How does fiction inform working lives? An exploration of the roles of empathy and social sustainability

This chapter discusses the relationships between fiction and working lives through exploring the roles of empathy and sustainability in how people read and perceive fiction in relation to their own private and working lives. It discusses how fiction experience may cause an empathic reaction in the reader, subsequently leading to behaviors contributing to greater social sustainability at work. The chapter problematizes some notions manifesting within these relationships by discussing how ideology infiltrates both the understanding of concepts themselves as well as how they relate to each other. Hence, it thereby discusses the multilevel nature of fiction, such that the individual experience of fiction by a reader has effects on their behavior but is influenced by ideological beliefs about society which are largely implicit to the reader herself. It thereby explains why fiction does not always enhance empathy. Using the distinction between aesthetic and ethical good, the chapter eludicates how fiction may sustain an ideologicalized version of empathy, and thus sustaining contemporary practices in the workplace and the economic system itself. The chapter finishes with an exploration of how fiction may enable a reader to become aware of ideology, thereby opening possibilities to achieve more viable forms of social sustainability.