Compulsion to Work? Malinowski and the Labour Question

What ‘drives man to strenuous, prolonged, and often unpleasant effort?’ This was one of the questions that Bronisław Malinowski would continue to return to throughout his career. His answer was that ‘the psychological problem of value’ is key (Malinowski 1925: 927), but grounded in kinship and social organization, magic and religion.
Compared with his influence on anthropological theories and debates over exchange, the question of work in Malinowski’s writings has garnered relatively little attention (apart from contributions by his own students). Malinowski, from the time of his earliest publications (Malinowski 1993) and initial fieldwork, posed the question of incentives and stimuli to work in different ways. In his Trobriands ethnography he investigated the question in a more systematic and empirical way in order to dispel the caricature of isolated, self-interested ‘economic man’ in prevailing economic and social theory, and simultaneously the idea that labour in ‘savage’ societies was compelled by bare necessity, with minimal social organisation.