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PAGE 1: Meaning & Purpose of Work
Page title: Meaning & Purpose of Work URL slug: meaning-purpose-of-work
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[H1] The Meaning & Purpose of Work
MBA elective · 3 credits · 14 weeks
Question the purpose behind your career, not just the strategy for advancing it.
[H2] Syllabus
The full syllabus includes the week-by-week reading and viewing schedule, assignment details, and the threads that run through the course.
Draft as of October 10, 2026. Subject to change before the term begins.
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[H2] Course description
You will spend more of your waking hours at work than doing almost anything else. What is it for? Is it worth it? When did you last do something at work that felt genuinely meaningful, and do you know why it did?
This course is organized around those questions. They don't have clean answers, but asking them seriously, with the right intellectual tools and enough honesty, changes how you see your working life and how you lead others through theirs.
The course does not ask you to become a Marxist, abandon your career ambitions, or feel guilty about a well-compensated professional life. It asks you to understand the intellectual history of the world you are about to lead, to examine the assumptions about work and meaning you inherited without choosing, and to develop your own account of what work is for and how you intend to live it.
Most MBA programs teach you how to succeed at work. This one asks a prior question: what is work actually for?
[H2] What the course is
Most of us inherit our relationship to work the way we inherit a language, without choosing it and without knowing there were other options. The course is an interdisciplinary inquiry drawing on philosophy, history, sociology, literature, theology, film, and psychology.
You will read Marx and Weber, who founded modern sociology while trying to understand what industrial capitalism was doing to people. You will read Hannah Arendt on the distinction between labor, work, and action, Carl Jung on the psychological hunger of modern life, and Richard Sennett on what it means to do something well. You will read Joseph Heller on what it looks like when a man has everything he was supposed to want and none of it is enough.
You will also watch films, conduct interviews, take part in a tea ceremony, produce a podcast episode, and at the end of the semester stand up without notes and say what you now believe about work and what you intend to do about it.
The assessments ask you to show up as a person: to interview real people, to make something that goes out into the world with your name on it, and to speak without a script. In a world where artificial intelligence can write much of what business school asks you to produce, the course bets on something it cannot replicate, a person who has grappled with the questions.
[H2] Learning objectives
(Use a bulleted list.)
- Locate your own assumptions about work within a historical, cultural, and intellectual tradition, and understand where those assumptions came from, whose interests they serve, and how they might be revised.
- Engage philosophical, religious, and cross-cultural accounts of work and meaning, and bring them into tension with your own experience.
- Distinguish between happiness and meaning as organizing values for a working life, and understand what each demands and offers.
- Articulate a personal philosophy of work: a defensible, specific, and honest account of what work is for and how you intend to live it.
[H2] Seven units, fourteen weeks
[H3] Foundations (Weeks 1-2)
The spiritual problem of modern work, and the basic distinctions between work, labor, and leisure.
Jung · Suzman · Arendt
[H3] The Western Inheritance (Weeks 3-5)
The Protestant work ethic, Marx on alienation, and the Enlightenment bargain.
Weber · Calvin · Melville · Marx · Smith · Mill · Berry
[H3] Work Across Cultures and Histories (Weeks 6-7)
Ikigai, shokunin, and the tea ceremony, then coerced labor and the foundations of modern capitalism.
Mogi · Douglass · Baptist
[H3] The Crisis of Meaning in Modern Work (Weeks 8-9)
Hollow work and burnout as a cultural diagnosis.
Heller · Han · Burkeman · Thompson · Oliver
[H3] Craftsmanship (Weeks 10-11)
Skilled practice as a way of being, and mastery in knowledge work and leadership.
Sennett · Crawford · Dreyfus & Dreyfus
[H3] Vocation, Identity, and Rest (Weeks 12-13)
Calling and the self, and the counter-cultural case for idleness.
Weil · Buechner · Kraybill · Russell · Steinbeck
[H3] Futures (Week 14)
Care work, meaning, and the working life you intend to live. Student final presentations.
Folbre · Frankl
Footer or last line: Questions about the course? Use the Contact page.
(Link the words "Contact page" to /contact.)