{"podcast":{"title":"The Harvard Brief","slug":"the-harvard-brief-7065267","podcast_index_feed_id":7065267,"rss_url":"https://feeds.megaphone.fm/NBNK6029646569","website_url":"https://newbooksnetwork.com","image_url":"https://megaphone.imgix.net/podcasts/afe001cc-8599-11ef-bbd6-dfe61665ac7f/image/d653e94481008154fdb351bec69734da.png?ixlib=rails-4.3.1&max-w=3000&max-h=3000&fit=crop&auto=format,compress","author":"New Books Network","episode_count":559,"summary":"Interviews with authors of Harvard UP books.","last_synced_at":null,"page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-harvard-brief-7065267"},"episode":{"title":"Entrepreneurial Work Ethic","slug":"entrepreneurial-work-ethic","published_at":"2026-03-16T08:00:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-harvard-brief-7065267/entrepreneurial-work-ethic","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-harvard-brief-7065267","url":"https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBNK9081524514.mp3","audio_url":"https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBNK9081524514.mp3","summary":"In this episode of High Theory, Saronik talks with Erik Baker about the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic. The dominant work ethic of our current moment, it asks us to constantly create new work for ourselves. Eric contrasts the entrepreneurial work ethic with the industrious work ethic, which valued hard work and drudgery in one’s allotted task. Over the course of the 20th century industriousness was replaced by entrepreneurship in the American economic imaginary. The ultimate villain of the entrepreneurial mode is the bureaucrat, the ultimate failing is complacency. This toxic, exhausting ethos in which the standard of all labor is changing the world, paradoxically stabilizes our economic system, by trapping us in unachievable dreams. We should note that High Theory as an academic side hustle is exemplary of the entrepreneurial work ethic, even if we have no ethics. That’s why we made a Patreon. The transcript of this episode lives here as a WordDoc and here as a PDF. Erik’s new book, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America (Harvard UP 2025) explains how this entrepreneurial work ethic took hold, from its origins in late nineteenth-century success literature to the gig economy of today, sweeping in strange bedfellows: Marcus Garvey and Henry Ford, Avon ladies and New Age hippies. Business schools and consultants exhorted managers to cultivate the entrepreneurial spirit in their subordinates, while an industry of self-help authors synthesized new ideas from psychology into a vision of work as “self-realization.” Baker argues that the entrepreneurial work ethic has given meaning to work in a world where employment is ever more precarious––and in doing so, has helped legitimize a society of mounting economic insecurity and inequality. Where wor…","meta_description":"In this episode of High Theory, Saronik talks with Erik Baker about the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic. The dominant work ethic of our current moment, it ask…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":940,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-harvard-brief-7065267/episodes/entrepreneurial-work-ethic/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-harvard-brief-7065267/entrepreneurial-work-ethic.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}