Labor, Employment, and Work

Abstract

Work is a cultural universal that exists in all human societies. Work is a means of producing a livelihood, a system of meanings and moralities, and a principle for structuring societies. The term “employment” refers to wage labor. Anthropologists study work from preindustrial societies to contemporary high‐tech industries. The key questions when studying work are related to how industrialization shapes relations between home and work, restructuring relations of gender and kinship, and how time use is restructured. Industrialization is not manifested in the same patterns everywhere. Deindustrialization and high unemployment in the West raise new questions about the future of work. Key themes in the anthropology of work include gendered division of labor, the morality of work, the identity of professional groups, how people are made to work, and resistance in the workplace.