American policy makers are convinced that jobs are what keep this country together but, increasingly, jobs are helping pull the country apart. Part of the problem lies in how Americans understand the meaning of the word "job." By measuring its value exclusively in terms of the money it earns for the worker, we divorce it from its true value -- the ability to connect people to each other. PNS editor Franz Schurmann, a professor emeritus of history and sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of "American Soul" (Mercury House).

Few things are so important in the lives of Americans as a job. We like to think that this country, as delegates at a recent G-7 forum on global unemployment put it, is "the world's biggest job producing machine."

But what if, instead of holding the country together as policy makers believe, jobs are now a big reason why America's social texture is coming apart? And what if the very way we conceive of a job contributes to rather than prevents this social unraveling?

A quick look at today's job structure underscores the point: once a complex pattern of individual niches held together by fairly fixed scaffolding, today more and more of the jobs at both the high and low ends are totally individuated and temporary, filled by highly mobile consultants who often moonlight at two or three others. At most only a third of the jobs provide benefits that cushion the lives of those who hold them and their dependents. Middle-class temp jobs may pay good salaries while working poor jobs hover close to the minimum wage. But neither get many if any benefits. At the bottom the underclass has no jobs, no benefits, no security and in good part relies on crime for survival.

It is well known abroad that America now scores pretty high on the social disorganization scale. In the old days full employment was seen as the chief remedy for social disorganization. Now it appears American-style full employment, "lots of jobs," may be a key cause of it.

If that's so, the problem lies in part at the concept of job itself. Job is a funny word. Nobody knows its origins. Yet job has a precise meaning: a piece of work done for an agreed price. Three aspects of the definition are important: job links work with money; both are measurable; and both therefore are manipulable, like any piece of technology.

The word job first made its appearance in the late 1600s -- around the time when the pieces were falling into place for the English industrial revolution centered on power-driven technology. The idea of manipulable technology went hand in hand with the idea of manipulable workers.

In 1776 Adam Smith published his epochal "Wealth of Nations" laying out the conceptual foundations of modern economics. Through prices, he argued, money provided a precise measure of the value a worker put into a product. In a nutshell, a job was basically about making money.

While capitalism's products were stunning, its doctrines provoked discomfort from the very beginning. Nothing speaks to that discomfort more eloquently than the fact that there is no word for "job" in most countries' vocabularies, even those that are heavily industrialized. In most cultures, people have a wide range of words to describe work but those words tend to refer to the social content of work; work is never linked exclusively to money.

In his encyclical on work, Pope John Paul II, who has become an increasingly vocal critic of capitalism, doesn't just separate work for money. He argues that the main purpose of work -- its core value -- is bonding people together in communities.

This notion comes much closer to how Japanese think of work. Japan is now recognized as the most successful capitalist society in the world, yet it has been following a non-Western employment model for the last 130 years. Today it has emerged from its worst depression in 70 years with only a 3.5 percent unemployment rate.

Assuming Americans were to agree that reweaving our social fabric was our top priority, we're not about to copy so different a culture as that of Japan. But we might begin to rethink our ideas about jobs and the job structure through a key insight of the Japanese. Rather than dividing workers into top, middle and low income earners, we would differentiate between those who want security first and those who prefer change and risk. The latter -- whom the Japanese refer to as "lone wolves" -- have used aggressiveness and hard work to acquire money-driven jobs at the top while the former work at jobs which are more rooted in communities.

What the Japanese know, but Americans have yet to recognize, is that both categories create wealth. Markets and governments work closely together to increase wealth coming from the top. What's needed now is for markets, governments and communities to collaborate on increasing wealth coming from the bottom -- where some two-thirds of the workforce work at community-driven jobs. In this way we might begin to acknowledge those jobs that really do hold the society together for their real worth.