated as part of a system.
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences
Work: Anthropological Aspects
In another perspective, work is studied as action and
performance. The anthropology of work has been
delineated by Applebaum (1992), Gamst (1995), and
Wallman (1979).
1. The Origins of the Anthropology of Work
Many leading scholars became interested in work in
the wake of European industrialization. Their main
focus was industrial work, but they made comparative
reference to pre-industrial work. Marxpraised the
high productivity and discipline of capitalist industrial
work, but criticized the alienation it caused. Pre-
capitalist work was less productive (e.g., the work of
craftsmen); nonetheless it had aesthetic character. In a
comparative study on religion in Europe, India, and
China, Weberwrote about the development of the
work ethic and the rationality of work.
Bu$ cher (1893) studied the division of labor and
cooperation, and formulated a theory of ‘independent
household economy,’ in which work is subordinate to
the autarchy of the household. Bu$ cher (1896) turned
his attention to performance: How was it possible to
perform constant, strenuous work in pre-industrial
societies? In his view, the answer lay in the aesthetics
and rhythms of work. In contrast to Marx and Weber,
Bu$ cher also drew upon contemporary ethnographic
literature, placing him at the forefront of the anthro-
pology of work. He did not, however, conduct any
fieldwork personally.
Malinowski, the founder of modern anthropologi-
cal fieldwork, was a student of Bu$ cher’s in Leipzig.
Bu$ cher and other German scholars (including Hahn
and Weber) inspired his interest in the topic of work,
which became the primary focus of his research on
gardening practices on the Trobriands (Malinowski
1935). On the one hand, he was interested in the issue
of performance: How do the Trobrianders succeed in
performing sustained, strenuous work? His findings
conclude that generally they were motivated by an
interest in food, but were also interested in the
aesthetics and social organization of gardening.
Malinowski also examined the relationship between
work and magic. Unlike Weber, he did not consider
magic a hindrance to successful gardening: Magic is
compatible with rational work, helping people to cope
with the vicissitudes of gardening.
Two of Malinowski’s students, Firthand Richards,
continued his line of study. In her classic work on the
Bemba in Northern Rhodesia, Richards (1939) stressed
more than Malinowski the separation of work and
needs: Work is not related merely to food requirements,
but is embedded in cultural traditions, in this case the
warrior past of the Bemba.
Based on intensive fieldwork, the studies produced
by Malinowski, Firth, and Richards are still worth
reading, mainly due to the diversity of issues and
abundance of material. At a theoretical level they were
16565
ISBN: 0-08-043076-7