Some people experience their work as a calling. People who experience their work this way see it as a source of fulfillment and self-expression, but also as a matter of duty or necessity. Despite increasing interest in the idea of work as a calling among management scholars, the idea has received remarkably little attention from philosophers. Yet the notion of work as a calling, I argue, challenges common philosophical accounts of the value of work and its relation to the self. In this paper, I draw on moral and political philosophy to explore why a calling can be experienced both as one’s obligation and as one’s destiny. I then argue that there are good grounds to endorse an ideology of work as a calling, in part because it can play an important role in providing a social basis for self-respect.
