Why do we work? Many of us might give a simple transactional answer to the question: We work in order to make money. For the American psychologist Abraham Maslow, and the management thinkers inspired by his theory of motivation, people’s motives for working could not be reduced to a paycheck. Instead, Maslow and his followers argued in management texts and training seminars that people work to fulfill higher psychological needs. People work to become self-actualized and to find meaning—provided that meaning can be found in the mundane realities of working life.

First proposed by Maslow in 1943, the hierarchy of needs is a grand theory of human motivation that arranges all motives into a ladder, from the basic physiological needs (for food and shelter) upward to needs for safety, for belonging, for esteem, and, at the apex, the motive for self-actualization. At the top rung of the ladder, the self-actualization motive was a future-oriented striving that drove humans to seek meaning and fulfillment in the world.

Maslow’s work began infiltrating management in the 1950s and ’60s, as the business trade press and management theorists picked up humanistic psychology to adapt managerial theories of motivation for a new era. For Maslow, corporations offered both an experimental site for him to observe human psychology—which he did as a consultant for California companies—and a site for humans to realize their higher-order needs through self-actualized work.

Why was corporate America drawn to the hierarchy of needs? They liked it because it offered both a grand narrative and master explanation for human psychology in a changing society and a practical guide to managing people. It is precisely in the tension between these two visions of the hierarchy of needs—the reductive diagram and the rich social theory—that the hierarchy of needs acquires its power and its politics.