Redeeming Work: The Institution—Part 2

The last of a four-episode series on redeeming work that discusses how ideological intrusion into our work can degrade, dilute, and even distort the good of our work.  Finally, we discuss the one area of positive enhancement (promoting engagement or flow) that the institution contributes to our work. 

Ideology can be defined as a set of political beliefs or a set of ideas that characterize a particular culture. Although ideology can degrade and dilute the good of work, its greatest threat is in distorting it by turning the specific work into something else to pursue another goal.  Historically, the ideology of communism adversely affected the good of work by distorting all work to conform to various ideological claims.  This led to fatal results due to unprepared armies, poor quality products, and food shortages.  Today, the sexual revolution, political agendas, consumerism, and wokeism all have adversely impacted the good of work in many fields.  Examples of journalism, education, and medicine demonstrate distortion by one or more of these ideologies by forcing them to pursue other goals.  These other goals now harm the internal good or excellence of each profession while simultaneously increasing interpersonal tension amongst workers, and harming society coinciding with decreasing trust within society towards each profession.  

The institution should strive to adequately match the talents of the workers with the tasks at hand knowing that the talents and tasks can change over time.  The institution should neither want a bored worker nor a stressed-out worker.  Increasing workers’ abilities through additional training and then giving them commensurate levels of greater responsibility and/or more challenging tasks is essential for growth and fulfillment in our work leading ideally to greater time spent in “engagement” or “flow.”  Ideas such as giving employees side project or innovation time off time to work on projects that they find interesting while on company time has shown to decrease burnout and increase job satisfaction.

References

A Time to Build by Yuval Levin is a key read for understanding the healthy role that our institutions should play while he convincingly argues that our current institutions are not healthy which is adversely affecting our society.  An NPR interview hits the high points of his book. 

Website on Communism and Computer Ethics by four Stanford graduates discussing Work Ethic and Motivation

Wikipedia has a nice discussion on Lysenkoism

Charles Colson and Nancy Pearcy’s book How Now Shall We Live is a classic book that responds to different worldviews contrasting them with a Christian worldview.  An entire chapter is dedicated to the outsized effects that the sexual revolution has on our worldview.  A 41-minute video reviews the book.

Carl Trueman’s book Strange New World is an excellent introduction to expressive individualism while his book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self is a deeper exploration.  There are multiple interviews and lectures with Carl Tru

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