Work, its value and evaluation

The lecture we gave was structured along the following lines. We began by showing the conditions under which the value of work could be recognized as intrinsically positive, i.e. expressive, rather than instrumental. These conditions are, in particular, an equality of talents and capacities to act and produce, and a radical refusal of inter-individual comparison and competition. What emerges is a communitarian ecology of work, in which each person ideally complements the others, through the abolition of the factors of scarcity that generate the productive specialization of work. We explained why this conception, by pointing to some of the highly valued dimensions of work (autonomy, the demand for meaning and recognition, the long horizon of self-development, in particular), is the matrix of recurring idealizations. We then examined the multiple dimensions along which work is segmented and stratified into quantities and qualities. And in the final part of the lecture, in line with an argument put forward in our opening lecture, we contrasted vertical and horizontal analyses of work, professions, relationships and work situations. Here, we reproduce the argumentative framework of the lecture. All the statistical material produced in support of the proposed demonstrations appears in the online version of the lecture.