Power and Work: The Development of Work as a Civilizing Process in Examples of Fictional Literature

Abstract

In the most highly developed industrial societies of today, the meaning of work and of social power-structures in work has become rather difficult to grasp. The less visible the constraints of work are, the less real they seem to become in the perception of many professional observers who see a decline of the Protestant work ethic (Bell; Lasch) or the rise of the “postworking” society (Gorz; Offe). The article gives emotions a central place in the description of work, using fiction as its prime source. Rural work in a partly pre-market society (an Austrian alpine village) is compared with office work in a service bureaucracy and with the professional work of college teaching. The development of work is analyzed in terms of a civilizing process (Elias) and an analogy is drawn with the transformation of warriors into courtiers in early modern France. The alien constraints imposed by people and a hostile nature turn into a net of milder but nonetheless “real” self-restraints.