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Changing Meanings of Work inGermany, Korea, and the United
States in Historical Perspectives
K. Peter Kuchinke
The problem and the solution. The article uses three broad his-
torical eras, preindustrial, industrial, and postindustrial, to investigate
similarities and differences in the meaning of working in three coun-
tries: Germany, South Korea, and the United States of America. Basedon the proposition of meaning as created in an interplay between the
individual and the social environment, attention is paid to work as a
social institution, and the characteristics of work processes, technolo-
gies, and organizations are described. The conclusion identifies com-
mon and divergent themes and argues for the importance of historical
perspectives for the education and training of human resource devel-
opment practitioners and the utility of a historical and comparative
approach to understanding the meaning of working. Directions for
further research are offered at the conclusion of the article.
Keywords: historical analysis; meaning of working; Korea; Germany;United States of America
Although historical perspectives are rare in the literature of human resource
development (HRD) and related fields, an examination of changing meanings of
work over time holds interest from a scholarly point of view and can inform
work meaning in contemporary settings. In addition, understanding the evolu-tion of work meaning is useful for a host of practical applications in national and
international contexts, such as career counseling and planning, job design, and
workplace redesign and organization development more broadly. This article
will develop selected themes of the evolution of the work meaning in three
modern economies and highlight their similarities and differences. Given the
constraints of the article and the breadth of the topic, the coverage will, by
necessity, be eclectic rather than comprehensive. Numerous accounts could be
given and many different perspectives adopted related to work meaning in a
specific period, country, and social group, and these detailed accounts wouldhighlight the complexities and difficulties of narrating history from an outsider’s
Advances in Developing Human Resources Vol. 11, No. 2 April 2009 168-188
DOI: 10.1177/1523422309332780
Copyright 2009 SAGE Publications
This article was subjected to a two-tier blind review process that did not involve the author who
is currently member of the editorial board.
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Kuchinke / CHANGING MEANINGS OF WORK 169
perspective, in hindsight, and based on secondhand and thirdhand accounts.
Although all social science scholarship, including historical writing, is in itself
context bound and reflective of specific historical interests and traditions
(Mannheim, 1986), the author’s hope is that the article succeeds in highlightingbroad historical trends that inform theory and practice and whet the appetite for
more in-depth study and follow-up research, without succumbing to the risks of
an overly simplistic, biased, or stereotypical treatment of the topic at hand.
The three countries were selected because of their differential social, cul-
tural, economic, and political histories that allow contrasts between a highly
free market–based economy in the United States, a social market economic
model in Germany, and a comparatively recently industrialized country, South
Korea (Korea), that is rapidly transforming itself into a knowledge economy
and a global economic force. Without claiming geographic generalizability,the United States, Germany, and South Korea (Korea) do belong to distinct
cultural groupings (Galtung, 1981), offer distinct work-related value prefer-
ences (Hofstede, 2001), and exhibit distinct country-level normative, cogni-
tive, and regulatory institutional profiles (Kostova, 1997), which can illuminate
similarities and differences in the meaning of working for an assumed but
likely theoretical modal segment of the population in the three countries.
Underlying the rationale of this article are two orientations to writing about
the topic: the complex and intricate relationship between the individual and the
social, and the nature of meaning. Related to the first, it should be observedthat in the extant literature, the meaning of working has been construed primar-
ily as an individual level construct concerned with “comprehensive, trans-situ-
ational and relatively enduring orientations towards work in general in terms
of a person’s evaluative system and cognition” (Ruiz Quintanilla & Wilpert,
1988, p. 4). It is, however, the broader environment that provides the norma-
tive, cognitive, and regulatory contexts for subjective valuations. Thus, from a
sociological perspective, work should be viewed as a social institution subject
to societal norms, expectations, options, and arrangements (Sweet & Meiksins,
2008). Although neither the personal nor the social realm should be seen assuperordinate—see, for example, the interesting proposition by Giddens
(1984) of the potential for personal action to change social norms—discussing
the psychological without the sociological aspects of meaning of working
appears to be incomplete.
The second point relates to the question of whether the meaning of working
should be viewed as fixed and stable, as is assumed by Ruiz Quintanilla and
Wilpert’s (1988) definition above and also by a large number of studies in
vocational psychology (e.g., Holland, 1985) and career studies (e.g., the work
by Schein, 1993, on career anchors), or whether the more salient aspects ofmeaning are constructed in context, malleable in response to situational fac-
tors, and thus temporary (see the related discussion on constitutive approaches
to leadership in Grint, 2000). In line with a constructivist approach, the thesis
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Advances in Developing Human Resources April 2009170
here is that the topic is best framed as an active process of meaning making
with the “result” of this process as neither personally nor contextually fixed or
permanent. Rather, the process of making meaning of working is part of the
self-reflexive and self-constitutive project that characterizes personhood or“self” in posttraditional and postmodern contexts (Bauman, 1991; Giddens,
1991). As of the date of the writing of this article, far-reaching upheavals in
the economy of the three countries and the world as a whole are under way
that affect the meaning of working and provide material for a new round of
accounts on the topic of work meaning to be written in the future.
