{"id":1963,"date":"2009-11-28T20:51:16","date_gmt":"2009-11-29T01:51:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/?p=1963"},"modified":"2009-11-28T20:51:16","modified_gmt":"2009-11-29T01:51:16","slug":"how-to-acheive-a-four-hour-work-week-write-a-book-about-how-to-acheive-a-four-hour-work-week","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/2009\/11\/28\/how-to-acheive-a-four-hour-work-week-write-a-book-about-how-to-acheive-a-four-hour-work-week\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Acheive a “Four-Hour Work Week”?: Write a Book About How to Acheive a Four-Hour Work Week"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been discussing\u00a0with a few friends the NY Times bestseller The Four-Hour Work Week<\/em> (www.fourhourworkweek.com<\/a>), which\u00a0calls us all to\u00a0less distracted\u00a0work habits,\u00a0to free up our time. Tellingly, however,\u00a0the 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\u2014$2,003.10 per month.”<\/p>\n

I’m pretty ambivalent about the whole self-help genre of such books, which constitute a veritable industry unto themselves, but would be\u00a0interested to know what others think. There\u00a0seems to be\u00a0definite inspirational value in such works\u2014they can empower people with new visions and goals worth pursuing. As we know, such works can definitely \u201cgrow their own legs,\u201d becoming \u201cself-fulfilling prophecies,\u201d of sorts (the key to \u201cThe Secret,\u201d anyone\u2026?). But my basic problem is that The Four-Hour Work Week<\/em> 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\u2019s setting forth), and in whose interests. That is, it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

One\u00a0critical lens through which to\u00a0examine such works may be\u00a0Pierre Bourdieu’s \u201chabitus\u201d\u2014 roughly one\u2019s deeply ingrained, acquired ways of speaking, acting, and being in the world inherited from one\u2019s group\/s, which act as signals of whether one is \u201cin\u201d or \u201cout\u201d culturally within certain contexts. If one has been fortunate enough to inherit the \u201cpreferred\u201d 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 \u201cthe playing field ain\u2019t equal\u201d 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.\u00a0Basically, the\u00a0American 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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been discussing\u00a0with a few friends the NY Times bestseller The Four-Hour Work Week (www.fourhourworkweek.com), which\u00a0calls us all to\u00a0less distracted\u00a0work habits,\u00a0to free up our time. Tellingly, however,\u00a0the 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":138,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/138"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1963"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1963\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1970,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1963\/revisions\/1970"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}