BASIC INCOME STUDIES An International Journal of Basic Income Research
August 2008
Roland Paulsen
University of Uppsala
http://www.bepress.com/bis/vol3/iss2/art3
Abstract ‚ The lottery question asks whether you would stop working, continue working in the same job or continue working in a different job if you won a sum of money large enough to allow you to live on it comfortably for the rest of your life without working. This literature review reports the results of 22 surveys carried out between 1955 and 2005 where this issue was raised in connection with basic income, and devotes specific attention to how the results have hitherto been analyzed. Used as a measure of employability, other dimensions of the lottery question, such as occupational discontent and satisfaction beyond economic necessity, have been largely overshadowed despite their prominence in the statistical material. The prevalence of non-financial employment commitment (NEC) has also been overestimated because of an analytical dichotomy between those who would continue working and those who would stop working completely if finances permitted. Suggestions for further studies include a clear distinction between non- financial commitment to current employment and to employment as such.
*I would like to thank Anna Lindqvist for all her support and helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. Also, I owe gratitude to the reviewers of Basic Income Studies and to Jurgen De Wispelaere for his extensive editing help.
Copyright ©2009 The Berkeley Electronic Press. All rights reserved.
Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies. ăAlbert Camus
In addition to the complex of economic troubles that introducing Basic Income (BI) is supposed to generate, BI is accused of being an antihumanist project that replaces full-employment policy with financial-distribution policy. People want jobs, the argument goes, and are the employed not better off than the unemployed when it comes to statistics of both physical and mental health? Indeed, depriving mankind of its essence (work) as some Marxists would argue, seems like a petty bourgeois idea. Would it not be better to support the unemployed with meaningful activity and income in one, i.e., employment, rather than making the humiliation of a financial allowance universal? This sort of criticism can be heard from both the Right and the Left on the rare occasions BI is publicly articulated (see Janson, 2003 for a summary). Of course, the relevance of such criticism is limited to the most radical notions of BI. The idea that BI should be introduced in order to facilitate more flexible labor market behavior (Brittan, 1995; Friedman, 1962) cannot really be interpreted as an assault on workfare society; nor can the more social democratic notions of BI where BI is more or less viewed as a complement to the capitalist labor market and as a compensation for its inherent deficiencies (Beck, 2000; Parijs, 1995; Rifkin, 1995). The goal of full employment does not inherently contradict the idea of a BI.
Yet some BI proponents criticise the symbolic and economic centrality of work in post-industrial capitalism (Bauman, 2004; Gorz, 1999; Offe, M¸ckenberger et al., 1996). The global rise of productivity, they claim, generated by technological progress, has rendered it possible to satisfy our basic needs with a minimum of human effort. Furthermore, the deskilling process that this technological progress has brought forth makes wage labor less and less satisfying (Braverman, 1974). The more rational that production becomes on a global level, the more irrational and repressive it becomes for individuals engaged in it on an operative level. Therefore, the heteronomous sphere of labor should be further rationalized and maximally reduced, not to eliminate work from the repertoire of human activity but to free it from economic constraint. In this process, BI is considered an important catalyst that would allow our attitudes to work to flourish beyond the realm of necessity (Gorz, 1988; Marcuse, 1955).
Underlying this line of argument is the assumption that most of us are only enduring our jobs because we are forced to. This is not a particularly new idea. Marx (1971, p. 820) wrote, "The realm of freedom actually begins only where labor which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production." Probably agreeing with Marx on this point, Prince Kropotkin compared the commonly claimed "right to work" to "the right to be always a wage-slave, a drudge, ruled over and exploited by the middle class of the future" (Kropotkin, 1927, p. 22). But is this old idea of freedom as absence of wage labor that is implied here based on the actual experience of those who, unlike Marx and Kropotkin, spend most of their waking hours as employees or is it only a product of a metaphysics that lacks contact with reality? To answer this question, the empirical study of non-financial employment commitment (NEC) is necessary.
