Abstract
Most of us will be familiar with the saying, ‘Find something you love to do, and you’ll never have to work a day in your life’. But is it accurate? Through interviews with individuals who have felt beckoned towards such an activity – in other words, who have a calling – we explain why this saying holds true for some, but not for others. We found that many called individuals have conditions, which are self-determined limitations on how, where and with whom they are driven to engage in their callings. Drawing on this idea, we differentiate a calling core, comprised of activities that meet all an individual’s conditions, from periphery activities that fall within the domain but only meet some or no conditions. Core conditionality can, in turn, explain the configuration of jobs people will be inclined to pursue in turning their calling into a career. For example, some called individuals with conditional cores deliberately eschew all-encompassing callings, instead pursuing stable non-calling work alongside part-time calling jobs that meet all their conditions. We also learned why individuals may change their enactment approaches over time as they develop a clearer understanding of what conditions truly matter to them.
What do you want to be when you grow up? This is a perennial question posed to children, and one often met with fantastical answers like ‘ninja’ or ‘unicorn’. Underlying this question is a long-standing assumption that if we can figure out the job we are meant to do then we will enjoy a fulfilled adulthood (Cardador et al., 2011). The notion that a person could be destined towards a particular occupation is captured in the management literature via the concept of ‘calling’, which is a meaningful vocation that people feel drawn towards (Dobrow and Tosti-Kharas, 2011; Schabram et al., 2023). There is mounting evidence that many people who work in their callings experience an abundance of positive outcomes, such as career satisfaction, well-being and life meaning (Dobrow et al., 2023; Kim et al., 2018). However, having a calling does not guarantee such a gratifying experience. The process of turning a calling into a career can be frustrating and draining (Cinque et al., 2021; Dean and Greene, 2017), to the point of causing individuals to involuntarily abandon their callings (Hennekam and Bennett, 2016; Sturges and Bailey, 2023). In essence, the documented experiences of called individuals are wide ranging, with some being highly positive, like one of our informants who effused about working in her calling saying that ‘I love it more and more every day’, while others have described ‘exhaustion and anger over spending their lives engaged in a “shitty” occupation’ (Cinque et al., 2021: 1767).
Accounting for this variation necessitates acknowledging that callings are not a ‘unitary phenomenon’ (Schabram and Maitlis, 2017: 585). Yet, while there may be agreement that the concept of calling is multidimensional, investigations into its complexity remain sparse (Hirschi, 2011; Zhou et al., 2024). The limited research in this area has focused on one of three issues: the source of calling, in terms of whether it is primarily internally or externally derived (e.g. Thompson and Bunderson, 2019), how it is discovered (e.g. Bloom et al., 2021) or how strong it is (e.g. Dobrow and Tosti-Kharas, 2011). However, these streams of inquiry do not provide robust explanations for the broad spectrum of approaches to enacting a calling. Through in-depth interviews with informants who have long-known what they were ‘meant’ to do with their lives, we discovered that callings can differ in previously unrecognized ways with implications for how individuals endeavour to pursue them in the labour market and their experience of doing so.
Our research contributes to the literature in several ways. First, we advance the emergent conversation about how callings are more complex than heretofore acknowledged, and in ways that are consequential for the experiences of called individuals (Zhou et al., 2024). By uncovering the concept of ‘calling conditions’ – self-determined limitations on the domain of a calling in terms of how, where or with whom a person is driven to engage in it – we differentiate between jobs that meet all of an individual’s conditions (‘calling core jobs’) and those that are in the calling domain but meet some or none of those conditions (‘calling periphery jobs’). Individuals with more conditions are likely to have fewer options for calling core jobs, and so may respond by increasing their engagement in calling periphery jobs. This pattern explains why some people purport to be enacting their callings through full-time work but find that their experiences fall short of expectations (Dobrow, 2013). Our novel core–periphery conceptualization of calling moves scholarly discussion of variation beyond sources or outcomes (Cinque et al., 2021; Duffy et al., 2014) towards opening the black box of what a calling is.
