Work plays an essential role in how we engage with the world, reflecting our desire to be productive, creative, and connected to others. By exploring the inner experiences of people at work, people seeking work, and people transitioning in and out of work, this book provides a rich and complex picture of the contemporary work experience. Drawing from extensive interviews with working people across the US, as well as insights from psychological research on work and careers, the book provides compelling evidence that the nature of work in the US is eroding - and with powerful psychological and social consequences. From this conclusion, the book also illustrates the rationale and roadmap for a renewed agenda toward full employment and toward fair and dignified jobs for all who want to work. The emotional insights complement the conclusions of the best science and policy analyses on working, culminating in a powerful call for policies that attend to the real lives of individuals in 21st century America. By weaving these various sources together, Blustein delineates a conception of working that conveys its complexity, richness, and capacity for both joy and despair."David Blustein's book on working combines the life stories of people with the centrality of work and its psychological underpinnings in a way that will move the field of vocational psychology forward. This book puts everyday working people and those who need to work front and center in the psychological study of working and in public policy. This book challenged my mind and touched my heart." -- Rosie Phillips Davis, Professor, Counseling and Educational Psychology and Research, University of Memphis"So much of the discussion of the future of work is about machines; David Blustein prefers to focus on humans. This book is the valuable and essential missing piece in a critically important contemporary debate, focusing not on what we do for work, but on what work does for us." --Anne-Marie Slaughter, Bert G. Kerstetter '66 University Professor Emerita of Politics and International Affairs, Princeton University and CEO, New America"A masterful book that gives compelling human voice and scientific clarity to the powers of work in contemporary human life." --Ruth Kanfer, Professor of Psychology and Director of the Work Science Center, Georgia Institute of Technology David L. Blustein is Professor in the Department of Counseling, Developmental, and Educational Psychology at the Lynch School of Education at Boston College. He has published over 120 journal articles and book chapters on the psychology of working, career development, work-based transitions, the exploration process, the interface between work and mental health, and the future of work. He is the author of The Psychology of Working: A New Perspective for Career Development, Counseling, and Public Policy and the editor of the Oxford Handbook of the Psychology of Working. Professor Blustein is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the National Career Development Association, and the American Educational Research Association, and he is the recipient of the John Holland Award for Outstanding Achievement in Personality and Career Research, the Extended Research Award by the American Counseling Association, and an Eminent Career Award from the National Career Development Association. In addition to his academic, scholarly, and public policy work, he also has served as a practicing counseling psychologist, providing psychotherapy and work-based counseling to adults and late adolescents."Advances the field with rich qualitative experiences that reflect well-researched psychological phenomenon regarding employment and workplace dynamics. This book is highly accessible and will interest academics and the general public alike." --Choice "Builds on [Blustein's] impressive scholarship, but admirably manages to wear its erudition lightly: it is a book from the heart, a labour of love, constituting nothing less than a manifesto in favour of decent work -- a goal that is as important as it is increasingly out of the grasp of many in America, and elsewhere." --British Journal of Guidance and Counseling "Offering suggestions from the personal to a more macro level, Blustein's The Importance of Work illuminates a most ambitious, progressive pathway forward with his familiar bold intelligence and compassion. It may well signal the dawn of a new age of work. Thanks to David Blustein, hope awaits in those first few steps ahead." --Career Convergence