Work meaning, thus, is constructed and expressed at the individual level but
is also reflective of specific moments in time that provide points of reference
and orientations with respect to how work activities are experienced and what
meanings are assigned. Four brief examples at different levels of analysis canserve to illustrate these points. Research about occupational identity of indi-
viduals engaged in socially tainted work tasks, such as jobs in sanitation and
slaughter houses, suggests that individuals construct and maintain a positive
self-image through work group–level cognitive framing and reinterpretation of
work activities considered by the larger society to be unsavory and distasteful
(Ashford & Kreiner, 1999). A second example, taken from country-level
research, suggests that in Scandinavian countries, where higher levels of pro-
fessional qualification are required and higher wages are paid to early child-
hood teachers and senior care center nursing support staff, professionalself-esteem and self-expressed career satisfaction are higher than in the United
States where these jobs require lower levels of professional training and are at
the bottom of the pay scale (Sweet & Meiksins, 2008). A third example, intro-
ducing a historical perspective, suggests that surgeons in medical practice,
now regarded highly as belonging to the most prestigious occupational groups,
were, prior to the advent of modern techniques of sterilization of equipment
and infection control, considered to be little more than butchers whose patients
were as likely to die because of the effects of the treatment as to heal (Abbott,
1988). Finally, introducing a life span and career development perspective, itcan be assumed that the same low-skill, part-time job that provides the first job
experience and pocket money for a teenager may be viewed and valued very
differently by that same individual who has gotten laid off as a midcareer
professional forced to make ends meet and differently still by that same person
after recent retirement with a secure pension, seeking social interaction and a
way to while the day away.
These examples are offered in support of the theses that (a) the meaning of
working is subject to social influences within a reference group; (b) within-
and between-country differences exist with respect to very similar occupa-tional tasks based on the regulatory environment (in this example, of the level
of education and compensation of teachers and nursing staff); and (c) the
valuation of a given set of occupational tasks can vary dramatically over time,
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viewed both historically and within the life and career span of individuals. The
meaning of working, therefore, should be considered not as an individual trait
that is fixed and an essential part of an individual’s personality but as a socially
constructed phenomenon subject to a variety of influences within and outsidethe individual and to situational and historical influences, and as a phenome-
non that is actively created, modified, challenged, and negotiated as part of the
ongoing achievement of identity creation and self-representation.
The plan for the remainder of the article then is to examine similarities and
differences in the construction of meaning of working by taking into account
the dynamic interaction between the personal and the social. This will be done
by approximating three eras in technological and socioeconomic development:
preindustrial, industrial, and contemporary. Although definitions and boundar-
ies would require much additional justification beyond the scope of this article,these eras indicate transition points where the institution of work for a major-
ity has been observed to have shifted in qualitatively significant ways. The
three eras, however, do not coincide in a temporal sense. In the United States,
a commonly used transition point to the industrial age is the end of the 19th
century, when after the ravages of the Civil War, mass production and modern
factories began to draw large numbers of workers from rural America to the
cities, and even larger numbers of immigrants were absorbed in the manufac-
turing establishments, giving rise to scientific management, labor unions, and
the beginning of a mass consumer culture. The shift from a rural, independent,and largely subsistence-based agricultural to an urban and factory-based
employment pattern brought dramatic shifts in work as a social institution and
work as an individual experience (Chandler, 1993).
During the early decades of the 1800s, industrial development in the numer-
ous small and large principalities, feudal states, and imperial free cities on the
territory now comprising the unified Germany was influenced by the introduc-
tion of the steam engine developed in England in the latter part of the 1700s,
which enabled the development of transportation, coal mining, and a host of
other industries, and supplanted industrial labor for agricultural, handicraft,skilled crafts, and manual labor. After the foundation of the German Reich
under Bismarck in 1871, government policy led to the expansion of industrial
production in heavy industry, trade, banking, and manufacturing and, thus,
transforming work in an emerging industrial nation (Wever, 2001).
Korea, in contrast, remained a largely agricultural society until late in the
20th century. The Choson dynasty, having reigned since 1392 over a little-
commercialized peasant economy, ended in 1910 to be replaced by Japanese
occupation and, following World War II, the U.S. military in the context of the
Korean war between 1950 and 1953. Only during the 1960s did South Koreaalong with the other “Asian tigers”—namely, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and
Singapore—begin to modernize and develop very rapidly from a rural to an
industrial economy (Amsden, 1989).
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The inflection point from the industrial to a knowledge-based and global
economy and orientation in the three countries under investigation in this
article is somewhat easier to determine and also more uniform, and it will be
set, approximately, in the early 1980s. After an era of predominance of U.S.manufacturing and rebuilding of the war-torn economies in much of the rest of
the world, the decline of manufacturing, compared with the service sectors
in all three countries; advanced information technologies; ease of trade restric-
tions; increased flow of capital and goods; and mobility of labor were among
the factors ushering in the shift toward a postindustrial, global, and
knowledge-based economy that once again transformed the way work is con-
ceptualized, experienced, and structured in substantial ways in the United
States, Germany, and perhaps with a delay caused by the Asian financial crisis
in 1997, in Korea.