Our second contribution addresses the need to improve understanding of how people enact their callings (Cinque et al., 2021; Schabram and Maitlis, 2017), especially when they do not align with traditional occupations or organizational roles (Schabram et al., 2023). We identify four configurations of jobs that feature varied combinations of calling core, periphery and non-calling jobs, and show how the conditionality of individuals’ calling cores explains which configuration they are likely to pursue. Unlike earlier theorizing about how specific and inflexible callings make workers more vulnerable to exploitation (Berkelaar and Buzzanell, 2015; Zhou et al., 2024), our informants offer an opposing perspective in that having many conditions may encourage them to reject the narrative that callings should be all-encompassing, and instead to embrace selectivity of enactment alongside stable work outside of their callings.
Finally, considering how a calling can include both core and periphery elements helps to elucidate why calling enactment might unfold dynamically over time (Sturges and Bailey, 2023). The process of turning a calling into a career can reveal additional insights about the nature of one’s calling core. For example, through working in their calling domain, an individual might discover that who they enact their calling with is more important for experienced meaningfulness than they had previously believed. Such a realization may, in turn, shift what calling jobs they are willing to take on, as well as their mix of calling core, calling periphery and non-calling jobs. We additionally show that pressures from outside the calling may lead to configuration changes. The interplay of factors both within and beyond individuals’ control more fully accounts for the dynamism that has been observed, but not yet well understood (Dik and Shimizu, 2019; Dobrow and Tosti-Kharas, 2011; Lemke, 2021), when it comes to enacting a calling.
Theoretical background
The concept of calling
In early theorizing, calling was positioned as a general orientation towards work, where it is viewed as an end-in-itself that is essential for self-fulfilment (Wrzesniewski et al., 1997). It was distinguished from career or job orientations, where work is respectively framed as primarily a source of attainment or financial gain. More recently, the concept has been applied to capture one’s relationship towards an activity or occupation (Dobrow, 2013). This activity-focused definition, which is the one we adopt in our research, has become prominent in empirical work, where scholars have considered the strength of calling towards various career roles (e.g. Bennett and Hennekam, 2018; Dean and Greene, 2017). While passion, which is ‘a strong inclination toward an activity (e.g. work) that individuals like and in which they invest time and energy’ (Astakhova and Porter, 2015: 1316) is a component of callings (Dobrow and Tosti-Kharas, 2011), the latter concept goes beyond ‘liking’ to include a sense of meaningfulness and intense drive to engage in the activity (Astakhova et al., 2022; Schabram et al., 2023). Further, whereas passion ebbs and flows (Astakhova et al., 2022), callings are a more stable beckoning towards an activity that people will often pursue at great personal cost (Bunderson and Thompson, 2009).
One way in which callings have been distinguished from one another is through their source, which has been intertwined with whether it has a self or other orientation. A classical calling originates from a divine being, whereas those advocating a neoclassical view have abandoned religiosity but retained the idea that the calling must be externally derived and prosocial in nature (Bunderson and Thompson, 2009). According to these perspectives, moral duty supersedes personal fulfilment. In comparison, a modern calling originates within the self and may, but need not, have an other-oriented focus (Dobrow et al., 2023). Agency and introspection are essential to this approach. Lepisto and Pratt (2017) offer a theory of meaningfulness to explain why callings may diverge. They argue that modern callings engender meaningfulness as ‘realization’, which is an actualized sense of fulfilment and authenticity experienced by the individuals doing the work. This contrasts with classical and neoclassical callings where meaningfulness arises through ‘justification’ in that the work is considered valuable or worthy from the perspective of the society in which it is embedded.
