Make Your Own Job

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 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 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 * 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 <i>The Code</i> 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 <i>Free Enterprise</i> 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 <i>Work Won't Love You Back</i> 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 <i>Crack-Up Capitalism</i> 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 <i>Counterrevolution</i>