Liberal Learning as a Quest for Purpose by William M. Sullivan (review)

The evolution of liberal arts education in the United States has led to the loss of the stature and importance that characterized its humanistic origins. Such education was never meant to create a culture of student compliance to a training that would put them in the pipeline for a position in the job market. However, that is precisely what happens today, William Sullivan claims. He believes that a culture is incubated in the college years that dominates the U.S. culture in general, which he calls a culture of acquiescence. Higher education's hidden curriculum, Sullivan's writes, is "the dispiriting notion that there is no alternative to the ferocious, Darwinian competition into which today's youth are being inducted" (p. 201). Commodification of education has pervaded the U.S. and other educational systems that embrace the neoliberal creed around the globe. An antidote to this culture, the author believes, is to recover the idea that during their college years, students should discover their vocation not to an occupation or professional position in the job market, but to a vocation in life. The concept of vocation is not, according to Sullivan, connected either to a religious or an elitist idea of higher education. Sullivan is also not suggesting diminishing the quality of the highly-important training imbedded in the liberal arts education project. Rather, he questions why such education has become so unidimensional, and where such a path will lead American society, from a place of sincere democratic concern.

Where does the concept of vocation stand and how does Sullivan understand it? There are at least two ways of thinking about the concept of vocation that have predominated since the outset of the 20^th century. One has been the association of vocation to a type of education that emphasizes a technical preparation towards the labor market; in this case, the occupational or labor market plays the role of a "caller" who summons potential workers. The other, more relevant and transcendent in the social sciences is the study of the association between work and having a calling or a vocation to it. This relationship was first studied and conceptualized by Max Weber's (1904) pivotal study on the effects of the Reformation on Western society. Weber sought to understand why and how people's desires changed in such an incredible way between the 16^th and 19^th centuries. His project led him to realize that the Protestant understanding of callings transformed the way in which people understood their place in the world. In a 1905 letter to Heinrich Rickert, Weber depicts the Protestant work ethic as not only the origin of the modern culture of callings—Berufskultur, but also of the one that endures in a human being who receives a call—Berufsmensch (Goldman, 1988).

Currently, the disciplines of sociology of religion, vocational psychology, and especially organizational behavior, have developed a research agenda trying to better understand the interplay of callings, or vocation, and work. Thirty years of research has shown important developments such as conceptual distinctions between callings and the concept of job and career (Bellah, 1985; Wrzesniewski, McCauley, Rozin, & Schwartz, 1997), how a calling develops in the worker (Dobrow, 2013)I focus on the antecedents of calling, a consuming, meaningful passion people can experience toward a domain. I propose a dynamic model in which calling can change over time and can be shaped by antecedent factors, specifically, through people's ability, behavioral involvement, and social comfort in the area toward which they feel a calling. I tested these ideas in a seven-year, four-wave prospective longitudinal survey study of 450 amateur musicians. Multilevel analyses indicate individuals who were more behaviorally involved and felt higher social comfort in the calling domain (e.g., music, and how such a calling is related to organizational dispositions like organizational identification, turnover intentions (Cardador, Dane, & Pratt, 2011), work engagement, self-efficacy (Hirschi, 2012), and motivation (Woitowicz & Domene, 2013).

Few studies have attempted to...