Allegiance to either of these two forms of calling has produced a ‘stalemate’ among researchers (Thompson and Bunderson, 2019: 429). This is unfortunate because while there is evidence that both exist within populations of individuals who believe they have a calling, their influence on outcomes is virtually identical (Duffy et al., 2014). The origin of the distinction appears to be people’s life experiences and backgrounds: those higher in religiosity are inclined to identify an external summons, whereas those with higher work-centrality and self-enhancement values are more likely to experience an internal pull (Ahn et al., 2017). Shimizu et al.’s (2019: 17) investigation of these differences led them to conclude that regardless of internal or external orientation, ‘calling itself is still a single construct’. This position is bolstered by a comprehensive meta-analysis, where self-oriented internally focused callings were not found to be fundamentally distinct from other-oriented externally focused callings (Dobrow et al., 2023).
Evidence to-date indicates that the most consequential ways in which callings differ is through how they are identified and their strength. Regarding the former source of variation, Bloom et al. (2021) found that people come to recognize their calling through either exploration (i.e. trying different work roles) or reflection. With respect to strength, although the popular phrase ‘having a calling’ implies it is a binary variable, there is compelling evidence that it is continuous: some people have a deeper sense of calling than others (Dobrow and Tosti-Kharas, 2011). This second form of variation is often determined by level of agreement with scale items such as, ‘I was meant to do the work I do’ (Bunderson and Thompson, 2009: 56). However, neither of these variables has been shown to explain why individuals choose one approach to enacting their calling over another. Only recently have scholars proposed that callings might have different ‘shapes’ as determined by scope, time proximity or duration, but the extent to which this theory captures people’s experiences of their callings has yet to be determined, and their link to outcomes is speculative (Zhou et al., 2024: 27). In summary, the concept of calling remains underdeveloped. This opacity is problematic because it offers little insight into how people should actually live their calling, which as we outline next, means they may be unable to realize the benefits associated with having one (Duffy et al., 2018; Lemke, 2021).
Living a calling
Channelling one’s calling into work, a transition sometimes referred to as ‘enacting’ (e.g. Sturges and Bailey, 2023: 1258) or ‘answering’ (Berg et al., 2010: 974) a calling, is not the only way to live it (Duffy et al., 2018). However, there are valid reasons why pursuing one’s calling as a career has received special consideration in the organizational studies literature. For one, people view enacting a calling as a way of increasing the odds that the many hours that must be devoted to work will be enjoyable and meaningful (Schabram et al., 2023). Second, there is growing evidence that enacting a calling induces positive outcomes (Dobrow et al., 2023), hence the advice to turn one’s calling into a career is sound in many cases. People who are not working in their callings are less likely to realize their benefits (Duffy et al., 2018; Lemke, 2021) and may experience regret and a sense of loss (Berg et al., 2010; Hirschi et al., 2018).
Another issue that must be considered is what it means to ‘work’ in one’s calling. Some callings translate neatly to standard occupational roles, but many activities to which people have a strong calling do not. For example, callings are commonly reported by people in creative industries that are characterized by high competition and precarity (Bennett and Hennekam, 2018). An implication of this pattern is that there are many called individuals who make a living through pursuing multiple jobs. The limited research on multiple jobholding in callings has suggested two patterns. One is where individuals craft their entire careers out of a patchwork of short-term calling jobs. Some people find this instability stressful, while others report embracing the inherent flexibility (Umney and Kretsos, 2015). The second is where individuals pursue their calling along with non-calling work. In such cases, the non-calling job has been conceptualized as a financial necessity, such as to survive periods of no or underemployment (Comunian et al., 2011), with negative impacts on workers (Cinque et al., 2021; Hennekam and Bennett, 2016). Academics have highlighted a need to better understand how calling intersects with multiple jobholding (Schabram et al., 2023; Zhou et al., 2024), an area that is becoming more important as its prevalence within the broader economy continues to grow (Campion and Csillag, 2022).
