Nariway — Tracing the Origins of How the World Works

Work was invented.
It can be reinvented.

Tracing the origins of the practices, words, and systems the world takes for granted.

1380

Freelance

1640

Boss

1864

Deadline

1889

Retirement Age

1926

The Weekend

1958

Meritocracy

2021

Tangping

Until 1803, career meant a horse at full gallop, not a professional life.

French · 1530s

Bismarck set the retirement age at seventy, for a population that rarely reached it.

Germany · 1889

Four nurses quit their jobs and built a 15,000-person company with zero managers.

Every word has an architect.

Frederick Winslow Taylor

He timed steelworkers to hundredths of a minute.

Engineer and management theorist, 1856–1915

At Andersonville prison, crossing the deadline meant being shot on sight.

English · 1864

1926

The year Henry Ford gave workers Saturday off, not for their sake, but because rested people buy more cars.

Sir Walter Scott invented the word for a mercenary whose lance was not pledged to any lord.

English · 1820

The word meant bedroom. The inventor called what it became "monolithic insanity."

United States · 1968

Mondragón cooperatives

80,000 workers own the tenth-largest company in Spain.

None of this had to happen this way.

Mary Parker Follett

She described modern management in 1920, and nobody listened until 1980

United States, 1868–1933

The Romans paid soldiers in salt. Almost no historian believes it.

Latin · 14th century

1958

The year the word "meritocracy" was coined. It was satire. Michael Young invented it to warn against a society that sorted people by test scores. The warning became the aspiration.

American colonists borrowed a Dutch word for uncle to avoid saying master.

Performance review

The U.S. military invented merit ratings in World War I to decide which soldiers to discharge.

United States · 1910s

He argued that modern freedom had become so frightening that millions would give it away.

Social psychologist and psychoanalyst, 1900-1980

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Follow the thread

Who decided that your working life should have a shape?

Five entries that trace one assumption from its origin to its consequences.

Career Career Ladder Frederick Winslow Taylor Mondragón Vocation

When did rest become something you had to earn?

Four entries on the invention of time off.

Retire The Weekend Otto von Bismarck Danish Flexicurity

The Japanese word nariwai (生業) combines the characters for life and work as one undivided concept. English does not have that word. Nariway is the reason it exists now.

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