Preindustrial Work
Work in preindustrial times should be imagined as radically different from
contemporary understandings, in part because of the dramatic differences in
technology, settings, and structure of the work process and work organization
but also because of the social conditions in the early democratic (United
States) and feudal (Korea and Germany) societies. Prior to the widespread
mechanization of labor in the form of the modern cotton gin invented by ElieWhitney in the United States in 1793 and the various uses of the steam engine
in agriculture, transportation, milling, and other areas, work has been described
as almost entirely manual, local, and subsistence focused. There was minimal
division of labor in the modern sense; work processes were performed in a
holistic manner, and products were nonstandard and produced on demand
(Volti, 2008). Education for work was by apprenticeship in the German guilds
for the small number of skilled crafts, but for the large majority in Europe,
colonial America, and Korea, work skills were handed down from one genera-
tion to the next and through on-the-job training. In largely agrarian and craft-based societies, there were far fewer occupations and professional groupings,
and work processes tended to be simpler. For most, the boundary between
work and nonwork was fluid or nonexistent because individuals’ living quar-
ters were on the small farms, above the workshops, or close to the stores that
provided their livelihood. Just as the notions of leisure time, vacation, or old-
age pension were nonexistent in preindustrial societies, so was the idea of
childhood as a time protected from the demands of physical labor. Child labor,
year-around work, long work days following the seasons, and lifelong work,
along with a lack of protection against illness, injury, or exploitation have beendescribed as the norm (Ciulla, 2000) and gave rise to the Marxian analysis and
critique of wage labor under capitalism in England in the mid-1800s (Marx,
1992). In Germany and the United States, public education in any systematic
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sense of the term was not introduced until the early 1900s, and university train-
ing as professional preparation was restricted to law, medicine, and religion
until the Humboldtian university reform in Prussia in the mid-1800s and the
advent of the public university system in the United States following the pas-sage of the Land Grant College Act introduced by Senator Justin Smith Morrill
of Vermont in 1862 (Clark, 1986).
Preindustrial work should further be imagined in the context of highly rigid
social structures. Social stratification meant the virtual absence of occupational
mobility and occupational choice, and a person’s social background indicated
almost complete control over the type of work, standards of living, income, and
social status. Professional and occupational roles for women were severely
restricted, and after the introduction of public school and health care systems
in the 1800s, teaching and nursing were virtually the only work roles outsidethe home open to women. Strong religious institutions and beliefs constitute
another facet of preindustrial societies and the meaning of working.
Korea
In Korea, the influence of Buddhism and Confucianism provided a strong
normative framework for working. Buddhism was observed from the 2nd to
the14th centuries as a national religion, according to which physical labor was
a path to Nirvana (freedom from suffering). The belief was that when one car-ried out arduous work and suffered from it, one could be free from greedy
passions. Accordingly, working meant an activity that harmonizes the human
spirit with nature as well as an activity that develops personal character (Jang,
1999). From the end of the 14th century, when Confucianism arose and pre-
dominated as the main Korean philosophy and religion, the meaning of work-
ing changed. Confucianism emphasized disciplining oneself mentally and
harmonizing one’s thoughts with one’s behavior, and scholars who studied
sacred books were given preferential treatment as the ruling class in the strict
hierarchical society. Merchants, craftsmen, and the peasantry who lived ontheir labor or skills were treated as commoners or menials, and their work was
looked down on (Kim & Lee, 1978).
Germany
In Germany, the Christian tradition and religious teachings in the various
and varied denominations arising after the Protestant Reformation of 1517
exercised their impact on the understanding of work and meaning of working.
As Placher (2005) chronicles in insightful ways, the notion of vocation and
calling in the Christian sense underwent dramatic changes from vocation as
conversion to Christianity in the second century, to joining the clergy in the
Middle Ages, to secular efforts in the service of God and hope for redemption
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and salvation in the centuries after the Reformation and, in particular, in the
Calvinist tradition. The notion of work as duty in the religious sense was trans-
ferred to duty to the landlord or sovereign in the feudal system and, later, the
German state. In this sense, work was seen as absolving one’s obligationtoward the patron who, in return, was responsible for ensuring the well-being
of his (and very rarely her) subjects. In particular, in the newly formed German
Reich of 1871, the emerging and growing middle class of public servants, civil
administrators, and military officers adopted the notion of work as obligation
toward the State, and this influence has persisted in Germany to the current
day (Wever, 2001).
The United States
Work in colonial America likely carried many of the characteristics of feu-
dal continental Europe along with the institution of slavery and the system of
indentured servitude for those immigrants unable to repay the passage to the
new world after arrival. In the newly formed republic of 1776, and with the
first waves of immigrants and settling of the territories West of the Appalachians
in the early 1800s, however, two strong movements converged that shaped the
meaning of working in the early decades in the United States and continue to
characterize what might be called “work in America.” The first is the founding
of the country as a democracy without an aristocracy and, compared withEurope, a far smaller influence of a landed gentry and, thus, plenty of oppor-
tunity and the need for an active life in the former colonies and the new terri-
tories. With amazement and admiration, for example, an early observer of the
political and civic system of the United States, Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote in
1835 that the
whole population are [sic] engaged in productive industry, and . . . the poorest as well as themost opulent members of the commonwealth are ready to combine their efforts. . . . TheAmericans arrived but as yesterday on the territory . . . and they have already changed the
whole order of nature for their own advantage. (p. 215)
The opportunity and necessity for work and advancement were ideologi-
cally grounded in the Protestant belief in the sanctity of labor as a secular
calling and means of serving God. As Martin Luther said, the demands of a
Christian life included a unified pattern of work and worship in whatever sta-
tion or profession a person found himself or herself. John Calvin, in the 16th
century, “extended, systematized, and institutionalized” Luther’s ideas by
preaching that “work was the will of God and even ceaseless ‘dumb toil’ suf-
ficed to please him [sic]” (Gini, 2001, p. 21). The tenets of what Max Webercalled the Protestant work ethic were based on the moral obligation of a life of
hard work, self-discipline, asceticism, and concern for achievement (Weber,
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1985), and combined necessity and virtue into a core belief of work in the
United States. Best-selling books in the early 1800s describing the lives of
“self-made” men, such as Andrew Carnegie and P. T. Barnum, and “rags-to-
riches” stories, such as the popular Ragged Dick novels by Horatio Alger, aswell as the moral worth of material success popularized the tenets of the work
ethic and the ideal of the endless possibilities open to everyone who just tried
hard enough, despite the fact that for the majority of immigrants, the dreams
of success and comfort were clearly out of reach (Wilms, 1979). The iconic
image of the person from humble origins overcoming hardship through dili-
gence, hard work, courage, ambition, and tough-minded pragmatism appears
to be firmly grounded in U.S. mythology and culture that endures to the pres-
ent day, seemingly reinforced, again, during the recent U.S. presidential elec-
tions of 2008. In this context, then, work is seen as an opportunity to proveone’s personal worth, resolve, and moral character—notwithstanding the fact
that opportunities for advancement and success are, in fact, far from evenly
distributed and that underprivileged social groups, such as immigrants from
certain parts of the world, African Americans, and women, enjoy the opportu-
nities to rise in their careers in significantly smaller numbers.
