Nariway

About

Every part of a job has an inventor.

Nariway is an independent research institution studying how human beings have organized work. The research becomes exhibitions, built with museums, libraries, and university galleries, so that students and families can see the working world as something people made and can make again.

Ford Madox Brown's Work, a Victorian street crowded with every kind of laborer at once.
Ford Madox Brown, Work, 1852-65.

The name

生業

nariwai

The name comes from the Japanese word nariwai, written with the characters for life and work joined into a single idea. English never developed an equivalent, and the words it produced instead describe people divided into roles and titles.

A Meiji-era woodblock print of women reeling silk at the Tomioka Silk Mill, one of Japan's first modern factories.
Tomioka Silk Mill, women reeling silk, c. 1873.

The archive

The archive holds nearly 600 entries on the words, practices, and systems of working life. Together they show how recently most of the present arrangement was assembled, and by whom.

  • Etymologies

    What did the word mean before it meant this?

  • Inventions

    When did this become normal?

  • Case Studies

    What has already worked elsewhere?

  • Thinkers

    Who saw it first?

Enter the archive
Ilya Repin's Barge Haulers on the Volga, a line of men straining to drag a barge upstream.
Ilya Repin, Barge Haulers on the Volga, 1870-73.

The exhibitions

The archive is the permanent collection. Every exhibition is assembled from it.

An exhibition follows one ordinary feature of working life back to its origin. It gathers the objects and documents that produced it, from the earliest surviving version to whatever is replacing it now. Exhibitions run from a single wall to a full floor, and each is built with the institution that presents it.

Adolph Menzel's The Iron Rolling Mill, workers laboring at a blazing furnace.
Adolph Menzel, The Iron Rolling Mill, 1875.

The researcher

Dr. Alina Okun

Alina Okun has spent six years researching the origins of modern working life and built the archive behind every Nariway exhibition. She spent the two decades before that in corporate finance, beginning at Arthur Andersen and continuing through UBS, technology startups, and angel investing.

She holds a doctorate in strategy and innovation and has published peer-reviewed research in the International Journal of Economics and Financial Issues. She has conducted executive interviews on the future of work and co-authored two bestselling books.

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A world in which work makes people more fully human.