Underlying the negative view of pursuing non-calling on top of calling work is the assumption that callings will pull people towards ever-increasing levels of commitment. Bloom et al. (2021: 328) describe the process of finding a calling as committing to a ‘single possible self . . . because callings require such a strong fusion between self and work’. Called individuals may even be expected to form ‘super-attachments’ to their work or organization (Cardador et al., 2011; Kim et al., 2018), consistent with the romantic image of bohemian artists (Lindstrom, 2016) and religious leaders (Dean and Greene, 2017) being engaged in their work in a consuming manner. Some accounts of called individuals in the popular press suggest this view may be incomplete. For example, a recent article in The Washington Post narrates one person’s experience letting go of pursing art as a full-time job and how this allowed her to ‘[find] her spark again’ (Miceli, 2023), while others have increasingly touted the benefits of pursuing multiple unrelated jobs instead of devoting themselves wholly to one endeavour (Sehgal, 2017).
These findings collectively point to two important issues that have yet to be adequately addressed in the callings literature. One is why and how people opt to enact their callings in different ways in the labour market, especially in the context of multiple jobholding. Another is how these differences explain why some people realize the ‘promises of calling’ (Berkelaar and Buzzanell, 2015: 157) and others, even if they have achieved commercial success, might concede that their ‘fantasy differed from reality’ (Miceli, 2023). In short, why some people are not able to happily live their callings within the world of work. Our research illuminates these issues by answering two interrelated guiding questions: (1) how and why do people enact their callings in different ways? And (2) how does that enactment explain their experiences?
Methods
We chose a qualitative methodology to answer these questions because of its potential to uncover complexity in people’s calling experiences (Dik and Shimizu, 2019). Our analytic logic was abductive, meaning that we aimed to generate new concepts and theory with an emphasis on explaining surprising findings (Timmermans and Tavory, 2012). Initially, our data collection efforts explored how people incorporate their passions into work. However, we noted that many informants were discussing an experience beyond passion: a sense of destiny or unwillingness to consider doing anything else with their lives. We therefore realized that our research provided a unique opportunity to address important issues related to callings, which is consistent with how abduction can prompt a shift towards new frameworks and theories (Dubois and Gadde, 2002).
Data collection
We solicited participation for the research through a variety of activity-oriented Facebook groups. We gathered background information about the activity that informants considered to be their passion over email, so that we could personalize our questions for them. During the interviews, we traced their initial exposure to their focal activity, their involvement over time and how they approached turning it into a job or jobs. To maintain conversational flow, we adapted the questions and their order, such that each interview proceeded in a unique manner.
Interviews were conducted in English either in-person or over the phone, based on the informant’s preference. They ranged in length from 40 to 80 minutes and were recorded then transcribed verbatim to enable detailed analysis (Tavory and Timmermans, 2014).
To be included in this research, participants needed to (1) describe a relationship to their activity that fit the definition of a calling and (2) be enacting it within the labour market. Meeting the first criterion involved describing being passionate about, consistently drawn towards and experiencing meaningfulness from engaging in an activity. All of our informants had been participating in at least one aspect of their callings since they were young and prior to entering the labour market. In applying our second criterion, we recognized that all our informants were enacting their callings through multiple jobs, which we believe is a function of the nature of the industries within which many called people’s activities fall (Bennett and Hennekam, 2018; Dobrow, 2013), and because of the general expansion of multiple jobholding (Campion and Csillag, 2022). Applying these criteria resulted in a final sample of 32 informants. 1
Data analysis
Our data analysis proceeded over four phases. The first was exploratory (Richardson and Kramer, 2006) and included reading and re-reading each transcript in its entirety. Our first two informants’ stories were consistent with the theory that people will strive to enact their callings in all-encompassing ways. However, as we refamiliarized ourselves with our third informant, Derek, we were struck by the surprising revelation that for him, working less at his calling was a choice that allowed him to live it in a more fulfilling manner. As we continued reading the transcripts, it became clear that he was not alone. While existing theories could account for why someone would be ‘stuck’ pursuing their calling part-time, none satisfactorily explained why people who already had or could be doing so full-time, chose smaller-scale enactment and believed that doing so was not compromising their calling. This insight spurred our abductive approach, as we recognized the need to construct theory (Timmermans and Tavory, 2012) that could explain why some people may thrive by intentionally pursuing their callings part-time, while others like Noel, who were ostensibly working full-time in calling-related work, experienced dissatisfaction and regret.