Work and Industrialization
The era of industrialization and modernization of work organizations, worktechnologies, and work processes ushered in qualitative shifts in the institution
of work and the subjective experience of working. Removing the confines of
life in small communities with their stable membership, strong religious tradi-
tions, and strict family and local hierarchies, work for hire in the rapidly
industrializing settings, factories, and early corporations of the late 19th cen-
tury added dimensions of choice and opportunity for self-direction but also
drastically increased physical and emotional demands that were likely unknown
in the earlier era.
The United States
In the United States, the history of management and organization provides
the framework for the changing understanding of work. As, for example,
Ciulla (2001) narrated, the rise of the factory system in the United States
around the turn of the 20th century meant that work was now under the control
of the clock that determined the speed of work on the production line, the
length of the work day and week, and the rate of pay under the piece-rate
system. The alienation of mechanized and employment-based work underscientific management, of the person as a “cog in the wheel of production” as
graphically shown in Charlie Chaplin’s film Modern Times, and the—by
today’s standards—appallingly unsafe working conditions in the early factories
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gave rise to the labor unions, whose membership peaked around 1920 at more
than 5 million workers but died back during the 1920s because of union-
busting and other antiunion tactics by employers, poor union leadership, and
new benefits given to workers (Ciulla, 2000). The human relations movement,focusing on the individual’s work attitudes and feelings of workers and their
effects on productivity, emerged from a series of experiments at the Western
Electric plant in Hawthorne, Illinois, during the mid-1920s. Contrasted to
F. W. Taylor’s engineering approach to supervision and work design, the
Hawthorne experiments and ensuing value orientation of humanistic psychol-
ogy focused on the agency, worth, and dignity of the individual, whose opin-
ion, feelings, and subjective experience were seen as paramount to achieving
not only organizational goals but also a sense of personal identity as a worker
and productive citizen. The notion of work as an expression of self, the pos-sibility of work as a means of realizing one’s higher aspirations, and the avail-
ability of alternative choices of work should be seen as key aspects of the U.S.
idea of work that developed during the middle part of the 20th century and has
become an enduring part of the meaning of working. This shift can be under-
stood by the material well-being of the United States during the decades fol-
lowing World War II, from which this country emerged as the only
industrialized nation whose infrastructure and industry escaped the ravages of
the War. This circumstance along with the expansion of the higher education
system and the availability of educational loans to servicemen and service-women to enroll in the nations’ colleges and universities raised the expectation
for participation, satisfaction, and nonmaterial outcomes from work.
At the same time, however, U.S. large corporations with their strict hierar-
chies, large bureaucracies, and anonymous work settings, proved unable to
provide the setting for meaningful work, setting up the struggle for freedom
and control depicted vividly in Sloan Wilson’s novel The Man in the Gray
Flannel Suit (Ciulla, 2000), Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, and
Hochschild’s The Managed Heart (1983). The romantic vision of work as a
place of pride, belonging, satisfaction, and commitment, then, is contrastedwith the notion of work as toil and trouble (the title of Joe Kincheloe’s, 1995,
book on the integration of academic and vocational education) and, ultimately,
the disappointment of employment settings and contemporary organizations
unable to fulfill the hope of humanistic psychology’s dream of an integration
or harmonization of the self and the (workplace-related) social. This tension,
in a way caused by the highly increased expectations of the experience of
work, appears as a significant characteristic of the meaning of working in the
industrialized United States and is well expressed by the late Studs Terkel,
whose best-selling book Working starts out as follows:
This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence—to the spirit as well as tothe body. It is about ulcers as well as accidents, about shouting matches as well as fistfights,
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about nervous breakdowns as well as kicking the dog around. It is, above all (or beneath all),about daily humiliations. To survive the day is triumph enough for the walking woundedamong the great many of us. (Terkel, 1974, p. xiii, parentheses in the original)
Germany
Whereas the notions of meaningful work and self-realization through work,
or at least in part through work, traveled easily from the United States to
Europe and later to Asia, the German context of work and organization differs
markedly from the North American free-market model. Many important and
interesting details related to work and its meaning in Germany mark the first
half of the 20th century; a more extended analysis would include the rapid
change and transformation during the final years of the first Reich under the
reign of Kaiser Wilhelm and the intensification of manufacturing in the years
leading up to World War I. This era was followed by the dismantling of the
German industrial infrastructure following its defeat in 1918; it included the
influence of the Russian revolution of 1917 and strong leanings by the work-
ing class toward a socialist and communist political model as well as explosive
cultural growth and diversity during democratization during the Weimar
Republic in the 1920s up to the Great Depression. It would further include the
political events of 1933, with the election to power of the National Socialist
Party and Hitler’s assumption as absolute political and military leader, who
initiated a public works program focused on the rearmament of the German
military and the weapons industry in the mid-1930s, leading up to the start of
World War II in 1939. Working, during these diverse times, was characterized
by a strong sense of duty to fulfill one’s obligation to the State and its
representatives—first, the Kaiser and the empireal bureaucracy and, later, the
national-socialist totalitarian regime where obedience, belief in the authority
and rightfulness of superiors, and unquestioned loyalty were seen as key attri-
butes of working that were demanded and given.
