“There is a sense, it would seem, that an ethos of collective sacrifice for the common good should fall disproportionately on those who are already, by their choice of work, engaged in sacrifice for the common good. Or who simply have the gratification of knowing their work is productive and useful.” — David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs
Why would anyone choose to become a teacher today? Or a social worker? Or a librarian?
Given today’s economic realities—including the cost of childcare, eldercare, and healthcare—it doesn’t make much sense to choose a career that doesn’t pay top dollar. Yet, people still choose those paths. To even become eligible for many of these jobs, people go to college and graduate school, often racking up tens of thousands of dollars in debt for the privilege.
The work of teachers, social workers, and librarians creates immense value in our communities. They care for or support a wide range of people. They enable access to knowledge and services that raise people’s quality of life. But the social and cultural value of these professions—and many others—aren’t reflected in their compensation, benefits, or status.
Economic anthropologist David Graeber went so far as to argue the ‘general principle’ that “the more one’s work benefits others, the less one tends to be paid for it.”
That general principle often influences our decision-making, even among small business owners and independent workers, on issues like pricing, marketing, hiring, sales, and more. We assume that choosing socially and culturally valuable work is also a choice to forgo any claim to comfort or boundaries. I’ve heard countless times that the only way to make money online is to teach other people how to make money online. I’ve seen a host of people abandon their socially and culturally valuable work to pursue more financially rewarding paths, often at the expense of those still doing the socially and culturally valuable work.
These choices are perfectly rational and reasonable. Even if I believe them to be misguided at times, I completely appreciate the need to, well, meet your needs in an economic environment that makes that difficult.
There’s a political and economic case to be made here (namely, that there should be far less disparity in how everyone is paid). There is, of course, a race and gender analysis to be applied to these assumptions. But today, I want to share an institutional theory that’s been really influential on not only how I think about the relationship between compensation and social value but also about how socially and culturally valuable work is narrativized in ways that harm people.
Several years ago, my sister-in-law, a librarian, sent me a link to an article, “Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves.” She was attending a conference and had just heard a talk by its author, Fobazi Ettarh. My sister-in-law thought I’d be interested in the idea. I wasn’t interested—I was fascinated.
Ettarh is a librarian and independent scholar whose work is “concerned with the relationships and tensions between the espoused values of librarianship and the realities present in the experiences of marginalized librarians and library users.” She coined the term ‘vocational awe’ to describe how the perception of the institution and its values are often in tension with the needs and experience of the people who do the work of the institution and its values. That tension frequently leads to psychological and financial stress, self-sacrifice, and burnout.
Published in 2018, Ettarh made quite a splash with the concept and her article. Since then, other professions and their institutions have used vocational awe to name the tensions in their own fields. And while I don’t love it when terms with specific meanings and context make their way into the discourse with more casual meanings and an aftertaste of self-help, Ettarh’s ideas can be faithfully translated to fields outside of librarianship.
In other words, that’s a long-winded way of saying that I think you should know about ‘vocational awe.’
1. No institution is sacred.
Libraries are just buildings. It is the people who do the work. And we need to treat these people well. You can’t eat on passion. You can’t pay rent on passion. Passion, devotion, and awe are not sustainable sources of income.
An institution—like the library, the school, the court, or the local barbershop—is the sum of its social purpose, political choices, and time. How we relate to and interact with an institution based on those factors gives it a larger-than-life quality. Institutions seem to become unquestionable and beyond reproach.
Ettarh describes our attitudes toward libraries as “inherently good and sacred.” ‘Sacred’ is a potent word, conjuring the image of libraries as cathedrals of knowledge occupied by devotees and ordained leaders. We get the impression that libraries (among many other institutions we see as sacred) operate outside human concerns and frailty.
Institutions are created and maintained by humans for human purposes, though. Therefore, they are subject to the same biases and oversights as any other human creation. Centuries-old institutions have histories of progressive reform (and reactionary backsliding). So even the appearance of infallibility is more a vibe than material fact.
We also consider less formal or structural institutions sacred.
In the US, small businesses, entrepreneurship, and even the category of work are often treated as sacred. And that idea is at least as old as Max Weber’s 1904 book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which described how work and vocation became directly related to one’s salvation—and how that relationship was exploited by capitalism. And in 2019, journalist Derek Thompson called ‘workism’ America’s new religion.
You may not see the work you do or the field you are part of as sacred in and of itself. But anyone socialized in the United States (and to some extent, other capitalist democracies) has assumptions and beliefs based on the sacredness of work and business. Those assumptions and beliefs impact how we think about prices we charge, the hours we work, the boundaries we set, etc.