We continued into a phase of open coding, where we broke the narratives down into small text segments united by a common theme (Richardson and Kramer, 2006). We aimed to be inclusive and careful with our open coding (Timmermans and Tavory, 2012) by reading each transcript line-by-line and encapsulating as many dimensions of our informants’ experiences as possible through at least one code. Although we were aware of existing theoretical frameworks, we used our data as a guide (Dubois and Gadde, 2002). Accordingly, many of our code names were in-vivo meaning they adhered closely to informants’ language (Corbin and Strauss, 2008).
In our second phase, we engaged in selective coding, which is a data reduction process that moves the researcher from labelling towards explaining (Richardson and Kramer, 2006). This involved combining open codes into more abstract themes. For example, we merged two in-vivo open codes (‘knowing [activity] will always be part of life’ and ‘[activity] is what supposed to be doing’) into the theme of ‘feeling destined to engage in [activity]’. Our combining was also directed towards identifying the challenges that individuals confronted in enacting their callings, and the steps they took to address those challenges. It was through this process that we identified the ‘calling conditions’ (activity, setting and relational) that we felt were instrumental to understanding how informants conceptualized their callings. As our definition of these conditions crystallized, we re-read each interview and categorized which (if any) were described and visualized this information, along with attendant quotes, in a table to identify patterns.
Our unveiling of conditions marked a transition into the third phase of reduction (Richardson and Kramer, 2006) where we began determining which concepts had the most potential to account for variation in informants’ experiences. During this phase, we followed the advice to explore relevant literatures (Tavory and Timmermans, 2014), which moved us to investigate multiple jobholding. We found, however, that informants’ approach to enacting their callings through multiple jobs did not accord with existing frameworks. We therefore focused on the aspects of their experiences that were distinct from previous literature. This process led us to develop four enacted calling ‘configurations’, each of which represents a distinctive approach to integrating multiple calling, and sometimes non-calling, jobs. We labelled the configurations (alternating unconditional calling core jobs, balancing conditional calling core with periphery jobs, expanding unconditional calling core jobs and preserving conditional calling core jobs) so as to capture the ongoing and active processes that informants engaged in within them.
We concluded our analysis by preparing summaries of the calling story for each interviewee. These stories mapped the trajectory of their calling and non-calling jobs, including whether they had ever temporarily abandoned calling-related work, as well as the factors precipitating such changes. We integrated these data with our findings about the structuring of callings to advance substantive theory about how calling conditions relate to the configurations that informants pursued, as well as how insights about those conditions and events occurring outside the calling, could plausibly explain the changes that some informants proceeded through over time. Table 1 includes illustrative quotes of the concepts that figure strongly in our theory.
Illustrative examples of key concepts.
Findings
We begin this section by introducing our informants’ callings and how they differed as a result of the presence of ‘conditions’, which relate to the activities within their calling domain that are experienced as most deeply meaningful. We describe three types of conditions – action, setting and relational – and explain how they conjoin to differentiate the ‘calling core’ where all conditions are met, from the ‘calling periphery’ where only some or no conditions are met. We then explore how the conditionality of individuals’ cores shaped how they lived their callings. We identify four ‘configurations’ of jobs enacted by our informants and outline the implications of each configuration for individuals’ experiences of meaningful work. We conclude by exploring how these configurations could shift as individuals learned more about themselves, or encountered market-related or personal challenges that were outside of their control.
Unpacking the concept of calling
Our informants’ callings to a general activity or ‘domain’ demonstrated high stability over time: beginning when they were young and persisting, or intensifying, as they matured. To illustrate, even though Quinn was raised in a religious family that rejected popular music, she recounted being drawn to such music as a toddler and by her early teens realized: ‘It was a deep calling within me, it was something I was born for, and I just could never get away from it.’ Zoey noted how ‘a lot to do with my childhood memories, is being on the back of a horse’ and narrated a distinct moment of recognizing her calling: ‘I remember very clearly the first time I went cross-country [riding]. I couldn’t even imagine not ever doing that again. It was like, “I must do this”.’