After the surrender in 1945, the Allied occupation forces allowed and
encouraged worker unions and employer groups to be reestablished in the ter-
ritory that later became the Federal Republic of Germany.
A far-ranging social dialogue developed over what shape the society’s new social, economic,and political institutions, including collective bargaining, should take. A broad consensusemerged . . . that the only way the market economy could function safely would be if the powerof the enterprises were tempered by free collective bargaining and worker participation orcodetermination . . . in management. (U.S. Department of Labor, 1991, p. 16)
Codetermination resulted in a typically European form of industrial democ-
racy, soziale Marktwirtschaft (social market economy), and a comprehensive
social safety net that stood in stark contrast to the unrestricted (at least until
recently) and highly competitive market economy of the United States. For
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much of the post-War period and well into the 1990s, German workers enjoyed
a comparatively high standard of living, comprehensive social insurance, and
long-term job security anchored in the German constitution, including the
Works Council—the union representation at the executive level that was con-stitutionally mandated and legally established in each firm with more than five
employees. With the chaotic experience of the Weimar Republic and the regime
of the Third Reich in recent memory, Germany deliberately embarked on a path
of work governance that assigned clear and formal rights and duties to each
member of society. Such rule-bound behavior, anchored in law and enforced in
many formal and informal ways, formed the foundation for transactional styles
of work relationships, where desired behaviors are elicited through a process of
exchange, and specific rewards and recognition are given for specific behav-
iors. Not surprisingly, this mode of exchange was maintained through a strongpresence of labor unions whose membership as a percentage of the total labor
force has hovered around the 40% mark for several decades (U.S. Department
of Labor, 2001) and has recently expanded through the establishment of a con-
federation of organized labor in diverse service sectors. This is in contrast with
the steady decline in union membership in the United States since the 1960s,
where fewer than 8% of all private sector workers worked with union represen-
tation in 2006 (Sweet & Meiksins, 2007).
A final characteristic of working in Germany was the highly rigid labor
market that ensured, on one hand, longevity on the job for a large majority ofemployees and high levels of expertise through long apprenticeships and in-
company training but, on the other hand, offered strong structural barriers to
career changes, earning additional university degrees past the age of 30, or
working outside of one’s field of occupational preparation. This system led to
high levels of long-term structural unemployment among all segments of the
populations, including those with university degrees. Working in Germany,
then, for most of the past 50 years, has meant absolving one’s duties within the
context of a clearly articulated and rigid occupational system that offered
secure employment situations, advancement, and comfortable standards ofliving but also discouraged lateral movement, obligated employers, and failed
to facilitate strategic reorientation. The system assigned specific roles and
responsibilities, and offered, to those in the workforce and to the unemployed,
clearly defined and generous benefits.
Whereas work and identity are closely linked in the U.S. normative
context—consider the ubiquitous first question to a stranger “And what do you
do (for a living)?”—working in Germany, as a rule, is not nearly as central to
the individual sense of self. Although pride in workmanship and professional
competence are valued highly, there is a far greater sense of separationbetween work and nonwork pursuits, both of which carry equal weight. As
much as career success and material well-being are valued and their loss
feared, according to the authors of a recent large-scale study on the meaning
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of working (Miegel & Peterson, 2008), it does, compared with the United
States, provide a less important source of identity; individuals in Germany
indicate that family, friends, and leisure are more important than work and its
outcomes.
Korea
Industrial development in Korea occurred much later than was the case in
Germany and the United States. Until the 1960s, Korea was described as one
of the more underdeveloped countries in the world because of the legacy of the
Japanese occupation and Korean War, its agriculture-oriented economic struc-
ture, scarcity of natural resources, and its small landmass (Kim, Kwon, &
Pyun, 2008). Public policy aimed at developing individual work skills andleadership competencies were implemented with the help of the American
military via management training and training within industry programs (Lee,
2001), followed by strong government initiatives for sustainable and long-term
economic development. Corporations initiated HRD programs that encom-
passed employees and their families, and the so-called education fever swept
the nation, expressing the value of education and learning as key for societal
and economic progress. The International Monetary Fund crisis led to large-
scale transformation and a revision of traditional organizational structures,
work patterns, and work values. This included a flattening of organizationalhierarchies but also layoffs and rising unemployment (Kim et al., 2008).