NEC refers to the part of our employment commitment that is not a product of the income that employment typically generates. In this article, several studies analyzing the presence of NEC are collected and analyzed. Research about NEC can be found in quantitative survey studies where the discussion above is generally not taken into account. The absence of such reference is not only unfortunate but also hard to understand. As we shall see, putting the concept of NEC into our context is a way of developing it and reevaluating its meaning. In return, as the concept helps peel economic compulsion from the modern work ethic and helps to assess the strength of what is left, this allows us to empirically test some arguments prominent in the growing literature on the critique of work. NEC can be measured in several ways, for instance by simply asking whether respondents are primarily working for earnings or not, or how they think they would react to unemployment.1 The most reoccurrent item, and often the only item measuring NEC, is the so-called lottery question. In fact, the concept of NEC was first presented in a single item study by Warr (1982) where the lottery question is used in the context of the UK. It reads as follows: "Imagine that you won a lottery or inherited a large sum of money and could live comfortably for the rest of your life without working; what would you do about work?" Three options are then offered: 1. "I would stop working"; 2. "I would continue to work in the same job"; 3. "I would continue paid employment in a different job" or "I would continue to work, but under different conditions."
Most of the studies using the lottery question report high levels of NEC. This suggests that even beyond the force of necessity people imagine wage labor to be a central source of meaning and joy. In all these studies, however, the second and third alternatives have been merged into one in the data analysis, which makes only two alternatives, to continue work or not to continue work, relevant. This article critically examines the consequences of this widely accepted analysis. As we shall see, another dimension of the lottery question appears as soon as we analyze the existing data more extensively than has been previously done.
This review includes the most cited lottery question studies from 1955 onwards.2 The results from the studies are analyzed in two steps: first, I present the results as they have generally been analyzed, i.e., as if only two alternatives were given to the respondents: to continue or not to continue work. Second, I disentangle the distribution between all three alternatives in the studies as far as possible; then I assess the results with reference to the discussion above. This disposition facilitates a clear distinction between two types of NEC: one that measures the non-financial commitment to employment as such, and one that takes only the commitment to the job the respondent currently has into account. In the next section, this distinction will be further explained.
The lottery question, which is hypothetically formulated as a scenario that can be hard to even imagine, insufficiently predicts the behavior of real lottery winners (Warr, 1982). An interesting branch of the BI research that elaborates experimental studies of possible work related consequences of BI has recently begun paying attention to post-award work behavior of lottery winners (Peeters and Marx, 2004). From this and other research of lottery winners (Arvey, Harpaz et al., 2004; Falk and M”enp””, 1999) we see that most people continue working in one way or another after hitting the jackpot. Still, the question of what kind of work people imagine they would undertake after gaining economic freedom remains insufficiently answered. The idea that most people want to work in some way is of course trivial. Every study of work commitment must pay attention to what kind of work the commitment is linked to. Before starting this discussion, however, let us see wherein the main value of the lottery question lies.
Even if early studies (Sheppard and Belitsky, 1966; Warr and Lovatt, 1977) suggest that the lottery question predicts labor market behavior to some extent, this does not do enough justice to its scientific value. The lottery question approaches, as Vecchio (1980, p. 361) puts it, "fantasy fulfilment (i.e., many people at coffee breaks, office parties, etc., often speak fondly of the prospect of having enough money to quit work, retire at an early age, and enjoy life)." In doing so, it encourages the respondent to transcend what critical theorists have called "one-dimensional thinking" (Marcuse, 1991), "the cult of productivity" (Adorno, 1978), "the economic reason" (Gorz, 1988) and other ideological concepts of necessity. Thus, the research using the lottery question does not deal primarily with predicting individual actions, but with employment-related dissatisfaction and notably with a yearning for something else. The political aspect of this yearning is somewhat disguised by the individualist appeal of the lottery question (which could be why none of the actual researchers has mentioned it), yet the negative character of the lottery question ‚ "imagine that you won" ‚ provides grounds for assessing the place of employment in the general conception of the good life. This dimension becomes particularly salient when respondents declare that they are satisfied with their jobs while in the same survey stating that they would quit or switch to another one if only they had the opportunity ‚ a phenomenon to which we shall return.