A desire for meaningfulness was integral to informants’ decisions to pursue calling-related work. Noel described how after high school he saw two paths for himself: becoming a manager at the retail store where he had been working or pursuing music as a career. For him, retail ‘just didn’t feel right’ whereas with music: I really just loved doing something that was part of me and a huge part of my life. And then once I went to music school is when I think I decided . . . and tried to pursue work as a musician instead of what everyone else did, a 9-to-5 job.
As Noel discovered in following this path, however, not all jobs in music will be equally meaningful. Probing these differences shows that the structuring of callings, as well as the vicissitudes of the market (e.g. ‘people weren’t really going to see live music anymore, it’s just all the DJ’), inform why and how people make decisions about enacting their callings.
We encapsulate informants’ varied experiences of meaningfulness in pursuing their callings as a career through the concept of ‘calling conditions’, which are self-determined limitations on how a person is driven to engage in their calling domain. These conditions coalesced around three dimensions, relating to individuals’ actions, the settings they are in and the others they are surrounded by, or the relational context.
Action conditions
Informants who experience the most meaningfulness when undertaking a limited repertoire of behaviours within their calling domain are considered to have action conditions. Jacob described how growing up in a musical family had meant, to some extent, being forced to play music: ‘I got put into piano lessons when I was four.’ However, engaging in musical improvisation was the action that helped him recognize his calling and sparked his decision to become a professional musician: I feel I have a knack for composing for scenarios, and I can get inside how to, you know, emphasize visuals with auditory stimuli. I think I have a knack for picking up what would be a good idea here or at least I have a wide breadth of experimentation and improvisation that I can do, that I can pull from something, somewhere for that.
As an artist who works with multiple media, including tattooing, Hope considers the action at the essence of her calling to be painting that allows full expression of her personal aesthetic vision: ‘[E]verybody has their own style, uniqueness, way of doing things and I’m now in my own. Like I feel completely where I should be.’ As a result, activities such as creating visually pleasing items based on someone else’s specifications do not meet her action condition.
In contrast, informants who experience multiple distinct ways of engaging in their calling domain as deeply meaningful do not have an action condition. Wesley defines his calling to the domain of music in terms of a set of wide-ranging actions. He was pulled to music through composing his own songs, playing others’ music, teaching music and becoming a musical therapist. He saw these actions as interrelated, explaining: ‘When I first started playing music, it was a therapeutic experience . . . I am now giving people that experience through music with education behind it. So hopefully they can have similar experiences that I did.’ Terrence described how actions related to his calling domain of outdoor recreation started with skiing as a child, but expanded over time to include snowboarding, teaching and evaluating ski instructors, ski touring, instructing rock climbing and outdoor search and rescuing. He continued to envision new actions: ‘I see myself probably going into the heli-guiding or the mechanized ski industry . . . something where I can really use all of my professions in one.’ He explained how this multiplicity: ‘has just reaffirmed what I do and how I feel about it’.
Setting conditions
This condition captures the experiences of people who feel impelled to enact their calling in a select place or places. Some informants were drawn towards expressing their calling in a public setting, such as a stage with a large audience, while others preferred private settings like a recording studio. Pablo’s calling was most meaningful when he was onstage. Indeed, he even picked up an action (being in a band) because it would facilitate more time in this setting: At the time I thought, ‘It doesn’t need to be a serious band, it doesn’t need to get famous, we don’t need to make lots of money, it just needs to be some music that I enjoy playing that I can play in front of an audience.’
Umi’s calling was tied to competitive settings, and she viewed work with her dogs and students outside of that as facilitating skills and resources for competitive success. Indeed, if she did not have family or other commitments, she remarked on how: ‘I would’ve just been competing constantly.’
