ABSTRACT
This chapter contextualizes social and historical terms and explains the trinity of Protestant ethic, work ethic, and occupational devotion and their interrelationship. It provides answers for the following two questions: what motivates people to work and how has this motivation evolved since the days of the Puritans and, later, since 1904-1905 when Max Weber wrote his famous essay? His object of study was the men who established the family-firm type of capitalist business, common in Western Europe and the United States from the seventeenth century to the present. The chapter explains a number of mainstream sociological concepts: work, leisure, social class, deviance, conformity, norms, and secularization. Today's work ethic has been described as "workaholism", an orientation that has probably been around as long as the work ethic itself, and that can be seen as another expression of the Protestant ethic. Occupational devotion includes the condition that work is intrinsically rewarding.
