Personal motivations to work

In the previous few articles I have hopefully demonstrated that people can be motivated to engage in volunteer work and gift-giving through the type of rational self-interest and structural motivations that are assumed in neoclassical economics. But this depiction of a human is - whether always recognised as such or not - a simplification that misses out on a lot of detail. Economics and several other fields sometimes use these simplifications because otherwise there would be too much information to deal with, but it is also important to engage with some of this complexity.

Here I want to discuss a variety of other motivations that people have to work that are not payments, including diffuse reciprocity, moral concern, self-actualisation, community, vocational demonstration, and possible pro-system sentiment.

Despite the fact that I have written here a list of reasons that people state they enjoy work, it isn't the case that all of these reasons are true for all people, and for some people it might be that none of them are substantially true. However, the reasons provided are commonly stated reasons that people participate in work.

Diffuse reciprocity

The "orchard scenario" in the previous article outlined a particular case of diffuse reciprocity, where one person, Alice, was motivated to gift resources to another, Beth, on the basis that Beth would likely do the same if Alice were incapacitated and could not work. This is an example of Alice providing goods to the community and receiving a benefit in return, but not a specific, obligated, guaranteed or even necessarily direct benefit.

There are sentiments toward diffuse reciprocity other than rational calculation and survival motivations. People want to enjoy a good quality of life, and they are often happy to participate in labour if they believe that they are positively contributing to that quality of life. Economic networks are vast and varied, and so people do not always know where the goods that they enjoy come from nor how their work contributes to the production and delivery of those goods, but they often believe that there is a relationship and they work in order to sustain that relationship.

In many cases, however, people identify a difference between a job that they think is productive to a society with a high quality of life and a job that is maladaptive to society (for example, a job they find morally dubious, that causes health problems, that acts as an unnecessary middleman or is just generally unnecessary). The former they think provides some diffuse reciprocity, while the latter allow for personal gain but don't contribute a general improvement to society.

Moral concern

A lot of people choose jobs because of moral concern: they believe that their job is morally necessary, meaningful or valuable. These jobs include teachers, doctors and nurses, emergency responders, disaster relief, house-building, medical research, and so on. Many people take on these jobs even though they are not well-paying in a lot of areas - especially where the government is the employer and faces budget restrictions. In many cases people do these jobs for free, volunteering to help others.

Moral concern is distinct from diffuse reciprocity because even though the people that are helped might contribute to the lives of the volunteer in some manner, the volunteer does the job primarily because they believe it is important to directly improve the lives of others and prevent suffering.

Self-actualisation

This is sort of a catch-all category for things that a person finds fulfilling and rewarding in relation to their sense of self, path through life or general well-being. People take jobs because they find them personally fulfilling, or a path to personal improvement. For example, people express that they do jobs because they love that particular line of work (some even express that they would do it for free). Some express that they do jobs because they lead to personal growth, due to contact with new ideas or the development of particular skills that they didn't have before. Some like the sense of achievement that a job brings, even if the specific job is not all that important. Others like the sense of contributing to society. Others simply like the idea of being productive or keeping busy. Many tie up their jobs with their identity or sense of self worth (sometimes in a healthy manner and sometimes not). For some, doing a job helps them feel that they are becoming a better person.

It is for this reason that people work on projects outside of paid work hours, develop personal or community projects that are just as sophisticated, useful and complex as paid jobs, choose lower-paying jobs that they find more exciting over higher-paying jobs that they find less interesting or challenging. It is why some people choose not to retire, or choose to pursue other vocations and work in their retirement.

Community

In addition to satisfaction from the work itself, many people choose to work because they enjoy the sense of community as well as make significant friendships and relationships. Work provides a nexus that does not just offer a place to regularly meet, but also a focus for discussion about the topic of the work, be it customers, cases, improvements, or more. Work also provides a shared project with shared achievements. For many, the shared meaning of work provides a connection that is absent, or significantly different, in other walks of life.

Vocational progress

One reason that people are motivated to work is not always because of the work itself, but because the work offers them a way to learn and demonstrate the skills required - including trustworthiness, punctuality and reliability - that they will need for a type of work that they are wishing to pursue because of the love of work. This could be considered a type of exchange, because the person will, for example, take a menial job to demonstrate their level of commitment and learn some basics skills, and expects to benefit from it by gaining a more desireable job later. However, if the outcome is not guaranteed and if the recipient of the work (the employers and the customers) are not the ones who later offer the desireable job, then I think this is more of an investment than an exchange, where one places themselves into the best possible position to achieve a goal. The investment is largely personal growth, but also the visible demonstration of skills that a potential future employer could consider.

Pro-system sentiment

There are a lot of reasons people express that they want to work, but there are also a lot of reasons that people give that they don't like working - hours, conditions, effort, the people, the pressure, the treatment, and so on. A lot of these conditions could be improved, and I discuss in a future article how a non-reciprocal gifting economy could improve them. Some people who are more reluctant to work might work if those conditions were improved, and some would not. But there is at least one other reason that people clearly express that demotivates them from working, which we might call anti-system sentiment. This is a constellation of factors that make people resent, distrust or reject work. A major part is the feeling that people are forced into work. Yes, if no one worked then society would not exist, and in many cases individuals definitely need to work for themselves in order to survive or have a good quality of life. But there is also a sense of disconnection between many types of work and survival, and a type of arbitrariness about the structure of work. People may think, "How does this help anyone survive?" or "Why do I have to be in the office to do this?" or "My manager is pushing different key performance indicators but they don't really represent anything" and "This work in meaningless, and if I stopped doing it society would go on just the same." But the biggest problem is that people can't stop doing it, or they won't get paid and won't be able to survive.

This anti-system sentiment isn't necessarily about avoiding work, but about being demotivated to work, stopping people from having a fulfilling quality of life, trying their best, enjoying their time, or even being productive. It can lead to stress, anxiety, depression and burnout.

I want to make a proposal that much of this anti-system sentiment is caused by the exchange. Work and survival are tied together, and this is why work feels forced. There is tension between employers and employees in many workplaces because they are both structurally motivated to accrue more exchange capacity. Employers have a tacit motivation to exploit workers and cut corners, while employees have an incentive in many cases to slack off and avoiding contributing innovations. Many jobs are unproductive busy jobs, which don't seem related to survival or improvements in quality of life, and the drive to make money through planned obsolescence and socially maladaptive product design mean that workers can feel they are actively making society worse and making more work for themselves.

Once the connection between work and survival is severed, because people receive resources through gifts rather than exchanges enabled by the pay they receive from work, the nature and attitude towards work is different: it is now truly voluntary. A person only needs to work if they believe in the work or enjoy the work, rather than because they feel forced to due to the need for money. I suggest that this might make work be seen in a more positive light, as unambiguous voluntary contributions to society and something that, for many, is enjoyable in-and-of itself. And the former of these - the unambiguous voluntary contributions - meet the ideals that many market advocates desire but which is held in tension in a market economy.

For this reason I think that a non-reciprocal gifting economy could foster pro-system sentiment, where people are more likely to engage in work because it is their personal choice and because the benefits are more immediately apparent, rather than being represented by monetary success, which can be a poor proxy.