Informants without a setting condition did not consider place to be relevant to the expression of their calling. Isla, for example, summed up her life ambition as to ‘share [music] everywhere’. There were several distinct settings where Alana desired to enact her calling and she experienced meaningfulness within each one: in grooming competitions she showcases her exceptional skills (‘you’re winning because of your talent and because of all your hard work . . . it’s very, very rewarding’), behind the scenes in conformation shows she helps handlers present their dogs (‘I know quite a bit about how to make each dog and each breed look their personal best’), while at the grooming studio she builds connections with and serves dogs and their owners (‘I love it more and more every day. The more clients I get, the more different breeds I get, the more I hear from my clients how much they like the job I’m doing’).
Relational conditions
Informants with relational conditions noted how enacting their calling with specific others was most meaningful. At several points throughout his interview, Noel emphasized that playing with people who share an artistic understanding was a crucial part of the meaningfulness of music: ‘speaking a language that you all know how to speak, in such a way that you all speak it fluently and together’. He expounded that ‘the music is the community, it’s who you’re playing with, not what you’re playing’. Rachel was also relationally choosy about her calling, except for her the ‘other’ referred to animals. Early in living her calling, she described how: What I learned at that point is that it’s the quality of the connection that I had with the horse. It’s not that any time on any horse is magical and wonderful for me. That was when I was learning that there had to be something to the horse as well.
Working with horses, she can closely communicate and connect with matters to her sense of meaningfulness.
For other informants, who they were with had less of a bearing on their experiences in their calling. We spoke with several musicians who joined whatever bands presented them with opportunities to play, in addition to performing on their own. Earlier in her career, Lara described how: ‘I would play with everybody, and I was here, I was there, I was everywhere!’ She currently performs on her own and belongs to three different bands. Brooke is eager to work with different clients and ‘all the different dogs and getting to know all their different personalities’. The opportunity to ‘learn about each one’ and how to show it successfully was a crucial part of the meaningfulness that she derived from her conformation handling jobs, where she exhibits dogs to earn ‘titles’ for breeders and owners.
How conditions differentiate a calling core and periphery
Considering the presence of conditions provides a textured picture of a person’s calling. When an individual is doing an activity that meets all of their conditions, we describe this as engaging in the ‘calling core’, and it is where they experience the deepest sense of meaningfulness and authenticity. For instance, Divija had two conditions on her musical calling, with the action condition being singing herself and the setting being onstage. Her decision to attend music school to professionalize her calling was precipitated by glowing newspaper reviews of her performance in a musical. She described how ‘there is absolutely nothing better than getting on a stage’. Without the opportunity to sing onstage, she experienced negative emotions (‘I get grumpy’) and a loss of sense of self: ‘If I don’t let it out, I don’t feel like I’d be true to myself.’
Some of our informants also engaged in domain-related activities that did not meet all the conditions of their calling, which we refer to as the calling ‘periphery’. Noel’s calling domain was music, and he described the conditions of his core as playing guitar onstage with others who share his musical philosophy. In situations where he performed substitute gigs with unfamiliar musicians, his relational condition was unmet. The most challenging circumstances would be where an individual engages in jobs within their calling domain that meet none of their conditions. For Faisal, this occurred when teaching piano lessons, especially to unmotivated students. Thus, although falling within his calling domain and still deriving some meaningfulness from ‘pass[ing] on my passion’, he also felt ‘frustrated on a daily basis because I’m not able to just play my own stuff as much as I would like’ because of the time demands of preparing and delivering lessons. Such activities are still somewhat meaningful and often an important part of earning a living, but informants could also resent neglecting their conditions.
Configurations of calling jobs
For all our informants, living their calling as paid work marked an important transition. The first time that someone offered compensation for their enactment of calling was so momentous that many could recall the event in detail, such as the songs they played or the dog they showed, even though it had happened years ago. Lara remembered thinking: ‘Wow, oh my god, I just got paid for playing music!’ Being remunerated was not only relevant to meeting informants’ material needs, but it also symbolized that others valued what they did, thereby moving the activity outside of the more purely personal realm it occupied as a leisure activity. Hope shared how: ‘when someone pays for your artwork, to be done to hang on the walls forever, it’s like I can’t even describe the feeling. You feel like you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing in life’.
