Vocation: Doing God’s Work

Work is central to individual being and social belonging within modernity, with strong theological dimensions as identified in Weber’s ‘protestant ethic’ thesis. Drawing from a large corpus of qualitative interviews with unemployed people, this chapter examines how work is not only desired as an economic or social good, but is positioned as an antidote to the trials of unemployment. In particular, this chapter builds on Weber by analysing Maslow’s idea of self-actualisation through work as recapitulating the theological idea of work as internally transformative. Furthermore, mainstream sociological theories of unemployment, particularly the ‘deprivation theory’ are reconsidered as reflecting these religious concepts of work as redemptive. Indeed, the ideal of the social goods of work is modelled on disciplined labour, in a history stretching through the factory back to the monastery, with the unemployed appearing as the rabble or beggars outside these institutions, in need of reform – an impulse shared by left and right wing governments and even socialist thinking.