Moral Reckonings and the Allure of Independent Work for Professionals
By Erin Reid and Lakshmi Ramarajan
May 19, 2022
Why do some professionals choose to leave traditional employment in organizations and move into independent, gig-based work? Our study of more than 100 journalists suggests that the experience of moral reckonings—realizations that working in an organization can prevent one from doing moral work—can be an important trigger.
Morals matter in people’s careers: autobiographies from fields as diverse as finance, politics, and rock and roll attest to people’s deep desires to build moral careers (e.g., Lewis 1989, Richards and Fox 2010, Power 2019, Obama 2020). Lawyers hope to serve justice, physicians to heal, teachers to educate. The journalists we studied joined the profession with the moral aim of doing work that allows them to report the truth to the public.
Yet, work is also the key means through which people secure money to fund both the material necessities and the pleasures of life—shelter, food, family, entertainment, travel, gifts and donations. Thus, people’s pursuit of moral aims in their careers are intertwined with the satisfaction of their material aims.
For many people, a crisis occurs when they find themselves working for organizations where salaries help them pay the bills but where hurdles prevent them from doing work they regard as moral. The accounts of the journalists we studied revealed that in these circumstances, people can experience reckonings: transformational, individual experiences by which they come to view working in an organization as preventing them from building a career that is simultaneously moral and financially sustainable.
These reckonings arise from either acute events or accumulate through repeated frustrations. Their determining characteristic is that they make visible the lack of fit between the work possible within the organization and satisfaction of the professional’s moral aims. For instance, many journalists described how the industry’s movement towards counting website metrics and spinning out brief, superficial stories that would attract attention, made it difficult for them to do the important, moral work for which they had joined the profession. One person explained:
“More and more newspapers are consolidating, cutting staff, or becoming these aggregation type sites where it’s all ripping off other people’s content and adding your own spin to it as quickly as possible. That wasn’t why I got into the journalism job.”
Such reckonings are not only deep experiences, they are also important inflection points in people’s careers, orienting them away from organizations and towards independent work. In our study, we found that after experiencing such reckonings, many journalists chose to leave traditional news organizations and work on an independent basis, doing freelance work or creating their own news organizations. By working independently and outside the auspices of organizations, they hoped to gain exert greater control over the morality of the work that they do.
It is well-established that independent workers seek more control over hours, personal life and flexibility while living with the downsides of precarity. Our study shows that in a world where commercialism is rife, working independently is one way workers seek to assert both moral and material control.