Whether we choose to include the third alternative (to continue working under different conditions) in the analysis or not, complicates the picture somewhat. Note that the lottery question deals only with the monetary dimension of modern wage labor. "The major reason for working at a particular job may be monetary, even though the reasons for wanting to continue to work are not," Morse and Weiss (1955, p. 196) observe. Other dimensions such as the social life, the routine, and the status associated with a job ‚ aspects of employment that envelop more classical notions of work, i.e., the activity of producing goods and services ‚ may well influence how respondents answer the lottery question. This means that the lottery question, strictly speaking, does not measure work commitment or work ethic as some scholars propose (Rietman and Schneer, 1996), but the non-financial employment commitment, meaning commitment to all aspects of an employment including organization, leadership and the other dimensions mentioned. However, if the analysis includes only two alternatives (to continue or not to continue working), we are exclusively measuring attitudes towards employment as such. If we include the third alternative (that is sometimes formulated as "continue working, but in a different job" and sometimes as "continue working, but under different conditions"), we get an idea of the respondents' satisfaction with their current employment.
Respondents choosing the third alternative may want to set out on new careers; they may want to change profession but stay in their organization; they may want to continue practicing their profession but in a different organization or as self-employed; they may also want to continue their current employment but as part-time employees. In any of these cases, the third alternative implies that the respondents, if enjoying financial security, would like to have a word with their employers.
Those choosing the first alternative (to stop working) are expressing an extreme reluctance to any kind of salaried work. These are people who would not like to become professional ballet dancers, psychologists, actors, race drivers ‚ not even alternatives such as self-employed author, musician, golfer or performance artist come spontaneously to the minds of these people. They are not interested in anything that has to do with the labor market. As I have already mentioned, nearly all research using the lottery question has focused exclusively on this group of people rather than on the group choosing the other two alternatives. Far from presenting any clear-cut results, the authors of these studies tend to emphasize the strength of the NEC.
Here, I would like to introduce a distinction between general NEC on the one hand, and specific NEC on the other. By "general NEC" I mean NEC that is not tied to a certain employment but to employment as such. This is the form of NEC that we are studying when separating those who would not want to work at all from those who would like either to continue or to switch to another job. "Specific NEC" refers to the non-financial commitment to a specific employment and is measured by an affirmative answer to the lottery question: to continue working with the present job. This distinction allows us to discover a new dimension in some of the studies that earlier analysis ignored.
Morse and Weiss's classic study, the first to use the lottery question, was carried out in a discursive context quite different from the one now dominating Euro-US culture. "We are now going through a period of readjustment of our institutions," they asserted, "to the shortening of the work day and week and to the early retirement of individuals from their jobs" (1955, p. 198). How will this affect us, they wonder? Like most of the lottery question studies, the Morse and Weiss study stresses that "even if [employees] had enough money to support themselves, they would still want to work" (1955, p. 191). Their study remains unique in that it let the respondents who answered affirmatively explain why in their own words. These explanations were classified in two categories: positive and negative reasons for continuing to work. Positive reasons included "to keep occupied" (32.0%), "keeps individually healthy" (10.0%), "enjoy the kind of work" (9.0%), "justifies my existence" (5.0%); whereas negative reasons were the ones that opened with "without work I would..." and continued: "feel lost, go crazy" (14.0%), "not know what to do with my time, can't be idle" (10.0%), "feel bored" (4.0%), etc. Morse and Weiss conclude that 36.0% of those 80.0% (Table 1) who answered they would continue working gave negative reasons, which, they argue, "lends support to the consideration of work as an important positive element in the emotional economy of many individuals because it serves to anchor the individual into the society" (Morse and Weiss, 1955, p. 192). In these days of human-resources-talk, the prospering of hedonism and consumerism rather than of the Protestant work ethic (Bauman, 2004), it seems reasonable to question whether any reason except "enjoy the kind of work" can be judged as "positive" in a less semantic sense. The tendency to view work as an "important positive element in the emotional economy" irrespective of what empirical results are presented is, however, well represented in the lottery question literature.
This also counts for the exclusion of the third alternative when applied to the general analysis of NEC. The third alternative is in Morse and Weiss (1955), included in the survey as a second item for those answering affirmatively. The correlation between "social class" and "wanting to change job" is analyzed; not very surprisingly, the tendency is that the lower class the stronger the inclination to change job. No further analysis is presented concerning specific NEC. As we shall see, even the early results presented by Morse and Weiss should imply a radical reassessment of the now prevailing idea that people would want to work even if they were not forced to by economic necessity. Before formulating such a reassessment, I present some other results in the field.