Whereas work in the preindustrial era was associated with manual labor and
held little social esteem, its place during industrialization was greatly enhanced
and praised as a core personal virtue. More recently, the value of work changed
again, and the emphasis on work seems to be rapidly losing its religious aura
in favor of a new preference for leisure and enjoyment (Kim & Lee, 1978).
Postindustrial WorkOver the past 20 years, economists, management scholars, and political
scientists have identified a clear break from the industrial model and a shift
toward a postindustrial or “new” economy based on the relative decline of the
farming/extractive and industrial and the rise of the service and knowledge-
based sectors (Sweet & Meiksins, 2007; Volti, 2008). “Knowledge has rapidly
become the principal economic resource, replacing capital, natural resources,
and labour . . . there exists [now] a weightless, or dematerialized economy, in
which intangible services are increasingly replacing physical goods as the driv-
ing force” (Baldry et al., 2007, pp. 28-29). Intellectual and cognitive demands,thus, are increasing and creating opportunities for advancement and rewards
for “symbolic analysts” while decreasing the value of routine operations and
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personal services (Reich, 1993). Although many observers warn of an overly
simplistic portrayal of the new economy—Sweet and Meiksins (2007), for
example, argue convincingly that many aspects of the industrial age, in fact,
exist in parallel with a new order—there is little doubt that dramatic changeshave occurred in the world of work since the 1980s and that the rate of change
continues to increase unabated. A central force of the current era, of course, is
globalization, which includes several important trajectories, among them a
rapidly growing economic modernization in many parts of the world; the
spread of management models and organizational forms originated in Western
Europe and North America; a rapid growth in the availability of information
from and about “developed” countries through the Internet and other media; a
preference for Western-style consumption, fashions, and other lifestyle choices;
and, in general, a spread of individualism and associated life politics aroundthe world (Giddens, 1991). At the same time, there has been disenchantment
with the possibilities and ethics of large organizational bureaucracies, be they
the U.S.-style multinational corporations; the Korean family-owned chebol; or
the nongovernmental organizations of the United Nations, the World Bank, or
International Labor Organization. In the North American context, the philo-
sophical tenets of total quality management of the 1980s, expressed, for
example, in W. E. Deming’s insistence on progressive employment practices,
including long-term employment security, information sharing, participatory
decision making, and inverted organizational pyramids, gave way to the corpo-rate downsizing movement associated with restructuring, mergers and acquisi-
tions, outsourcing, and off-shoring of jobs in the 1990s. These movements, the
burst of the “dot-com bubble,” and the corporate accounting and ethics scan-
dals of the early 2000s have introduced a degree of skepticism with respect to
the ability of large corporations to fulfill the promises of good work. As man-
agement scholars noted, work for large corporations might, indeed, be
unhealthy for individuals (Leavitt, 2007).
The United States
The “betrayal of promising work,” to use Ciulla’s (2001) characterization
of contemporary settings, is accompanied by a chasm between the rhetoric of
commitment, loyalty, and trust and the reality of the work environment.
“Employers wanted trust, loyalty, and commitment from employees, but many
employees knew that their employers were no longer willing or able to recip-
rocate. Organizations were trying to figure out how to maintain these values in
an uncertain work world” (Ciulla, 2001, p. 153). Professional work, consid-
ered still by Reich (1993) as secure and full of promise, has intensified cogni-tively and emotionally, and increased with respect to the time required to fulfill
urgent tasks. Americans
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work long hours and work very hard when they work. . . . A recent . . . study reports that 75%of Americans believe that workers experience more stress on the job than they did a generationago . . . [and indicates] that the pace and intensity of labor and the duration of work are increas-ing” (Sweet & Meiksins, 2007, p. 151).
In addition, nonstandard work schedules are increasing, and “fewer than
one in two employees (40%) works a standard day shift approximating the
notion of a 9-to-5 full-time job” (Sweets & Meiksins, 2007, p. 159). Because
of stagnant real wages for most of the past 30 years, dual-income families now
constitute the norm rather than the exception.
The increase in work intensity, work duration, and work stress has, on the
individual level, resulted in the breakdown or at least loosening of the psycho-
logical contract between employees and employers (Rousseau, 1996) implied
by the traditional career. Instead, the concept of the protean career (Hall &Moss, 1998) and the notion of free agency have been used to denote the
untethering of the individual from the social. Although some are undoubtedly
able to benefit from the increased choice and opportunity of the new employ-
ment model, it stands to reason that for a majority, the model does not lead to
increased opportunity but to uncertainty, fear, and material insecurity.
Germany
Whereas these trends are pronounced in North America and the United
Kingdom, continental Europe has been buffered to a certain extent throughout
the 1990s and is only now faced with the need to adapt. In Germany, the social
safety net, long the hallmark of the “third way”—the alternative to both free-
market capitalism and socialism—has come under attack for its high cost and
lack of organizational flexibility to compete on a global level. During the past
10 years, long-cherished social benefits such as short workweeks, bonus pay
at Christmas, long and generous unemployment benefits, job security, and
low-cost health insurance have been reduced or eliminated. In return, indi-
vidual attitudes toward work have shifted as well. The German federation of
labor unions, for example, published a large-scale investigation on work in
multiple industries and observed that there was a declining sense of belonging
and identification with work (Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund, 2007). Germans
appear quite content to seek sources of identity and life satisfaction in areas
unrelated to work, such as family, community involvement, travel, and other
non-work-related dimensions of life. Career advancement and higher incomes
are not primary motivators for younger Germans, as a recent representative
opinion survey suggested. Although some 80% of respondents in a large-scale,
randomized, and stratified survey design indicated that they welcomed a fast-
growing economy, only 19% of adults were willing to “work hard and contrib-
ute a lot to the organization.” Fewer than 45% indicated that they were willing
to work longer or harder for a higher salary, and 44% answered that they had
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not done anything during the past 3 years to improve their job prospects
(Miegel & Peterson, 2008).
