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In this essay, you will examine the culture of "work" critically. Most of you have either worked in the past or are currently working, and even more of you will work in the near future. For most of us, activities associated with work will occupy about one half of our adult waking hours (8 hours of work, 8 hours of leisure, 8 hours of sleep), so it is crucial that we fully understand the cultural assumptions prevalent in our particular work situations. When we understand these cultural assumptions, we can then make informed decisions about how to live our working lives. We have the choice of accommodating, resisting, or negotiating these cultural assumptions, and in doing so we open up the potential to change the assumptions that operate against our own beliefs regarding workplace conditions and relationships. Work Critical Essay Those of you who have work experience (full or part-time, paid or volunteer) might write an autobiographical account of a single job you have occupied and the company that employed you. Your topic for this essay will center around a job you have (or have had) that requires you to complete a variety of tasks and interact with a number of other employees. You will derive the arguments and specific, concrete details for your work critical essay directly from your own experience in this workplace.Those of you who have never worked might write an ethnographic description of a particular workplace and its employees. Your topic for this essay will center around a workplace to which you have easy access. You will derive the arguments and specific, concrete details for your work critical essay directly from your own detailed observations of this workplace and from interviews with its employees.After you have decided on the general approach you would like to take in your essay (autobiographical account or ethnographic description), and you have decided on the specific workplace you would like to examine critically, then complete the invention heuristic provided for this assignment. Answer as many of the questions as you can in as much detail as you can.After you have completed the invention heuristic, you are ready to begin writing your work critical essay. Your essay should include the following elements: | 1. | An introduction to the work environment and a preview of your conclusions about it. You might also include any good or bad feelings--biases--you have toward the workplace that might influence your descriptions. | | 2. | Fully developed and well-detailed paragraphs explaining and critiquing a number of cultural values perpetuated in the workplace you are examining critically. Discuss each of these values in terms of their cultural production and contextual distribution by your employers, and your own critical consumption (accommodation, resistance, and negotiation) of the values. | | 3. | A conclusion based on ways you think the work environment might be improved. |
Your audience for this critical essay should be people who have work experience in the kind of job or company you are writing about but who have not worked in exactly the same job or company. In other words, assume that your audience has fairly general knowledge of your topic but lacks specific understanding of the particular problems you have faced at work. Work Practical Essay Write a formal letter to someone in the workplace (a fellow worker, manager, or owner) who can do something about the problem(s) you describe in your critical essay. This letter should be approximately one single-spaced page in length, your tone in the letter should be appropriate to your audience and purpose, and you should suggest viable solutions.
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