Work as a Calling: From Meaningful Work to Good Work, by Garrett W. Potts. New York: Routledge, 2022. 164 pp.

Abstract

I n Work as a Calling, Garrett W. Potts suggests that our language about work— specifically our academic discourse around workplace callings—is problematically individualistic. It prioritizes personal fulfillment over the common good. It stresses subjective meaning making at the expense of moral traditions. Such language, Potts argues, has unwelcome consequences, including anxiety in constructing one’s meaning, depression from not experiencing fulfillment in it, and burnout from the related and never-ending pursuit of measurable gains. Obsessed with selfactualization, today’s language of calling limits and even harms our moral world. Potts’s diagnosis draws not fromWittgenstein (though a gesture toward language games would not hurt) but rather from Robert Bellah’sHabits of the Heart (1985), a seminal text in the sociology of American life. Potts’s antidote builds on Bellah’s constructive response—i.e., Bellah’s nonindividualist notion of calling—by adding philosophical heft from Alasdair MacIntyre, one of Bellah’s more notable interlocutors. Given this genealogy, Potts describes callings in a community-focused manner: they are not individualistically construed. Instead, they draw on “civic” and “biblical tradition[s]” (49) to advance “good work,” “the good of individual lives,” and “the common good of communities” (147). To understand callings in this way, Potts suggests, is to embrace the traditionand community-based languages of American life. This helps people transform intomorally exemplary practitioners and enables them to flourish “in their quest for the good life more broadly” (68, internal quotations removed). Those looking for a history of American individualism will not find it in Potts’s monograph. (In chapter 2, there ismention, but no discussion, ofMartin Luther, John