History of Job Search, Before Jobs

The notion of “jobs” and choice in one’s career is a modern invention.

No, high school students back in the Bronze Age didn’t sulk in angst while choosing between “hunting” and “gathering” as a career. And the original Goths and Vandals didn’t fill out applications to become pillagers.

For most of human history, what you did for your daily bread was determined by caste, church or king, and enforced by a societal molasses that discouraged new solutions, change, or movement. “Self-actualization” was tough to come by when 98% of humanity picked crops by hand and never traveled further than 25 miles outside their birthplace. Peasantry, serf & servant, and the horrific existence of slavery, define the vast majority of effort of all the human beings who have ever lived.

Peasants in an anarcho-syndicalist commune being repressed by the system.

The long trip from wandering around the savanna to seeing Hootie & the Blowfish in Savannah, Georgia, is the story of increasing urbanization and specialization. As we settled down into towns and villages, we had to develop new ways of dealing with all of the things that a settlement’s increasing population require. Tending to the needs, hopes, fears, health and protection of citizens required new, specialized knowledge. And over the centuries, that amount of knowledge increased greatly, which in turn meant it required more and more time to master.

So as cities grew larger, they simultaneously became populated with a wider variety of specialists. The labor of the farmstead was divided into the trades — the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick-maker. The labor required to manage large numbers of people living in close proximity were codified into the professions — scribes, notaries, accountants, attorneys, and physicians. And Western civilization has always had a difficult time determining how it feels about those tending to society’s social, distributional, and financial needs — the artist, the barman, the merchant and the moneylender.

As the Dark Ages were ending 1,000 years ago, surnames came back into widespread use, having been lost since Roman times. Because we commonly inherited from our fathers not just our genes, but our work, many took as last names the names of their profession: Smith, Cooper, Carpenter and Cook became the last names for smiths, barrel makers, woodworkers and chefs, respectively. (The same holds true outside of English-speaking countries, where common last names Schmidt, Lefebvre, Ferraro / Ferrari, Herrera, Kovac and Kowalski all refer to metal-working occupations, just like Smith does.)

The typical pathway from adolescence to adulthood was to be apprenticed to a master craftsman, rise through your “journeymanship”, and then eventually take your place as an individual practitioner within the local guild. Even Benjamin Franklin, in many ways the first American, started out apprenticed to his older brother before he took advantage of the Colonies’ greater mobility to run away to Philadelphia.

As can be gathered, this meant that manufacturing and production remained very small scale. At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith illustrates the division of labor in The Wealth of Nations with the largest firm he can find: a pin factory employing all of ten workers!

There were larger institutions such as the military, the church, or the royal bureaucracy, but joining these organizations was less like choosing a job than it was choosing a way of life. Perhaps similar in their unchanging intensity of feeling to 21st century Americans’ allegiance to our sports teams (were you ‘recruited’ to be a Yankees fan? If I offered you $10,000 / year more in pay, would you switch to being a Mets fan?)

So prior to industrialization, production was small in scale, professions were inherited, mobility was very low, and thus, choosing your career and job was easy:

You did what you were told.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 17th, 2009 at 3:02 pm and is filed under History of Job Search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.