Why is it that your work.....what you do for a job.....seems to define you as a person in the social world? After your name, this question seems to come up rather quickly in introductory conversation. People get tagged with certain occupational labels and a myriad of sterotypes start flying across the room.
Work is important in human interaction. You don't have to be a cultural anthropologist to understand how the world started changing when proto-humans developed tools to allow for productive time spent outside of hunting, gathering, fighting and having sex. I'm sure there are some that trace this functional identity issue to some of the core challenges in behavioral psychology, sociology, law, and our basic culture itself.
Let's focus on what's outside your window right now, in the real world, and leave the academic pursuits to others. What do you do for for your normal job? How is that related to your long term career goals? Are either of those part of who your really are?
For many people, your job is not your career and it's not what you'd like to be identified with as a deep and lasting personal commitment. Because work is sometimes not your identity. It's what you do to be able to be yourself when you're not working.
The nature of work is different in the 21st Century than it was even a few months ago. For centuries, we've done a variations on the master-slave, capitalist-consumer, tradesman-society, and corporation-workforce transaction. Now things have drastically changed. Corporations cannot support the normal employment transaction within the international economic arena. Outsourcing, contracting, "Lean" process design, cheap transportation, and real-time information exchange have all given your normal work a huge make-over. If you have not experienced those changes yet, don't worry. You will.
The evidence is so clear and frightfully in our face that lots of people refuse to take a look: The Postal Service, American Auto Workers (and now their international counterparts) , IBM, General Electric, US Steel (does that still exist?), Japanese Electronics, Ship Building, European Banks, even Wal Mart (one of the worlds largest employers) is re-thinking their normal employee transaction.
This blog will start to look at the dynamics of work, and how this basic part of your life is (or will be) completely changed in the next 18-24 months. That seems like a short time frame and in the internet world, it's probably 3-5 years.
You are welcome to post here on how your job has morphed, changed, disappeared, or multiplied in the recent past. How do you plan on "making a living" in the future? How is that a part of who you are? Or should it be?
I'll keep you posted from the inside of the employment transaction machinery. I work with employers and applicants on matching up people with work.....project work, regular work, any kind of work. It's been what I've done for about 30 years and it's a fun, enlightening, and scary job.
It's apparently part of who I am. Which was my original question. Why is that?
No comments:
Post a Comment