The Meaning of Work
Thinking Allowed
BBC
4.4 • 997 Ratings
🗓️ 16 December 2020
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The anthropologist, James Suzman, explores the shifting meaning of work, and argues that for 95% of our species' history, it held a radically different importance – it did not determine social status, mould our values or dictate how we spent most of our time. How did it become the central organisational principle of our societies and is it time for a dramatic re-think?
Also, Ella Harris, Leverhulme Fellow in the Geography department at Birkbeck, University of London, examines ‘pop up culture’. Temporary or nomadic sites such as cinemas, supper clubs and container malls are now ubiquitous in cities across the world. But what are the stakes of the 'pop-up' city? Has economic insecurity and precarity been re-branded as desirable and exciting?
Presenter Laurie Taylor Producer Jayne Egerton
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Take some time for yourself with soothing classical music from the mindful mix, the Science of |
| 0:07.0 | Happiness Podcast. |
| 0:08.0 | For the last 20 years I've dedicated my career to exploring the science of living a happier more meaningful life and I want |
| 0:14.4 | to share that science with you. |
| 0:16.1 | And just one thing, deep calm with Michael Mosley. |
| 0:19.4 | I want to help you tap in to your hidden relaxation response system and open the door to that |
| 0:25.4 | calmer place within. Listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:30.3 | BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts. |
| 0:36.4 | This is a Thinking Loud Podcasts from the BBC and for more details and much, much more about |
| 0:42.2 | thinking aloud, go to our website at BBC.co. UK |
| 0:47.0 | hello. |
| 0:48.0 | Or more specifically hello Dolly. |
| 0:50.8 | Working night to buy what a way to make a Oh, Dolly. They just use your mind and they never give you credit. |
| 1:04.7 | It's enough to time you crazy if you let it. |
| 1:09.8 | Mind to Right. |
| 1:11.8 | Dolly Pardon. Wundering why she should let the toad work squat on her life. |
| 1:17.0 | Six days of the week, work sits with its sickening poison, wrote Philip Larkin, and all just for paying a few bills. |
| 1:25.0 | That's out of proportion. |
| 1:27.0 | But although I can easily remember the time when I felt my own life being brought down, |
| 1:32.0 | poisoned by work, those four years filing |
| 1:35.2 | invoices in a Rayon factory that half decade alphabetically re-shelding books in a |
| 1:40.4 | library, although I can vividly remember the times when, again like Philip Larkin, |
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