Book Reviews

Erin A. Cech. The Trouble with Passion: How Searching for Fulfillment at Work Fosters Inequality. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2021. 344p. Paper, $29.95 (ISBN: 978-0520303232).

Loving your work is a truly American idea, but is it a capitalist trap? As a librarian, passion has played heavily in my own narratives about my work. As I’ve grown in my career and learned more about how multifaceted librarianship is, and as I have worked in different areas of librarianship, the passion I once held for the field has been hit hard with the reality of labor.

Erin A. Cech, an Associate Sociology and Mechanical-Engineering Professor at the University of Michigan, explores questions of passion seeking in labor in The Trouble with Passion: How Searching for Fulfillment at Work Fosters Inequality. Cech developed a theoretical concept she calls the passion principle: “the belief that self-expression and fulfillment should be the central guiding principle in career decision making” (xii). Cech uses more than 170 interviews with college-educated career aspirants (students) and career counselors and four surveys of workers in the United States to demonstrate her theory. Cech also uses cultural schema, or “shared cultural frameworks for ‘viewing, filtering, and evaluating what we know as reality’” (13).

In the first chapter, Cech shares her data so that the reader can see the interviews Cech collected and how the passion principle has factored into the choices career aspirants made. In chapter 2, she asks, “What is so compelling about finding passion in your labor?” There is more evidence from her data and interviews with students/career aspirants, but we also see that some people don’t rely on seeking passion in their work. Cech notes that those who pushed back on the passion principle theory were rare, and her data shows that class/socioeconomic status plays a large part in who gets to find passion in their work and who doesn’t.

In chapter 3, “The Privilege of Passion,” Cech has a particularly interesting section titled “Passion in Precarity.’’ As a former diversity resident librarian, I reflected on my experiences with job precarity during my residency. Cech notes that “for respondents from less privileged class backgrounds, passion-seeking came with greater risk of landing on a precarious path—a path that was unstable, temporary, poorly paid, and/or lacked feasible advancement opportunities’’ (147). This is exactly how some diversity residency programs work, and librarianship should continue to really critique how those programs truly work in the metaconversations about pipeline issues and retention. In chapter 4, Cech explores choicewashing: explaining away societal patterns of occupational inequality by making it about individual choices and how passion-seeking in labor can diminish structural issues of the labor market.

The last chapter questions whether passion-seeking in labor exploits workers. This is where the theoretical concept of vocational awe developed through the work of Fobazi Ettarh and her 2018 article, “Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves,”1 can be explored by library workers who are reading Cech’s book. Both Cech and Ettarh explore worker exploitation in their respective works. Cech explains, “passion promises to inspire the inclination to work hard that is expected of employees in a capitalist economy, without requiring either extensive external compulsion by employees or the moral imperative of hard work for its own sake” (192). She writes about Karl Marx and his concerns about the exploitation of workers and “surplus value” (the economic value of what workers produce and the amount they are compensated for their work, 192). Ettarh also addresses these concerns in the “Burnout” and “Undercompensation” sections of her 2018 work.

As a white-collar worker and former diversity resident trying to “prove my worth” to my institution to gain permanent employment, I worked longer hours and nights and weekends to achieve my goal of holding onto my position and ending my precarious status. Now I have more agency and freedom (privilege) in my role and can have clear and stricter boundaries between my work and other areas of my life. What resonates with me from Cech’s book is the discussion about capitalism and how it ties to white-collar work.

Throughout the book, Cech notes how the demand and opportunity to have passion for our work has grown and shifted due to changes in industrial life, the expansion of white-collar labor, technology shifts, gendered-labor shifts in the workforce, and how Americans view work. This resonated with me as a librarian and historian. As I began my work in librarianship, I practiced vocational awe, and passion was a big part of the narrative I told myself about why I did this work. I spoke about it while completing my MLIS, in job interviews, when I moved from working as an archives assistant to being a children’s librarian at a public library, and during the interview process to be a diversity resident. The book never really answers the question of whether passion seeking in work is bad, and I don’t believe that is Cech’s goal. Cech engages readers to think about passion in labor seeking in a broader context of working life in America. Cech, a trained sociologist, uses those tools and evidence-based data to support a new narrative about how current career aspirants view passion-seeking in their future careers. If you’re looking for a book that can offer you new insights into career choices while making you think critically about librarianship, passion, and labor, this is a recommended read.—Mallary Rawls, Florida State University

Note

1. Fobazi Ettarh, “Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves,” In the Library with the Lead Pipe (January 2018), https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/.