Book Reviews
| Published date | 01 December 2001 |
| Date | 01 December 2001 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8543.00217 |
BOOK REVIEWS
The Oxford Book of Work edited by Keith Thomas. Oxford University Press, 1999,
xxiii+618 pp., ISBN 0-19-214217-8, £20.00; 0-19-282531-3, £9.99 paper.
This anthology ought to be at the centre of contemporary discussion of work, its
future as well as its past. Thomas has assembled a wonderful collection of writings,
some a mere sentence long, others extending to several pages, and has arranged them
into nine chapters, which are themselves further subdivided. Under ‘Compensations
and Rewards’ we find some 16 different topics, ranging from ‘Work as the Creator of
Civilization: the Celebration of Human Productivity’ to ‘The Tedium of Idleness’
and ‘The Psychological Necessity of Work’. Though Thomas’s editorial method is
self-effacing, and there is no attempt to provide a full context for the extracts in
terms of the particular setting or literary genre from which they are drawn, the very
juxtaposition of so many observations on this one subject has the effect of high-
lighting their individual characteristics. One of Thomas’s express aims is to illustrate
the literary conventions guiding the ways writers have treated the subject. In conse-
quence we can see how work is capable of engaging many different means of
expression, and need not figure merely as pretext for the jargon and patent nostrums
of contemporary popular discussion. There is also a dearth of professional literature,
and of its more relaxed alternatives, in this collection. Even the ubiquitous Charles
Handy figures only once in a passing reference, in a Times piece by Libby Purves.
Thomas’s colleagues, he felt sure, were perplexed by his interest in so dreary a
subject, yet what emerge vividly from the book are the riches of so many individual
observations.
One of their implications is that important parts of the industrial psychology
studied by modern specialists are less the product of our own society, and of modern
technology, and more intrinsic to the western tradition, or perhaps to the human
condition in general. When reading of ‘The Pleasures of Occupation’, we are swept
rapidly backwards from W. H. Auden and Anne Frank to an anonymous eighth-
century Irish poet, and forwards again to the poets of the Elizabethan Renaissance.
We encounter a workaholic Pliny the Elder at one point, but are reminded at another
that Peter Medawar attributed the tendency for professionals to overwork to habits
that had become ingrained during the Second World War. Sometimes the changes in
perspective over quite short periods are surprising. J. G. Patterson of the Industrial
Welfare Society described unemployment thus in 1934: ‘Enforced leisure is an em-
barrassment which only those who have experienced it can possibly understand.’
British Journal of Industrial Relations
39:4 December 2001 0007–1080 pp. 607–632
#Blackwell Publishers Ltd/London School of Economics 2001. Published by Blackwell Publishers Ltd,
108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
Why do the terms ‘enforced leisure’ and ‘embarrassment’ seem so strange a way of
describing joblessness today? Very often there are exhilarating combinations, as
when we move from Diderot the encyclopaedist defining the term ‘me
´tier’, by way of
Homer’s shipwright (in Chapman’s translation) to the autobiographical poem of a
bell-ringer, elegizing an ancient craft in, of all years, 1968. There are also interesting
similarities. Thomas’s own sympathies seem to resemble those of the economist
Alfred Marshall: ‘The truth seems to be that as human nature is constituted, man
rapidly degenerates unless he has some hard work to do, some difficulties to
overcome, and that some strenuous exertion is necessary for physical and moral
health.’ Today’s historians rarely pronounce so explicitly on the subject of human
nature, yet much of Thomas’s own work has been devoted to the exploration of just
how that human nature came to be so ‘constituted’ over time as a network of
perceptions, values and sympathies. (This aspect of Thomas’s own work is an
organizing theme of his recent Festschrift: P. Burke, B. Harrison and P. Slack, eds.,
Civil Histories: Essays Presented to Sir Keith Thomas, Oxford, 2000.)
The editor’s direct style when introducing individual passages conceals the extent
to which this book resembles one of the great works of eighteenth-century histori-
ography in offering an interpretation of civilization in its entirety. Work ‘is a
virtually inescapable part of the human condition’ and ‘makes possible all the
pleasures and achievements of civilization’. Despite this, however, the influence of
‘classical notions of decorum’ for long prevented its serious treatment in ‘Western
literature’. Work as a process, argues Thomas, is also intrinsically harder to handle
in literary terms than ‘shorter and more intense forms of experience’. Nevertheless,
Thomas has assembled a remarkable array of writers whose claims to inclusion
depended on their having written something of ‘intrinsic literary value’. In this
respect, those lingering classical notions of decorum seem to shape this project, too,
though Thomas’s criterion of value is simply that the piece must be ‘interesting to
read more than once’. Like his teacher Christopher Hill, Thomas seeks to avoid
complacency in the reader, sometimes at the risk of seeming complacent himself, as
when explaining the book’s Englishness: most of the selections are ‘written in English
by British or North American authors, but with a certain number drawn from other
literatures in translation’. This is, after all, the Oxford Book of Work.
Yet Thomas uses the coherence afforded by this unfashionably restricted (if still
enormous) body of material to demonstrate a rather different point, about the sheer
scale of the variety of work in all its forms, and about its inconsistency. Thomas
would hate to be thought of as a post-modern writer, yet aspects of this collection do
serve to return a sense of complexity and contradiction to the centre of our ordinary
understanding. The positioning of an extract from Albert Einstein’s Autobiographical
Notes at the end of the chapter on ‘Head Work’ may offer an indication of Thomas’s
own views in this respect: ‘Out yonder there was this huge world, which exists
independently of us human beings and which stands before us like a great, eternal
riddle, at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking.’ This was the world
Einstein chose to dedicate his life to studying. Thomas in turn makes the riddle of
work’s place in the human condition a subject for our own generation, and in doing
so frees it, and us, from the entanglements of ‘theory’ by ensuring our access to its
complexity.
What we have instead is a sense of theory as merely a subset of the long-standing
literary representation of work. We are even supplied with some suggestive pre-
statements of ideas that have been latterly alluring. In 1573 Edward de Vere, Earl
of Oxford, gave an account of reading in agricultural terms which anticipates,
608 British Journal of Industrial Relations
#Blackwell Publishers Ltd/London School of Economics 2001.
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