Korea
A similar development has been observed in Korea. Despite the emphasis
on nonwork as a major life pursuit, however, Korea has the longest work hours
among OECD countries, with the average worker working in excess of 2,300
hours (OECD, 2007). In 2003, the Korean government revised the Labor
Standard Law and shortened the maximum number of work hours, but the new
standard will be phased in only gradually during the next 5 years (Kuchinke,
Kang, & Oh, in press).
According to research published in 1998 and in 2002 (Korean ResearchInstitute for Vocational Education and Training, 1998, 2002), opinions about
working, loyalty to the organization, and work versus family commitment
showed distinctive generational differences. For example, the younger, post-
War generation cited the goals of achieving recognition in society and self-
realization as the most important reasons for working. The older, pre-War
generation, in contrast, viewed work as a way of fulfilling their obligation as
members of society or their families. Loyalty to employers also differed by
generation, with more than 20% of the younger generation indicating that they
would switch to another organization if the opportunity arose or that they werecurrently preparing to change jobs. Members of the older generation were far
more reluctant to leave their present jobs. In the 4-year time span between the
two survey publications, there was a decrease in work centrality: Younger
people placed more value on their family, community, and leisure. These gen-
erational differences appear to be indicative of different economic and social
experiences and a shift between an “earn money” and a “spend money” gen-
eration and between a “prohibited to travel abroad” and a “free to travel
abroad” generation.
Conclusion
The premise of this article and, indeed, this issue on the meaning of work-
ing, was that working plays a central role in the lives of individuals and orga-
nizations, and should become a key focus of the field of HRD. This article
sought to outline major themes related to the social, political, economic, and
technological conditions in which work is situated and to do so by comparing
and contrasting three countries that might provide contrasting images and
illustrate the range of work meanings at the intersection of the individual andthe social.
Taking a historical approach, preindustrial work was portrayed as less dif-
ferentiated, more manual, direct, and focused on subsistence and procurement
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of the means to survival. Under the feudal systems in Korea and Germany,
work took place in tightly circumscribed and limited social settings, whereas
the early democratic system of the United States assigned a more egalitarian
role to work as requirement of establishing one’s livelihood and social standingin a free society. Industrialization, arriving at different times but with similar
effects in Korea, Germany, and the United States, meant the move from a
largely agrarian and craft-based society to a work system based on employment
in organizations of increasing sophistication and complexity with respect to
their structure, work processes, and technology. Alongside this development,
the evolution of the human relations movement and related fields, such as
industrial psychology and organizational behavior, held the, at times implicit
and at times explicit, promise of work fulfillment and satisfaction, thus, broad-
ening the mere instrumental view of work—seen from the individual and theorganizational perspectives. The article further described the tension between a
vision of meaningful work and the ability of industrial organizations to provide
it. Finally, the current era, often labeled as the “new” or global economy, was
characterized by increased pressures but also by increased choice and opportu-
nities for individual work and organizations. Although the industrial model of
career and work offered, for many, the promise of long-term employment and
stable work, the implied contract between employer and employee was broken,
and the remnants of the old model of loyalty, trust, and commitment appear to
survive only in the form of exhortations and false rhetoric. In turn, a proteanmodel of work is offered that places the responsibility for opportunity finding
and selection solely on the shoulders of the individual and creates a free-agency
pattern of employment and work. The freedom and choice implicit in the
model, however, is gained at the price of emotional and material insecurity, and
its benefits are available only to a small privileged cadre of highly educated and
geographically mobile elite and not the large majority of the workforce in the
three countries under investigation in this article.
Before moving to the implications for HRD theory and practice and the
need for future research, several observations are in order. The first relates tothe differences and similarities of work meaning in the three countries across
the three eras portrayed here. Working is universally a basic necessity and need
for individuals and societies, but the conditions, circumstances, and valuations
of specific occupational tasks and roles are affected by the larger socioeco-
nomic system in which the institution of work takes place. Common to the
three countries was the observation of work as quite similar within a given era
of technological and social development. Work in preindustrial times might
have consisted of quite similar tasks, challenges, and opportunities around the
globe. Common, too, appear the constraints that a feudal system of governanceimposes on work as well as the relative security of patriarchy, even though
there were no legal claims that share croppers, for example, had on the land-
lord. In contrast to a feudal system, in a young democratic nation there is a
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greater need for everyone to be industrious and a relatively smaller cast of
landowners and the aristocracy; also, there is a greater degree of opportunity
to forge one’s own fortune, or fail, in a freer society. Another difference lies in
the normative system imposed by the religious system within each country.Whereas the Protestant Reformation placed work of any kind in a valuable and
dignified context, Confucian philosophy valued certain occupations higher
than others.
Industrialization, too, exerted similar effects on the organization and struc-
ture of working, whether, for example, a factory was located in Berlin,
Chicago, or Pusan. Yet the political context and ideological frame of a given
factory job differed based on the ideological and philosophical role of work.
