From Purdy’s For Common Things:

One thing that a culture does is give people ways of thinking about what they are doing. They can see the connections among their work, their talents and the needs of the world. They perceive their work as belonging to a whole, some of whose possibilities are good, which they help to sustain.

In other words, a rich culture helps people to say what their work is for, what its purposes are. This means an architect can understand how her work serves the purpose of creating heartening places for people to live and work, a journalist the aim of informing people of their community’s business and the world’s, a doctor making possible healthy lives, or a farmer feeding people and maintaining fertile land . . .

Work that can be good in these elemental ways can also, necessarily, be bad. It can fail. There are ruined fields, unintelligible essays, and displeasing buildings. Just as good work gives a measure of sense and dignity to a person’s activity, bad work is degrading. A job or an industry that does not offer the possibility of good work, that is manifestly unnecessary, that develops no talents, that achieves no excellences, is a species of tragedy, or of insult.

On one level, Purdy’s first book is an interesting parallel to Steve Garber’s Fabric of Faithfulness or Visions of Vocation.  Like the Purdy quote above, Garber seems to understand the intrinsic value of good work.  Good work and good culture go hand in hand.  And the same can be said for bad work and unhealthy culture.

My own vocational experience has taken some interesting turns over the last couple of years.  I love my job, even on its most frustrating and tiring days.  And as it has changed, has moved beyond the classroom, I have had to reorient what that “good work” looks like and how it fits into the bigger scheme of things.

We don’t talk about work well, which is funny when you think about how much we all talk about work.  What does the culture around us say about work?  How does that affect our approach to the work we have all been called (or have chosen)?  Those are good questions worth asking.

(image from advancedcabinetscorp.com)