by Kirsten McHugh
Over the last few weeks, there has been no shortage of provocative and interesting articles, books, and podcasts related to “good work”. As always, our team would like to share the Top 5 articles we have been reading with you all. We hope you enjoy these pieces, that they give you some “food for thought”, and that they contribute to your thinking about what it means to do “good work”.
In the latest Good Project Newsletter (link here), we highlight a few articles and tools for effective communication with those who hold beliefs or values different from your own. In keeping with the theme of encouraging respectful discourse, take a look at this article from The Ethics Centre’s Dr. Tom Dean, “How To Have A Conversation About Politics Without Losing Friends” (link here).
Ethics Unwrapped is well-known for their video series and case studies of ethical scandals. They also have a blog series in which they explore the behavioral ethics of scandals in current events. They recently released a third part in their series focused on the infamous “Varsity Blues” scandal (here), in response to the Sports Illustrated piece on Coach Center (here). This latest post by Robert Prentice takes a look at one of the central though perhaps less glamorous players in this story—a tennis coach who accepted a “marginally qualified” student in return for a bribe from the student’s wealthy parents.
In a recent Slate Magazine article, Karmela Padavic-Callaghan and Hossein Taheri examine the barriers women face to fully participating in their careers and contributing to their fields. In their article “Women Have Been Disappearing From Science for As Long As They’ve Been Allowed to Study Science” (here), the authors compare the career trajectories of scientific heroines Madame Curie and Harriet Brooks, pointing out the differences in each of the women’s support networks, along with how that contributed to (or hindered) their ability to fully engage in their work. The authors draw parallels between the barriers that ultimately ended Brooks’s career and those that still affect many women today.
Here at The Good Project, we encourage students to engage in respectful dialogue and deep reflection. Many of the lessons in our new curriculum (here), incorporate opportunities for students to discuss big issues, listen to the range of perspectives in their class, and identify what they personally find meaningful in their work as students and members of a community. A team from The Civic Engagement Research Group just published a new related study in the American Journal of Education. In “Is Responsiveness to Student Voice Related to Academic Outcomes? Strengthening the Rationale for Student Voice in School Reform”, Kahne et al. argue that strengthening student voice leads to academic benefits such as higher attendance rates and better grades. Access the article and a short summary here.
Stateside, it seems like every conversation about work quickly leads to a discussion of “The Great Resignation”. There is a lot of “doom and gloom” talk by those who believe that Americans have abandoned their attachment to work and to their identities as professionals. However, Carolyn Chen argues in her recent article “What the Anti-work Discourse Gets Wrong”, published in The Atlantic (link here), that the work culture we see in places like Silicon Valley–where companies provide access to benefits such as meditation spaces and mindfulness retreats in an effort to foster “devotion to work”—is “not an outlier but a harbinger for American professionals.” Chen states that, despite the rhetoric, “...many professionals describe a good job with words such as calling, mission, and purpose—terms that were once reserved for religion.”
Our work highlights the 3 E’s of “good work”—excellence, ethics, and engagement. This framework came out of the original “Good Work” study of 1,700 professionals back in the mid-1990s. In that study, those participants who were doing what we would consider to be “good work” were very much finding purpose and meaning in their professions. Although the decades since that original study have seen many changes in the way we work, it appears that engagement holds steady as a central tenet of what Americans seek in their employment.