also tend to stay close to home, for many of the same reasons.)
Moving for a job doesn’t strike the professional elite as a big deal, because the
professional elite relies heavily on work to shape identity. A study of health professionals
in Massachusetts found doctors’ lives shaped by what sociologist Mary Blair-Loy calls
the “work devotion schema”: high-level professionals are expected to “maintain a single-
minded focus” on work in which “[a]ny nonwork activities pale... in significance...
[to] professional responsibilities.” This ideal has its roots in the Protestant work ethic, in
which work was viewed as a “calling” from God.^77
For many in the professional elite, work becomes a totalizing experience. “Holidays are a
nuisance because you have to stop working,” said a corporate litigator. “I remember
being really annoyed when it was Thanksgiving. Damn, why did I have to stop working to
go eat a turkey? I missed my favorite uncle’s funeral, because I had a deposition
scheduled that was too important.”^78
Working-class men find this obsession with work off-putting. Thus a salesman decried
overly ambitious people who “have blinders on. You miss all of life.... A person that is
totally ambitious and driven never sees anything except the spot they are aiming at.”
Working-class men dismiss work devotion as narcissism. An electronics technician
criticized people who are “so self-assured, so self-intense that they don’t really care
about anyone else.... It’s me, me, me, me, me. I’m not that kind of person at all, and
that’s probably why I don’t like it.”^79
But elite men embrace work devotion as integral to manliness. Working long hours is
seen as a “heroic activity,” noted a study of lawyers.^80 For Silicon Valley engineers,
working long hours turns computer keyboarding into a manly test of physical endurance.
“There’s this kind of machismo culture among young male engineers that you just don’t
sleep,” one engineer told Marianne Cooper.^81 “[S]uccessful enactment of this
masculinity,” she concludes, “involves displaying one’s exhaustion, physically and
verbally, in order to convey the depth of one’s commitment, stamina, and virility.”^82
For elite men, ambition and a strong work ethic are “doubly sacred... [as signals of]
both moral and socioeconomic worth.”^83 Work, in some sense, is their religion.
Recognizing that may make us less condescending about Americans who worship a
different God and arguably have a healthier relationship to work.
Moving for a job makes sense in this context, if you know a million former college
- Why Doesn’t the Working Class Just Move to Where the Jobs Are?