Erik Baker, "Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America" (Harvard UP, 2025)

Mar 2, 2025

In this engaging discussion, Erik Baker, author of 'Make Your Own Job,' sheds light on how the entrepreneurial work ethic reshaped American culture throughout the 20th century. He reveals the unexpected connections between historical figures like Marcus Garvey and Henry Ford, and how this mindset shifted expectations for workers. Baker argues that while promoting individual initiative, this ethos has led to increased economic insecurity and inequality. He explores the roots of the gig economy and its social implications, making a compelling case for reevaluating our relationship with work.

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Intro

00:00 • 2min

The Entrepreneurial Mindset: A Cultural Reflection

02:17 • 12min

The Rise of New Thought and Management Ideologies

14:00 • 8min

Entrepreneurial Spirit in the Great Depression

22:26 • 11min

The Synthesis of Economic and Cultural Conservatism in Reagan-era America

33:00 • 3min

Franchising Nostalgia: Corporations and Small Business Culture

36:19 • 8min

Historical Echoes of Entrepreneurial Challenges in America

43:50 • 4min

Understanding the Roots of the Gig Economy: Beyond Technology

47:46 • 3min

Navigating the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic in Modern Employment

50:58 • 4min

How Americans think about work changed profoundly over the course of the twentieth century. Thrift and persistence came to seem old-fashioned. Successful workers were increasingly expected to show initiative and enthusiasm for change—not just to do their jobs reliably but to create new opportunities for themselves and for others. Our culture of work today is more demanding than ever, even though workers haven't seen commensurate rewards.

Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America (Harvard University Press, 2025) by Dr. Erik Baker 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.” Policy experts embraced the new ethic as a remedy for urban and Third World poverty. Every social group and political tendency, it seems, has had its own exemplary entrepreneurs.

Dr. Baker argues that the entrepreneurial work ethic has given meaning to work in a world where employment is ever more precarious––and in doing so, has helped legitimize a society of mounting economic insecurity and inequality. From the advent of corporate capitalism in the Gilded Age to the economic stagnation of recent decades, Americans have become accustomed to the reality that today’s job may be gone tomorrow. Where work is hard to find and older nostrums about diligent effort fall flat, the advice to “make your own job” keeps hope alive.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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