Work as a Calling: From Meaningful Work to Good Work, by Garrett W. Potts. New York: Routledge, 2022. 164 pp.

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus ¹

In Work as a Calling, Garrett W. Potts suggests that our language about work—specifically our academic discourse around workplace callings—is problematically individualistic. It prioritizes personal fulfillment over the common good. It stresses subjective meaning making at the expense of moral traditions. Such language, Potts argues, has unwelcome consequences, including anxiety in constructing one’s meaning, depression from not experiencing fulfillment in it, and burnout from the related and never-ending pursuit of measurable gains. Obsessed with self-actualization, today’s language of calling limits and even harms our moral world.

Potts’s diagnosis draws not from Wittgenstein (though a gesture toward language games would not hurt) but rather from Robert Bellah’s Habits of the Heart (1985), a seminal text in the sociology of American life. Potts’s antidote builds on Bellah’s constructive response—i.e., Bellah’s nonindividualist notion of calling—by adding philosophical heft from Alasdair MacIntyre, one of Bellah’s more notable interlocutors. Given this genealogy, Potts describes callings in a community-focused manner: they are not individualistically construed. Instead, they draw on “civic” and “biblical tradition[s]” (49) to advance “good work,” “the good of individual lives,” and “the common good of communities” (147). To understand callings in this way, Potts suggests, is to embrace the tradition- and community-based languages of American life. This helps people transform into morally exemplary practitioners and enables them to flourish “in their quest for the good life more broadly” (68, internal quotations removed).

Those looking for a history of American individualism will not find it in Potts’s monograph. (In chapter 2, there is mention, but no discussion, of Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Max Weber—figures strongly linked to notions of individual calling.) This omission is unfortunate, because tradition-based languages, and the communities of which they are part, undoubtedly change over time. Awareness of their historical changes could help us understand why callings have become individualistic in the longue durée. Perhaps some communities self-consciously chose individualistic language, practices, and/or structures to express their evolving moral convictions around work. They may have important lessons for us today.

Potts’s monograph, however, is not historically unaware. It is simply focused on the contemporary post-Bellah scholarship (i.e., the post-1985 literature) on “work as a calling.” Chapter 1 analyzes four sets of scholars: first, Amy Wrzesniewski of the Yale School of Management, whose three categories of work—job, career, and vocation—are portrayed as feelings-based variations on Bellah; second, Shoshana Dobrow Riza of the London School of Economics, who considers the notion of calling to be purely subjective in orientation; third, Bryan Dik and Ryan Duffy, vocational psychologists at Colorado State University and the University of Florida, respectively, whose practical advice around callings is “beholden to modern notions of personal preferences” (29); and, fourth, John Bunderson and Jeffery Thompson, professors at Olin Business School and Brigham Young University’s Marriott School of Business, respectively, whose research on calling, Potts claims, fails to integrate a “therapeutic fulfilment of one’s preferences” with a “transcendent vision of meaning” (35). Chapter 2 continues this analysis by drawing clear lines of influence between Bellah and each set of scholars, noting how the latter have shed the original moral vision of the former.

The heart of Potts’s monograph rests in chapter 3, where Bellah’s vision of calling is seen through a MacIntyrean lens. To the best of my knowledge, this exercise—which leads to the construction of a “practice-based” account of calling—is truly novel. For MacIntyrean business ethicists especially, it is a welcome contribution to the scholarship of “practices,” which are “the bedrock of MacIntyre’s moral philosophy” (68, internal quotations removed) and the subject of numerous articles in Business Ethics Quarterly and beyond. MacIntyrean “practices,” one may recall, are “any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative activity” (e.g., housebuilding); they involve the promotion of “goods internal to that form of activity” (e.g., houses) as well as an extension of “human powers to achieve excellence” (e.g., the virtue of discipline, cultivated through one’s craft) (64, quoting MacIntyre [1981] 2007, 187). “Work as a calling,” Potts creatively suggests, aligns with MacIntyrean practice. As such, a calling “must always prioritize internal goods” as opposed to “external goods,” such as “profit or individual prestige” (65). Moreover, a calling must serve the good of others and be subject to “practice-based communities” which offer a school of virtue and moral accountability for the person called (81). These criteria, among others, mark a calling as “true” (58). They also hedge against the symptoms of “fake” or self-centered callings—symptoms of “existential distress,” “moral fragmentation,” and the like (108)—described in chapter 4.

