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. 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.”
Excerpts, Interviews and Reviews
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The Can-Do Spirit that Undermines American Workers. Washington Post (January 3, 2025)
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Fairytale at the Supermarket. The Baffler (January 14, 2025)
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The Entrepreneurial Ethic. Know Your Enemy (January 21, 2025)
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The Insidious Charms of the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic. New Yorker (January 27, 2025)
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America’s Entrepreneurial Spiral w/ Erik Baker. The Majority Report with Sam Seder (January 30, 2025)
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How American Capitalists Harnessed the American Work Ethic. Delving In with Stuart Keller (February 3, 2025)
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Erik Baker on the Entrepreneurial Century. Who Makes Cents (February 3, 2025)
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America’s Era of the Entrepreneur — with Erik Baker and Faisal Al Yafai. The Lede (February 5, 2025)
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The Best Books We Read This Week. New Yorker (February 5, 2025)
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The Power of Negative Thinking. Defector (February 5, 2025)
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What to read when you’re finally ready to loud quit your job. LitHub (February 10, 2025)
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The Folly of Academic Self-Help. The Chronicle of Higher Education (February 12, 2025)
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Living to Just Work: ‘Make Your Own Job’ by Erik Baker. ZYZZYVA (February 13, 2025)
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The Cult of the Entrepreneur. The New Republic (February 17, 2025)"
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Opinion: Elon Musk Is the World’s Richest Man. Why Is He Sleeping on an Office Floor? New York Times (February 27, 2025)
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Make Your Own Job. New Books Network (March 2, 2025)
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Interview: Make Your Own Job by Erik Baker. Work Stoppage (March 20, 2025)
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Review: Compliant Mechanisms. Protean Magazine (March 24, 2025)
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You, too, can never, ever relax. Harvard Gazette (April 1, 2025)
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Episode 58 - Interrogating the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic. Reinventing Solidarity (April 9, 2025)
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Fashionable Nonsense. The Baffler (April 14, 2025)
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The Cult of Doing Business. Commonweal (April 29, 2025)
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Elton Mayo with Erik Baker. This Guy Sucked (May 1, 2025)
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What Makes a Person’s Work Valuable? It’s Not Us (May 13, 2025)
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Biblioracle: Erik Baker explores entrepreneurialism in ‘Make Your Own Job’. Chicago Tribune (May 17, 2025)
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Never jump into an overcrowded pool. Hater’s Guide to Living Well (June 10, 2025)
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专访 | 哈佛学者:为何创业工作伦理让美国人疲惫不堪 [Exclusive Interview: Harvard Scholar: Why the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausts America]. The Paper (CN) (June 20, 2025)
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Review. ILR Review (July 2025)
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E218 - The History of America’s Entrepreneurial Work Ethic w/ Erik Baker. American Prestige (July 15, 2025)
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Harvard Business School and the creation of the MBA with Erik Baker. American Campus Podcast (July 27, 2025)
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Review. Las Vegas Review of Books
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Review. Kirkus
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Review. Library Journal