Episode description

The religion of work and welfare: Laurie Taylor explores the way in which our understanding of jobs and joblessness has become entangled with religious ideologies. He's joined by Tom Boland, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at University College, Cork, who argues that Western culture has ‘faith’ in the labour market as a test of the worth of each individual. For those who are out of work, welfare is now less a means of support than a means of purification and redemption where job seeking becomes a form of pilgrimage.

Also, Carolyn Chen, Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, explores how the restructuring of work is transforming religious and spiritual experience in late capitalism. She spent five years conducting an ethnographic study in Silicon Valley and found that tech companies have brought religion into the workplace, in ways that replace churches, temples, and synagogues in workers’ lives and satisfy needs for belonging, identity, purpose, and transcendence. What happens when work replaces religion and are there wider lessons for workers beyond the niche world of high tech?

Producer: Jayne Egerton