By my lights, Potts’s constructive work in chapter 3 raises important questions about truth and falsity in callings and in morality more generally. A nod toward moral truth, or moral objectivity, is given when Potts refers to “a final human telos” of community-based practices (70). But a certain moral relativism is implied in Potts’s overall approach. A “true” calling, it could be said, furthers the common good of a single community. But to what extent is that calling “true” if it does not further the common good of other communities, including communities that are affected by the person called (e.g., a neighborhood and its natural environment, when a CEO makes an unsustainable business decision) or communities to which the person also belongs (e.g., a church that preaches against unsustainable business decisions)? Though Potts acknowledges “accountability” within practice-based communities (81), more attention could be given to moral accountability between communities, especially when communities hold antithetical worldviews (this being the status quo of contemporary American life). Might a certain kind of moral objectivity facilitate intergroup accountability? And might the notion of “true” callings make clear, or obfuscate, that moral vision?

Leaving behind these thorny questions (which apply to aspects of MacIntyre’s moral theory as well), we can praise Potts’s constructive work in chapter 3 for its convincing interpretation of the following MacIntyrean claim: that an activity must be sufficiently complex to qualify as a practice. Consider the following: architecture is complex, bricklaying is not; hence bricklaying is not a practice. One may interpret this conclusion with some indignation: is it not possible (an objector might ask) that some bricklayers view their work as sufficiently complex and thus see their work as part of a practice (as well as a true calling)? To this objection, Potts would stress “the point that MacIntyre is trying to make” (79), namely, that insufficiently complex work can entail a form of moral degradation. Bricklaying may constitute monotonous work or may feature in a dehumanizing gig economy. The key idea here is human dignity, not sufficient complexity per se. And so, for Potts, the “sufficient complexity” criterion of MacIntyrean practice is about work that is “humanly dignifying,” being enriched by communities that embrace, not alienate, the proverbial bricklayer (79). Even architects—who may also experience gig-like conditions—would appreciate this part of Potts’s discussion.

Chapter 5, the final chapter of Potts’s monograph, is appropriately titled “A Reason for Hope.” It offers stories of individuals, representing a range of industries, who exemplify true callings. Although true callings are indeed the focus, Potts offers an additional interpretive gloss. Not only are these individuals exemplary in their callings, he claims, but they also demonstrate qualities of servant leaders. Potts thus connects “work as a calling” with the idea of “servant leadership” (121), a concept introduced to leadership discourse by Robert K. Greenleaf in 1970. Potts wisely makes no claim to novelty here. In fact, he acknowledges that Gregory Beabout and Matthew Sinnicks, fellow MacIntyreans, have already drawn conceptual links between the spheres of calling and servant leadership. But Potts is to be commended for how he identifies servant leadership, or a true calling, in the stories told. He utilizes a “scale measure,” which he developed in previous research, to gauge “the extent to which leaders exhibit virtuous character and narrate their normative commitment to supporting and sustaining: (a) good work, (b) the good of individual lives, and (c) the common good of communities” (124). Methodologically speaking, then, Potts is to be praised for not leaving such assessment (i.e., the identification of genuine servant leaders) to the whim of mere feelings.

In all, Work as a Calling makes a valuable contribution to the business ethics literature, as it ties together scholarship on work callings, virtue ethics, and contemporary leadership studies in one accessible volume. The text argues against individualist notions of work, and this point is exemplified on each page as one clearly sees its indebtedness to the MacIntyrean tradition of business-ethical reflection. (The book is even dedicated to the International Society of MacIntyrean Inquiry.) Business ethicists of any persuasion would do well to learn from Potts’s community-generated insights. With him, they may fruitfully reflect on the normativity of their language around work. They might even wrestle personally with what it means to live out work as a calling.