Introduction
Have you ever boasted about getting four hours of sleep due to the mountain of work through which you had to plow the previous night? Have you ever tried to put away your laptop and step outside but felt a pang of guilt about taking a break? I and many other Americans can relate. A recently established norm in the United States is productivism, which encourages us to derive pride from completing our work to a high standard. This ideology condemns laziness and deems all success the result of hard work. Such a mindset is distinct from the aim to maintain a normal standard of living (“working to live”) or afford a higher one (“working to live well”), in that devotion to work is tied to productivists’ self-esteem and social value rather than motivated primarily by a desire to earn money to be spent and enjoyed later. But how did productivist thinking arise? According to The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by German sociologist Max Weber, the answer lies in what he describes as the Protestant work ethic.
The Rise of the Protestant Work Ethic
Weber observes a shift from the traditionalistic spirit demonstrated by European cloth merchants part of the putting-out system to the work ethic exhibited by members of the “Western bourgeois class,” or business owners. The putting-out system, a precursor to the Industrial Revolution, involved cloth merchants’ buying fabric produced by farm families’ households in the countryside before selling it to middlemen. These merchants enjoyed minimal working hours and significant leisure time, but their lifestyle changed when young, new merchants imbued the business with a competitive spirit; they began asking cloth buyers for their preferences, overseeing cloth-making to ensure they were fulfilled, and selling more fabric at lower prices. This approach involved more rigorous work, but the new merchants devoted themselves to it nevertheless–not because they sought to spend the money they earned but rather because they hoped to accumulate and reinvest it in their business. In Weber’s mind, from this transition emerged the Protestant work ethic, the foundation of a form of productivism, while a working-to-live mentality characterized old cloth merchants’ traditionalism, for they were satisfied with their current standards of living and desired to work only as much as was required to maintain them. But what motivated competitive new businessmen to adopt the Protestant work ethic instead?
Weber proposes that they followed Calvinism, a branch of Protestantism characterized by strict denial of self-indulgence. According to Calvinist belief, your succeeding at work means that you are enhancing God’s glory and that He has chosen to grant you salvation; in contrast, wasting time is the gravest sin because it fails to elevate His glory. Businessmen’s aforementioned views of consumption–their proclivity for reinvesting rather than spending earned money–may have also had religious origins. To Weber, Puritans, most of whom were essentially Calvinists, believed that humans control the goods they acquire merely for God’s benefit and due to His grace, so they should not spend money for their own pleasure. Even after the 1600s, when the desire for salvation no longer motivated Western business owners, and even after the increase in mass consumption in the early twentieth century, their continued devotion to their work indicated an association between constant productivity and their self-esteem, identities, behaviors, and values.
A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Protestant Work Ethic Beliefs
Although Weber theorized that productivism has its roots in the development of Protestantism in Europe, as mentioned, the U.S. has been infiltrated by the ideology. Therefore, after learning about norms around work and productivity in this country as part of Culture and Society, I wondered how they compare to those of other countries. I soon discovered a preliminary answer in a study conducted between 1986 and 1988 across thirteen nations. The researchers distributed questionnaires measuring the degree to which university students displayed the Protestant work ethic (PWE) on seven scales. Ultimately, they concluded that participants from wealthier, First World countries tended to possess lower scores than those from Third World countries. In fact, for above 75% of the scales, samples from India, Ciskei–in the southeastern part of South Africa–and Zimbabwe had the highest PWE scores while samples from Great Britain, Germany, and New Zealand the lowest. Moreover, countries with high gross national products (GNPs)–Germany, the U.S., Great Britain, Austria, and New Zealand–exhibited low PWE scores while countries with lower GNPs–India, Zimbabwe, and the West Indies–high ones.1
Why did these trends emerge? According to the researchers’ analysis, which was based upon four of Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofstede’s dimensions of national culture–power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism, and masculinity–the high power distance relationships in some countries contribute to their support of the PWE. The level of power distance within a society refers to the degree to which, in Hofstede’s words, the “less powerful members of organizations and institutions (like the family) accept and expect that power is distributed unequally.” I suspect that respecting authority may contribute to our dedication to obeying instructions from superiors and completing the tasks delegated to us to a high caliber. Nevertheless–considering that the exclusion of employees from decision-making, for instance, in high power distance countries may reduce job satisfaction and thus commitment–I wonder the degree to which power distance is directly proportional to exhibiting the PWE. The study also found that countries that highly value individualism, as opposed to collectivism, possessed high PWE beliefs, likely due to their encouragement of individual achievement. Yet, the researchers noted that less wealthy, Third World countries with higher power distance relationships and a greater emphasis on collectivism than individualism most strongly endorsed the PWE. They hypothesized that when collectivism is correlated with PWE beliefs, the country may exhibit authoritarianism, which can suppress individual rights in the name of collective objectives. Individuals’ need to demonstrate obedience to authority and yield to strict control may increase productivism.