Twenty-five years after the publication of the Morse and Weiss study, Vecchio replicates the lottery question and concludes that "the present findings suggest that a leisure ethic may be replacing the traditional work ethic in the United States. This point is in accordance with the general prognosis of cultural change theorists" (1980, p. 366). The percentage who would then choose to continue to work had dropped to 72.2% (samples were taken from 1974, 1976 and 1977). In fact, the percentage of those choosing the first alternative (to stop working) reached its peak in the US during the late 1960s. Up to then, the lottery question studies report similar results to those reported by Morse and Weiss (Kaplan and Tausky, 1974; Tausky, 1969). Quinn and Staines (1979) report from surveys made in 1969, 1973 and 1977 that the percentages of those choosing to continue working were as low as 67.0% among employed adults in both 1969 and 1973. In 1977 the ratio had increased to 71.5%. Campbell, Converse et al. (1976) found that in 1971 74.0% of the employed male population replied affirmatively to the lottery question, whereas only 59.0% of the employed women did so ‚ a gender difference that eventually seems to have weakened radically (Harpaz and Snir, 2002; MOW International Research Team, 1987; Rietman and Schneer, 1996).
From 1974 onwards, US lottery question studies report an NEC percentage that fluctuates between 71.5% and 80.0%. An important exception is found in the international comparative Meaning of Work (MOW) study in 1987. Here, as Harpaz comments, "the USA, which ranked second (88.1 percent) in the proportion of its labour force that wished to continue working, seems to have broken a trend that has predominated since the late 1960s" (Harpaz, 1989, p. 149). Both Weaver (1997) and Rietman and Schneer (1996) report, however, that during the 1990s the NEC percentage dropped back to approximately 73.0%. At the bottom of the worldwide NEC league in the MOW study lies Great Britain where only 68.8% would continue working; a result supported by Warr's (1982) meticulous study in 1981 to which we shall return. Israeli results have since 1981 pointed out a much stronger NEC in Israel than in other industrialized nations, with the exception of Japan (Harpaz and Snir, 2002; MOW International Research Team, 1987; Snir and Harpaz, 2002)
The US results especially, whose amplitude permits historical analysis, suggest a weakening of NEC. In Morse and Weiss's study, those who thought they would stop working completely constituted 20.0% of the population. Fifty years later, this percentage had nearly doubled to 39.0% (Rietman and Schneer, 1996) among middle-class managers who are known to be significantly more prone to answer affirmatively to the lottery question than other professional groups (Morse and Weiss, 1955; MOW International Research Team, 1987; Warr, 1982). In 2005 exactly the same ratio of general NEC was disclosed in a Gallup survey (Saad, 2005) among the adult US population.
However, since the lottery question has been put differently over the years, there are methodological problems in making these kinds of generalizations. Some (Morse and Weiss, 1955; Warr, 1982) split the lottery question into two stages where only two alternatives (to continue working or not to) are given at the first stage while the second stage permits the respondents to specify whether they would stay at their present jobs or look elsewhere. Vecchio on the other hand, does not even offer a third alternative to the respondents, while Harpaz's surveys, the MOW study, and Rietman and Schneer seem to have offered three alternatives from the beginning as described in the introduction. However difficult it is to tell how a bias due to these different formulations might operate, it is important to take this aspect into account when analyzing the various results. Furthermore, whether or not respondents have been offered a "don't know" alternative is not obvious; the reason for this remains a mystery. As Warr comments, "[t]he absence of 'don't know' responses in a national survey is surprising, and it is possible that they have been omitted before calculation of the percentage figures" (Warr, 1982, p. 310). From this methodological flaw in the lottery question studies we now approach what must be described as a major flaw, a flaw that has dominated the research within this field since it began.
In most of the lottery question studies, the authors emphasize the strength of the general NEC while dismissing the idea that any cultural change of attitudes towards work should have taken place. "Despite various reports of change in workers' values and attitudes toward work in the industrialized world," Harpaz (1989, p. 149) asserts, "a major proportion of a representative sample of the labor force in seven industrialized societies apparently still chooses to hold a job when it is no longer financially necessary." To refute cultural change theories seems to be a major object in most of the lottery question studies ‚ notably the Israeli ones. As for all quantitative research, the relation between NEC and a range of other variables has also been thoroughly examined. For instance, stronger NEC shows significant correlation with being younger (Morse and Weiss, 1955; Warr, 1982; Vecchio, 1980), having high socioeconomic status (Morse and Weiss, 1955; MOW International Research Team, 1987; Warr, 1982), being married (Warr, 1982), having a meaningful job (Harpaz and Snir, 2002; Kaplan and Tausky, 1974; Snir and Harpaz, 2002), enjoying occupational satisfaction (Harpaz, 2002; Kaplan and Tausky, 1972; Morse and Weiss, 1955; Snir and Harpaz, 2002), and having low pay-oriented work values (MOW International Research Team, 1987). The relevance of these correlations is barely pronounced. It is as if they were interesting in themselves or only waiting to be explained and put into context by someone else ‚ rather often they seem to betray a blind interest in "employability" and its relation to generous welfare systems (see Nordenmark, 1999). We deal with some of them later, but before doing so, let us return to the general claim that the majority would continue working at their jobs even without financial pressure.
