Work as Worship: An Investigation into Some of its Economic and Wellbeing Effects
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the doctrine of Karma Yoga of Hinduism, which incorporates work into the spiritual life and converts even secular work into an act of worship. It seeks to replace the desire for material rewards with the aspiration of offering up the work to Deity, thereby converting work into worship. It is shown here that, as an unintended consequence, this would have a positive effect on a worker’s economic productivity because the practice of work-as-worship relaxes their time constraint. When karma yoga is practiced in teamwork, this productivity increase can not only attenuate diminishing returns to labour but also counter the effects of free-riding in teams. Furthermore, if executed in the spirit laid down by the doctrine, karma yoga would induce altruism towards others, and this is shown to have an additional positive effect on the productivity of organisations. The paper also discusses the salutary health and well-being consequences that can be expected of work done as worship. Finally, this paper ends with a brief discussion on the relevance of the theory on work as worship to two other religions: Christianity and Islam.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".