Many highly educated workers in the white-collar economy feel that their job cannot be “just a job” and that their career cannot be “just a career”: Their job must be their calling. These corporations invented the modern journey of a career, that narrative arc bending toward a set of precious initials: VP, SVP, CEO.Īs the managerial revolution created a sense of professional progress, the decline of organized religion and social integration in the 20th century left many Americans bereft of any sense of spiritual progress. And within these laborious labyrinths, workers could ascend from grunt to manager to executive. Large companies required massive, multilevel bureaucracies. Rail and telegraphs made new kinds of businesses possible, including department stores, mail-order houses, and the national oil and steel behemoths.

“As late as 1840, there were no middle managers in the United States,” Alfred Chandler observed in The Visible Hand, his classic history of the rise of America’s managerial revolution. To conduct this full orchestra of operations, they built a new system for organizing labor. With goods and information moving faster than ever, firms headquartered in major cities had to track prices from Los Angeles to Miami. In 1800, traveling from Manhattan to Chicago took, on average, four weeks in 1857, it took two days. In the 19th century, the railroads and the telegraph forced American companies to change the way they organized their labor. And for hundreds of millions of people everywhere, work is still work-grueling or boring or exploited or poorly paid, or all of the above.

Their work was a matter of subsistence and necessity it was not a race for status or an existential search for meaning. They assembled gears and sewed thread and patched homes. Around the world, people hunted or harvested, just as their parents and grandparents had. Until quite recently, we had little concept of “progress” in our labor. H ere is a history of work in six words: from jobs to careers to callings. This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems.

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