ABSTRACT
In the Western world, the idea of work being motivated by moral considerations rather than by a simple need to fill one’s belly has long been presumed to date from the Protestant Reformation or at least from the Calvinist phase of that upheaval. Until quite recently, in fact, the terms “work ethic” and “Protestant ethic” have often been used interchangeably to describe those who seem to “live to work” rather than “work to live.” This “Protestant/work” ethic was thought to govern both the propensity to accumulate capital of the bourgeois entrepreneur and the inspired as-siduity of the artisan or manual worker. Since World War II, however, the tendency to ascribe worker motivation to a Puritan ethic of work or indeed to any single, monolithic ethic at all, has come under attack. Some scholars today question whether some work ethic ever affected the behavior of most workers. Others, while admitting the relevance of ethical motivation in the workplace, argue that just as “work” can no longer be defined simply as “paid labor,” so different ethics inspire different kinds of work.
