Harvey Goldman

Good work, from Homer to the present

Dædalus Summer 2005 Work has long been understood as an ethical practice within a more comprehensive moral economy. Yet students of the modern professions have often ignored the ethical aspects of work. One can therefore only applaud contemporary reform efforts like the GoodWork Project that attempt to understand the speci1⁄2c moral economy of the professions. Effective projects for the reform of work have generally needed to acknowledge not only professionals’ ideologies and practices, but also the social institutions and forces that inform them. Only in this way have reformers been able to determine the genuine nature of the problems that undermine good work. In modern times especially, the challenge of work goes deeper than the moral formation of single individuals. As Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, and Max Weber well understood, we moderns live in a social climate that increasingly and systematically takes control over the conditions of meaningful and responsible work from those who work–even within the professions. One implication of their theories is clear: unless the social climate is transformed, merely exhorting students in professional schools to ‘do good’ is not likely to produce truly good work.