As already mentioned, the NEC discussed in the research so far is a general NEC, i.e., a non-financial commitment to employment as such. From 275 semistructured interviews where the lottery question was put, Kaplan and Tausky (1974, p. 195) comment that "[w]ork as an activity was viewed in a positive light, but often with little commitment to the work normally engaged in when employed." This is also reported, at an early point, by Morse and Weiss who conclude that "for many individuals, commitment to working is much deeper than commitment to their particular job" (1955, p. 193). The specific NEC, i.e., the commitment to the job the respondent is currently holding, can only be extracted if we construct a new dualism between those who would continue working at their current jobs, on the one hand, and those who would quit, on the other hand. Unfortunately, it is not always possible to discern this other dualism in some of the studies since the presentation of the data often is too scarce. This can also be said of quite recent studies (Harpaz, 1989; Snir and Harpaz, 2002; Vecchio, 1980), despite some criticism from Warr concerning this neglect: "[t]he published accounts of the US research are typically lacking in detail, and responses are described as falling into one of only two categories (would or would not continue working)" (Warr, 1982, p. 310). The results presented in Table 2 are partly based on my own calculations of rather fragmentary reports (Morse and Weiss, 1955; Warr, 1982), while in Harpaz and Snir (2002), MOW (1987), Saad (2005) and Rietman and Schneer (1996) all frequencies are explicitly reported.
If viewing these results in terms of a new dichotomy between those who would want to change jobs and those who would not, we see that even in the early study of Morse and Weiss, more than half the population of employed males (55.0%) would want to leave their present jobs if finances permitted. The difference between the US results presented in Rietman and Schneer (1996) where 74.0% of the MBAs would quit their current jobs and the Japanese results of the late 1980s (MOW International Research Team, 1987) where this percentage was at 33.5%, suggests that cultural differences have great impact on the specific NEC. Considering the US results, our dichotomy also reveals a historical increase of those wanting to leave their jobs; from 55.0% in the Morse and Weiss study to 59.7% in the MOW study and finally 74.0% in Rietman and Schneer (1996) ‚ an increase that becomes invisible when focusing on the general NEC (see Table 1).
What is even more striking is the all-pervading yearning of the majority (with Japan and Israel 1987 as the only exceptions) for something else than the current job situation. In most of the studies the share of discontented employees amount to approximately 60.0%. Discontent, or at least a hazy yearning for something else, seems to prevail inherently in what is usually referred to as "employment." Closer analysis reveals, however, how deeply misguiding the use of the term "employment" (not to mention "work") can be. "Employment" can allude to an infinite number of disparate activities and situations. This should belong to common knowledge; yet in most of the studies of NEC, "employment" stands out as a homogeneous institution without any internal differentiation. In a small number of exceptional lottery question studies, a more stratified concept of employment is presented. Morse and Weiss (1955, p. 197), to begin with, found that of the 86.0% of the middle-class professionals who answered they would continue working, 68.0% said they would continue in the same type of work. Among the unskilled working class the share was at 16.0%. Generally the middle-class share of those who would continue within the same type of work was at 61.0%, while the working class lay at a total percentage of 34.0% and farmers topped at 69.0%. These occupational differences are also salient in the MOW study where, for instance, 49.0% of the chemical engineers claimed they would continue working with the same job whereas only 34.0% of the temporary workers indicated they would do so. In Warr (1982) these occupational differences were not as salient even if 42.0% of the women in managerial, supervisory, administrative or professional occupations answered they would stay in their present jobs which can be compared to 26.0% among skilled manual workers, and clerical and retail staff. Still Warr (1982, p. 310) concludes: "Another aspect warranting careful examination in the future is the pattern in respect of socio-economic status. For example, full-time male employees in the ABC1 category are significantly more likely than DE employees to exhibit non-financial employment commitment: will that differential be retained in future years, or will it become enlarged or reduced?"