For Korean workers in the rapid industrialization phase of the 1960s and
1970s, work was seen as a contribution to building a modern society—a simi-lar normative context, interestingly, as was presented to workers in the former
German Democratic Republic where work was portrayed as a way to build a
socialist society and to demonstrate the superiority of the planned economy
over the capitalist system evolved in the Federal Republic. To what extent this
ideological message was internalized is not known, but it did present the offi-
cial message about the meaning of working at that time and place. Within the
more highly individualistic context of the United States of America, working
has not held the meaning of furthering a state-sponsored agenda, with the pos-
sible exception of work to support the War effort during the early 1940s and,of course, work in the military.
Working in the “new economy,” appears to be influenced by global move-
ments and an equalization of the role and meaning of working appears plau-
sible. Multiple, often contradictory, and complex forces impact on the lives of
individuals, and working is played out in a tension between the demands of the
work organization and the desire for leisure, free time, and engagement with
family, community, and friends. As individuals navigate through the current
era, the guide posts of the past appear to vanish: The organization, long viewed
as a stable anchor, is often unable to fulfill its role as a provider of stable,engaging, and rewarding work. The shift toward individual responsibility of
work and career provides promises and increasing options but comes at the
price of instability and material and emotional insecurity.
A second broad conclusion relates to the observation of an incremental
broadening and shift in the prevalence of certain types of work during the three
eras. Although farm work or teaching takes place today under very different
conditions from that 200 years ago, the basic processes of planting and har-
vesting or of instructing students appear to be stable. New professional roles,
however, have been added, such as the prevalence of managerial work or workinvolving information technology.
What then has an investigation into the meaning of working to tell the field
of HRD and its practitioners? For one, developing a basic understanding of the
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history of one’s profession or chosen field has been proposed as a requirement
of professional education because it allows for insight into the traditions and a
differentiated understanding of current trends in light of those of the past
(Peters, 1973). Second, it enables practitioners to develop a sense of perspec-tive and to distinguish new from old ideas and practices, to evaluate claims of
innovation against an understanding of what has been tried in the past. Finally,
and perhaps most important, it helps practitioners develop a base of indepen-
dent judgment that is useful in a marketplace of ideas about people and orga-
nization that is full of fads and unfounded claims of breakthrough ideas and
alleged recipes for success (Mickletwaight & Wooldridge, 1998). This explo-
ration of history of work appears essential for a field whose responsibility and
scope has been defined as education and training not only for work but also
about work (Copa & Tebbenhoff, 1990). When, for example, career resilienceis the goal of an HRD intervention (Sutcliffe & Vogus, 2003), an examination
of the history of work can provide the required perspective to better understand
the relative importance of current pressures in light of past challenges and
provide the needed distance and perspective to function effectively in the cur-
rent situation.
Finally, there are several recommendations for further research. First, as has
been confessed at several times throughout this article, an article covering
large temporal and geographic areas is, despite the best intentions, subject to
unwarranted generalizations and hence the call for more detailed and sophis-ticated research on the meaning of working during more clearly delineated and
shorter time frames, geographic locations, and occupations. How to sensibly
carve up the territory is in itself a challenging question, but considering the
short shrift given to historical and comparative research on work meaning in
HRD, much progress has to be made in this respect, no matter what spatial or
temporal lens is employed. Second, the tendency to view previous times as
homogeneous or unitary and, thus, less complex than the current era should be
avoided. Although less information is available about the past than the current
times, it stands to reason that work in preindustrial Europe, for example, was just as complex and multifaceted as today’s world of work. Consider, for
example, the literary accounts of the plight of working women as vividly dis-
played in Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles, accounts of child
labor in the cotton mills of the north of England, or German playwright
Schiller’s harrowing story about the weavers’ revolt in the 1800s in the Silesian
mountains. In current times, research has focused too little on manual work,
the work of immigrants, of transient workers, or other underprivileged groups.
Third, in the age of globalization, urgent attention needs to be given by HRD
researchers to the changing meaning of working in industrializing and emerg-ing economies, including the important question of whether there is the emer-
gence of a global set of work values influenced by Western and individualistic
understandings of work. In addition, an understanding of the impact of
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national, regional, and local cultural norms on the evolution of work meaning
is needed to guide HRD professionals to assist organizations in work design,
organization development, leadership and management development, and
other interventions. As the rate of change is increasing, and organizations arefaced with the challenge of transformation and adaptation, the focus on the
meaning of working around the world and in many detailed settings should be
given much attention. It is the hope of the authors of this issue that the articles
collected here can provide a first orientation and direction for future study in
this important area.
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K. Peter Kuchinke is professor of Human Resource Development at the University of
Illinois where he also serves as Director of Graduate Programs. He holds an appoint-
ment with the Russian and East European Research Center and is Editor of Human
Resource Development International. Professor Kuchinke’s current research focuses on
identity formation and professional development, with much of his work being con-ducted in cross-cultural settings. A native of Germany with residency in the US for 30
years, he has extensive consulting experience in the US and abroad and holds leader-
ship positions in professional associations in the U.S. and Europe.
This refereed journal article is part of an entire issue on The Meanings of Work and
Working in International Contexts. For more information or to read other articles in the
issue, see Kuchinke, K. P., & Ardichvili, A. (2009). The Meanings of Work and
Working in International Contexts. (Special issue). Advances in Developing Human
Resources, 11 (2).