The Second Protestant Work Ethic
However, a nuance that this study overlooks is that, according to Claudia Strauss, author of What Work Means: Beyond the Puritan Work Ethic, Weber describes two Protestant work ethics. Before the emergence of the aforementioned form, the Puritan work ethic, the early Protestant work ethic existed. It was based upon the theology of Martin Luther, who preached that we should complete our work as if it were God given, an idea that extended an individual’s vocation beyond his/her religious calling and to his/her worldly one. What distinguished ordinary workers who possessed the early Protestant work ethic from the businessmen who exhibited the later Puritan work ethic? Essentially, the former focused on being industrious during normal working hours rather than, as the latter did, dedicating most of their time to their occupations due to a reluctance to indulge in leisure time. While what Strauss calls the “living-to-work ethic” reflects the Puritan work ethic and is prevalent amongst salaried U.S. workers with higher incomes, the early Protestant work ethic, common amongst hourly wage workers, has given rise to the “diligent 9-to-5 work ethic.” Those who display this second work ethic draw a clear division between the times and spaces they devote to work versus nonwork to prevent the former from bleeding into the latter.
You may be asking yourself, “Why are these versions of productivism applicable to different types of workers?” I had the same question, but Strauss explains that hourly wage earners cannot continue working at home even if they sought to; they are not exempt from the regulations within the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and thus would require additional pay for working overtime. Consequently, employers prevent them from doing so. In contrast, salaried workers are exempt from the FLSA provisions. Given that their working longer hours does not mandate extra pay, employers perceive salaried workers’ choosing to extend their workdays as ideal, for it demonstrates dedication to their jobs. I wonder how testing independently for these two work ethics, or the two Protestant work ethics from which some scholars believe they stemmed, may have affected the study’s results. While it measured the PWE likely as the degree to which participants demonstrated the Puritan work ethic, some countries in which the productivist ideology is prevalent may exhibit the diligent 9-to-5 work ethic more than the living-to-work one. In fact, Strauss suspects that the U.S. is one of the countries in which the former is more common than the latter.
Conclusion
Another inquiry this study prompts is how the results may differ if it were conducted today. “Work-life balance” is a phrase that arose in the 1970s and became popular in the 1980s, when the study was conducted; yet, it has evolved over time as events such as the COVID-19 pandemic–encouraging a greater emphasis on mental health, flexible working hours, and other changes to the workplace–have occurred. While this cross-cultural analysis presents numerous opportunities for further investigation, the conclusion that it reached is fascinating in and of itself. Productivism seems to have a firm grip on the U.S., but broadening my understanding by studying its presence in other countries has put my learnings from Strauss’ work into perspective.
Sources
- Thank you to our Culture and Society instructor for sharing the information upon which this post is based.
- What Work Means: Beyond the Puritan Work Ethic by Claudia Strauss
- https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00224545.1993.9712136
- https://geerthofstede.com/
- https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbesbusinesscouncil/2025/04/08/work-life-balance-did-it-always-exist/
- Feature image: https://www.chron.com/lifestyle/houston-belief/article/protestant-work-ethic-that-took-root-in-faith-is-1834963.php
- As you read the results and corresponding analysis, please remember that there are some potential errors in the data due to factors explained in the researchers’ thorough error analysis and summarized here. As with any study, I discourage you from holding the conclusions as facts. First of all, translation issues could have falsified results, but the accuracy of translations was validated by retranslating them into the original language. Additionally, acquiescence bias–the potential tendency for the questionnaire respondents to agree with the given statements–could have occurred; however, including questions for which agreement would lower their PWE scores amongst those for which agreement would raise them likely limited the effects of this potential error. Participants may have also experienced social desirability pressures, or sought to demonstrate higher PWE scores to make positive impressions on the researchers, whom the article describes as relatively high status. Last, some respondents from Third World countries may have exhibited higher scores merely because their religions are more conservative on certain social issues than those in the Western world are, and the PWE is aligned with conservative views. ↩︎