There is nothing sacred about work, business, or entrepreneurship. Everything about how they function (or how we function within them) can be renegotiated.
2. Awe is a method of discipline.
In the face of grand missions of literacy and freedom, advocating for your full lunch break feels petty. And tasked with the responsibility of sustaining democracy and intellectual freedom, taking a mental health day feels shameful. Awe is easily weaponized against the worker, allowing anyone to deploy a vocational purity test in which the worker can be accused of not being devout or passionate enough to serve without complaint.
Look at almost any job description today, and you’ll find references to passion, purpose, and community. Look at any sales copy for a career or business coach, marketing course, or fractional COO, and you’ll find the same. These references (explicit or implicit) elevate the work or the offer in question and attempt to induce awe in the supplicant, I mean, applicant.
Awe, as Ettarh notes, is a discomfiting feeling. We experience it when faced with something much grander and more powerful than ourselves. The natural response to awe is self-subjugation. We relegate our own needs to better serve the focus of our awe.
Further, the feeling of awe is paired with the narrative of sacredness to resist critiques of the institution and its demands. Ettarh notes that this is especially harmful to people who have been historically excluded from these institutions. She explains, “Because vocational awe refuses to acknowledge the library as a flawed institution, when people of color and other marginalized librarians speak out, their accounts are often discounted or erased.”
Ettarh’s argument is clearest when applied to fields like librarianship, education, and healthcare. But I see its ripple effects throughout all types of work and business. Most self-help and business books attempt to invoke some sense of awe, perhaps in the market, innovation, or creativity. You might even be encouraged to be in awe of your own goals or potential.
Awe inspires—or requires—discipline.
The more awe-inspiring an institution, organization, or fearless leader is, the more we’re willing to do. Companies will spend gobs of money on inspiring awe—think Google’s legendary offices or Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference—to instill awe-inspired self-discipline among their workforces.
What wouldn’t you do in the midst of awe? What wouldn’t you compromise? What objections wouldn’t you dismiss?
Even if you work for yourself or a small business that doesn’t have billions in the bank, awe-inspired self-discipline comes by way of lofty mission and vision statements. By all means, create those mission and vision statements! But be aware of their power over how you think about your relationship to work or your business.
Authentic awe can be a profound emotion, something that we can seek in nature or places of worship. But when awe gets imposed on us, we should understand it as a mode of discipline.
3. Vocational awe has material consequences.
Through its enforcement of awe through the promotion of dramatic and heroic narratives, the institution gains free, or reduced price, labor. Through vocational mythologies that reinforce themes of sacrifice and struggle, librarianship sustains itself through the labor of librarians who only reap the immaterial benefits of having “done good work.”
Ettarh ties vocational awe to several negative effects librarians regularly experience, chief among them burnout, insufficient compensation, and job creep.
The library public often expects a monastic devotion to the sacred duties of librarianships—sacred duties that can now include administering Narcan to stop a drug overdose, conducting first-contact mental health services, and helping patrons navigate social services websites to get the assistance they need. These are mentally, emotionally, and often physically taxing duties—ones that formal library science training doesn’t cover. Similarly, the library public’s image of a librarian doesn’t include those duties, so the level of responsibility and risk that librarians take on isn’t reflected in their pay, benefits, or working conditions.
Job creep plus insufficient compensation is a perfect recipe for clinical burnout.
Again, we’ve normalized a labor regime of constant job creep and insufficient compensation. We’ve normalized burnout. And we’ve done it by integrating vocational awe and its consequences as a critical part of our culture. We address the problems of work stress, overcommitment, and burnout with individual solutions rather than taking a step back to question the systems and structures that got us here.
For librarians (teachers, social workers, nurses, etc.), the path to resisting vocational awe is treacherous. They must navigate some tricky political and institutional dynamics to create a life where they can pursue meaningful work without giving themselves over to it.
However, this is where I get to the good news for small business owners, the self-employed, and independent workers. The institutions we deal with are generally more ambiguous and less formally structured. That means we have a much greater opportunity to renegotiate and make creative choices about how to proceed.
We can combat vocational awe in our work and model for others what greater structural change could look like. Vocational awe has become a powerful framework for analyzing my own expectations and assumptions. I remind myself that I don’t need to be a martyr, nor do I expect anyone else to martyr themselves in the name of work, purpose, or mission.
At the very least, we can remember that we can do ‘good’ work and still ask for good pay, clear boundaries, and sustainable conditions.
