I’ve been discussing with a few friends the NY Times bestseller The Four-Hour Work Week (www.fourhourworkweek.com), which calls us all to less distracted work habits, to free up our time. Tellingly, however, the book seems equally as interested in pursuits like this: “Or forget about traveling. A brand-new black Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder, fresh off the showroom floor at $260,000, can be had for $2,897.80 per month. I found my personal favorite, an Aston Martin DB9 with 1,000 miles on it, through eBay for $136,000—$2,003.10 per month.”

I’m pretty ambivalent about the whole self-help genre of such books, which constitute a veritable industry unto themselves, but would be interested to know what others think. There seems to be definite inspirational value in such works—they can empower people with new visions and goals worth pursuing. As we know, such works can definitely “grow their own legs,” becoming “self-fulfilling prophecies,” of sorts (the key to “The Secret,” anyone…?). But my basic problem is that The Four-Hour Work Week provides a too partial, overly incomplete picture of how such dreams are made (this is before we even get to the value of the dream he’s setting forth), and in whose interests. That is, it’s a problem of looking at American public life accurately. By ignoring the systemic, structural, and social factors which can impede such opportunities, I think the author effectively neuters possibilities for political action by ignoring societal power dynamics.

One critical lens through which to examine such works may be Pierre Bourdieu’s “habitus”— roughly one’s deeply ingrained, acquired ways of speaking, acting, and being in the world inherited from one’s group/s, which act as signals of whether one is “in” or “out” culturally within certain contexts. If one has been fortunate enough to inherit the “preferred” ways of communicating in any given context, a four-hour work week becomes more of a possibility. If we ignore these dynamics, on the other hand, we will fail to see that the “the playing field ain’t equal” in terms of such opportunities–and the individual becomes the focus, without an understanding of the larger, material social forces which are also implicated here. Basically, the American authors of such books are failing to think in terms of sociology, instead assuming an individualistic default position for such writing that perpetuates power imbalances. — Don Waisanen