Unfortunately, ensuing lottery question studies do not provide enough information to answer Warr's question. Yet our conclusion must be that the specific NEC is largely dependent on what kind of work it involves. Meaningfulness and status have been propounded as two important aspects of work that influence the inclination to voluntarily continue with the same job. The neglect of these aspects denotes how utterly uninformed quantitative empirical research can be of the most basic philosophical concepts within a field. Arendt's (1958) distinction between labor and work, for instance, should by now have disqualified every scientific use of terms such as "work," "the labor market," "employment," etc. as if these concepts referred to uniform entities. "Voluntary servitude" seems to be a very marginal phenomenon. Monotonous labor with low status that normally is instrumental both to the worker and to society is rarely voluntary chosen beyond the realm of necessity. "Callings" or "labors of love" on the other hand are valued as identity projects and transcend their economic functions (Allvin, 1997; Leidner, 2006; Menger, 1999). Those enjoying this type of work are of course more likely to answer affirmatively to the lottery question. Even concerning this privileged group the results are, however, far from unequivocal. What is often called "intrinsic work orientation" ‚ to value a certain job for its being interesting, challenging, autonomous ‚ is known to influence the general NEC (Harpaz, 2002, p. 180), and logically it should have an even stronger effect on the specific NEC (although we do not know that due to incomplete reporting). What is interesting, however, with studies where these sorts of correlations are reported is that the relation is never absolute. The parameter estimate of "intrinsic orientation" in Harpaz (2002, p. 191) lies, according to his survey results from 1981, at -0.27, which means that the probability of the respondents with such orientation to continue working at their present jobs or elsewhere (general NEC) increases with 24.0%.3 The interesting thing here that goes unmentioned by Harpaz is not simply the existence of a correlation, but the weakness of it.
This is even more striking when occupational satisfaction is studied. In Harpaz (2002) there is no significant correlation between occupational satisfaction and general NEC in 1981. In 1993 on the other hand, occupational satisfaction increases the probability of general NEC with 17.0%. What does this mean? If we take the Morse and Weiss study, for example, 84.0% of the working class said they were satisfied or very satisfied with their job situation; but as we have already mentioned, only 34.0% said they would continue with their present type of job in absence of economic pressure. The gap between these figures means that a considerable part of those who allegedly are satisfied still would want to leave their jobs if they had the chance. An even clearer example is given in a recent Gallup survey (Saad, 2005) where respondents have been offered the opportunity to tell whether they hate, dislike, like or love their jobs. Among the fortunate 32.0% who claim they love their jobs, only 61.0% think they would stick to it if they won on the lottery; among the fortunate 59.0% who like their jobs, this percentage is as low as 26.0%. Again, the occupational satisfaction that is necessary for specific NEC appears to be different from the standards we normally put up when assessing our current satisfaction. Could it be that the normal state of things is taken into account when we think of ourselves as "satisfied" in a way that the lottery question upsets?
The weak correlation between specific NEC and work satisfaction could be a consequence of what Elster (1983, p. 110) calls "adaptive preference formation" ‚ the adjustment of desires to circumstances. As Ackroyd and Thompson put it: "Really satisfying work is difficult to find for the majority of people, and this is widely understood...People at work are often willing to say that they are satisfied with their work, but what they mean is that they are satisfied, given that one cannot expect much satisfaction" (1999, p. 42). In Elster's theory, the formation of adaptive preferences is an unintentional psychological mechanism (in contrast to the Buddhist practice of equanimity). If so, and given the intensity of what Anthony (1984) has succinctly termed the "ideology of work," simply asking whether people are satisfied at work or not cannot be regarded as a sufficient measure of work satisfaction. Provided that it is properly analyzed, the lottery question obviously is a valuable complement.
I have made a distinction here between general NEC (non-financial commitment to employment generally) and specific NEC (non-financial commitment to a specific employment). General NEC excludes an extreme group of employment- rejecting persons who would not want to work at all if finances permitted, whereas specific NEC excludes both this group and those who think they would want to change jobs if they could do so without taking any economic risks.
