NONFICTION - June 26, 1994

THE REINVENTION OF WORK: A New Vision of Livelihood for Our Time by Matthew Fox (HarperSanFrancisco: $22; 342 pp.). Dr. Larry Dossey talks of “joyless striving”; former business executive Rolf Osterberg calls it “one of the drugs we use to deaden and block the emotional aspect within us”; oral historian Studs Terkel refers to “a Monday through Friday sort of dying.” What these three writers are talking about, of course, is modern work--the job dissatisfaction that afflicts, according to one account cited in this volume, as many as nine workers in 10. That may be an exaggeration, but there’s no question that millions of people today find work much less rewarding than it should be, in large measure because work is now defined almost exclusively in terms of economic rather than intrinsic worth. Matthew Fox, a self-described “post-denominational priest” expelled by the Dominican order last year for his radical, New Age-ish views, explores the causes of and cures for this malaise in “The Reinvention of Work,” and seems to touch all the relevant bases. The book has problems, though, for Fox, who now heads an Oakland-based institute devoted to Creation Spirituality, employs an inspirational style that’s more enthusiastic than plausible. Moreover, although Fox’s views seem somewhat less intellectually sound than Joseph Campbell’s, he’s au courant to a fault; he loves to use terms such as praxis and paradigm shift. To his credit, though, Fox knows good material when he sees it, and that’s the major strength of this book--the ideas about work with which it is littered, culled from Meister Eckhart and Thomas Aquinas, E. F. Schumacher and Rainer Marie Rilke.