Choosing your Work Arena

What Work? What Arena?

Work choices are life choices: fundamental to your well-being and those who are closely related to you.

In making your choice, many factors are in play. On the one side, you are constrained by society and social phenomena, and on the other side by your own nature and interests.

Factors relevant to choice within this framework relate to your personal capability and to your choice of an arena within society where you want to work responsibly on a full-time basis.

Making a Living & Making a Life

The primary way to make a living is by engaging in commercial exchanges. However, making a life is more than making a living. So many employment opportunities may be available for non-commercial work, especially in modern wealthy societies where government or charitable foundations can provide funding.

At present, the biggest provider of finance (and hence employment work) is the government. This is a funder that is never neutral in regard to QH3-research, QH4-society, or QH5-ideas.

Examples of ways to make a living or survive economically without any commercial aspect might include:

• QH1: Family—subsidies and welfare payments for looking after one's own children or fostering others.
• QH2: Organization—employment within government bureaucracies (including the military) financed via taxation of commerce; or within non-profit bodies financed via grants, donations and subscriptions.
• QH3: Disciplines—employment within private or government-funded universities, research institutions.
• QH4: Society—employment as a politician or as a judge; or within advocacy organizations, or in membership associations.
  
• QH5: Philosophy—employment within special academies, ideology-based think-tanks
• QH6: Spirituality—employment within a church, membership of a utopian community.
• QH7: Art—employment in sponsored or subsidized performances and events.

Examples showing it is possible to operate in almost any arena and generate an output that can be part of a commercial exchange:

• QH1: Family—e.g. nanny work, child-minding, counselling, personal introductions (match-making).
• QH2: Organization—work in businesses producing tangible goods and services: e.g. manufacturing, mining, marketing, health-care, education.
• QH3: Disciplines—knowledge economy businesses generating intellectual products as in software or biotechnology; industrial contract research services.
• QH4: Society—social output work like arbitration, legal services, journalism, popular entertainment.
• QH5: Philosophy—educational or social work based on a doctrine eg psychotherapy.
• QH6: Spirituality—paid consciousness-raising work or ritual performance.
• QH7: Art—public concert, film production, art gallery.

Each domain appears to offer a particular unique orientation for any organization: see explorations in the TOP Studio.

Conjecture: Life Choices

Convention, opportunity or personal pressures may lead a person initially into the particular arena like a conventional QH2-business or QH2-government agency. This may or may not be a good fit. Many find it difficult to organise gratifying work.

High-Flyers

As an informal observation, it seems that a person destined for higher things in their domain—e.g. mail-room boys who become CEOs (QH2), scientific technicians who become senior professors (QH3), journalists who become editors or publishers (QH4), actors who become producers (QH4)—are usually quickly attracted to an arena and work their way up rather rapidly.

Misfits

Those who will never go beyond the lower work levels (WL-I, WL-II and even WL-III) can find themselves in work that is deeply unsatisfying. This is typically within some firm/agency-QH2 e.g. earning by giving 5-minute massages, or supervising deliveries, or keeping accounts. The sense of boredom, drudgery or oppression may be intense and eventually intolerable.

They want to either help with research (i.e. low work-level in QH3), or campaign about some social injustice or failing (i.e. low work-level in QH4), or affirm ideas for living (i.e. low work-level in QH5), or join a spiritual path (i.e. low work-level in QH6), or help with artistic events (i.e. low work-level in QH7). It may be possible—but rarely without financial sacrifice or social compromises. Sometimes withdrawal from society or retirement gives freedom.

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• Recognizing capability and choosing your work.

Originally posted: 25-Oct-2013