General NEC varies heavily geographically and historically ‚ from embracing 61.0% in the US, 1994 to 93.0% in Japan, 1987 (see Table 1). The studies focusing on general NEC reveal a weakening of it that is far from linear but still noticeable. That 39.0% of the US MBAs declare that they would rather not work at all is certainly remarkable in itself, still it only constitutes half the truth concerning commitment beyond necessity. In Rietman and Schneer (1996) those falling outside the category of specific NEC constitute 74.0% of the population. In nearly all of the national samples presented here (with Israel and Japan, 1987 as the only exceptions) an overwhelming majority indirectly states that they only work where they do for financial reasons. The type of job the respondents have radically influences how they answer the lottery question ‚ those with stimulating, high status jobs are more likely to exhibit specific NEC than the less privileged ones. To consider your job satisfactory or intrinsically meaningful does not warrant that your answer to the lottery question falls within the scope of our measure of specific NEC. Even respondents who claim to be satisfied with their job situation can be ready to leave it if the opportunity presents itself. This could be interpreted as symptomatic of the inherent oppressiveness of all kinds of wage labor including the more attractive ones. In either case, the low prevalence of specific NEC reveals that underneath the work-glorifying rhetoric of our dominant political parties, people accept their job situations primarily because of economic compulsion. This is why the introduction of BI (at a level sufficient to fulfil basic economic needs) must be regarded as a humanist project that relieves people from life-long dependence upon specific employments that most of us would rather try to avoid.
But is this not bad news for the BI proponents who claim that BI would not produce a huge disincentive for labor market participation? If the foundation of today's wage labor is economic compulsion, would the dissolution of this compulsion not create enormous shortages on the labor market and render the realization of BI impossible?
We should not exaggerate the scope of what the lottery question can measure. The lottery question primarily measures vaguely formulated longings beyond taken-for-granted notions of necessity, and as such it is a bad instrument for ascertaining future consequences of introducing BI. Yet the study of real lottery winners might have some relevance to the question of practical implications of BI (Peeters and Marx, 2004), and concerning this research some parallels should be drawn.
To refer to Falk's and M”enp””'s (1999) qualitative study of actual lottery winners, one result was that only a small minority of the interviewed winners continued working at the jobs they had before winning. Similarly to Marx and Peeters, they still conclude: "After a sabbatical year or two, at the latest, all winners interviewed have continued or at least would have wished to continue to work in some form or another" (p. 115). Interestingly they add that the type of "work" their winners were engaged in borders what might also be called a "hobby": "One built a house, another renovated it, a third worked at the cottage and a fourth went into voluntary work. Helping friends with their projects was very common. To one, winning in the Lotto provided the opportunity to fulfil the dream of living as a free artist" (p. 108).
As far as the question of possible consequences of BI is concerned, it would be a mistake to assume, based on observations like this, that people would voluntarily sweat on the assembly line all day long. The inclination among researchers in this field to assume that most people want to engage in productive activity (of some kind, somehow, in one way or another, etc.) might at best appear philanthropic, but as Gorz (1988, pp. 53‚56) cautions, it may just as well produce an essentialist concept of human nature with devastating consequences if accepted as a foundation on which to build emancipatory projects such as BI. What might seem like bad news for the BI project also demonstrates the need for it. Practical consequences and difficulties must simply be settled ‚ not neglected. To sum up, I will discuss three concrete proposals for the study of NEC ‚ both among those who can only imagine what a jackpot situation would be like and among those happy few who actually experience it. First of all, social scientists should make the effort to distinguish philosophical notions of work from existing forms of employment ‚ an obvious difference for those engaged in both activities. Second, it should be worthy of note whether potential and actual lottery winners want to continue working at the same old job or go elsewhere. Third, to be able to realistically assess the consequences of BI including possible difficulties, attention should be paid to which types of employment we tend not to commit to. This would give us the possibility to discuss what unattractive labor we find necessary for our well-being and how this labor should be performed in an alternative society.
1 Warr et al. (1979) present the Work Involvement Scale.
2 See the individual studies for details such as instruments, samplings, procedures, and so forth.
3 Odds ratio (Exp(B)) = e -0.27 = 0.76
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Roland Paulsen Department of Sociology University of Uppsala Box 624, SE-751 26 Uppsala Sweden Email: roland.paulsen@soc.uu.se