We further found that the conditionality of informants’ calling cores, along with opportunities they encountered, played a role in how they enacted their callings through multiple jobs. For simplicity, we refer to jobs that aligned with all of an individuals’ conditions as ‘calling core jobs’ and those that did not, but still fell within the domain of their callings, as ‘calling periphery jobs’. We begin by exploring the two configurations involving only calling jobs: alternating unconditional calling core jobs and balancing conditional calling core with periphery jobs. Because both of these configurations entail full-time engagement in calling work, they most closely resemble traditional notions of all-encompassing callings. The remaining two configurations (expanding unconditional calling core jobs and preserving conditional calling core jobs) involve part-time calling enactment through combining calling and non-calling jobs. We outline how these configurations are distinct from one another in Figure 1.
Summary of enacted calling configurations.
Alternating unconditional calling core jobs
Without calling conditions, informants in this configuration encountered many possibilities for enacting their core and as such crafted their careers out of multiple calling core jobs. Consider Zoey’s multifaceted equestrian career, which involved high-level competition (including the Olympics), coaching students, training and selling horses, and being a brand representative for equine products. Although demanding different skill sets and pursued in different settings, each job was an important source of meaningfulness: One thing that I think is really meaningful is the progress and the process of training an animal. I think that’s pretty incredible. The other part of my job is coaching . . . the reason I do the coaching and I enjoy it is being a leader to young women and girls. I think that, to me, is a huge, call it meaningful work, of what it is that I do.
While individuals in this configuration were able to capitalize on the flexibility provided by their unconditional calling core, they also faced challenges about how to allocate their time. Different jobs generated distinct costs and benefits, and so informants occasionally agonized over which opportunities to accept. Brayden described a current conundrum: The thing I’ve been grappling with is, do I want to do [music] with an original band . . . or do I want to do it with a cover band or a cruise ship band or something like that, where I’d have a steady living and make a lot of contacts?
Choosing the cruise would mean leaving his current bands. These pulls towards different jobs were complicated by the fact that they often needed to be carried out in non-overlapping settings. If Alana was showing dogs in a grooming competition, for instance, it meant travelling and being away from her dog grooming business.
One approach used by informants to sustain meaningfulness when tempted by many calling-related jobs was to deliberately rotate between different ways of enacting their calling. Because Terrence’s unconditional core was connected to the natural seasons, he used it as a reliable basis to guide such rotation. His winters were spent instructing skiing, managing a ski programme, competing in snowboarding and doing avalanche work, and then he switched to rock climbing and search and rescue work when the weather warmed. Other informants focused on shorter-term strategies, such as throughout a typical workday or week. Zoey drew on the support of others to help her manage potential conflicts between different core jobs, such as at horse shows where she needed to coach her students while also competing on her own as well as on clients’ horses. She was able to ‘work it out in a few different ways’ such as by crafting detailed show schedules to share with her students or working with show management as necessary.
Balancing conditional calling core with periphery jobs
Informants in this configuration were pursuing their callings full-time through a combination of calling core and periphery jobs. Because they fell within their calling domain, all these jobs were experienced as at least somewhat meaningful. We use the term ‘balancing’ in order to capture how informants attempted to strike a balance between having enough calling periphery jobs to earn a decent living, while keeping as many of the deeply meaningful core jobs as they could. To illustrate, within her calling domain of working with dogs, Brooke’s core is conformation. Her periphery jobs are working at a grooming salon, dog teeth cleaning and training dogs, which do not meet her action or competitive setting conditions. Gaining renown as a conformation handler has expanded her opportunities to take on calling core jobs. Although not yet able to eliminate her periphery jobs for financial reasons and still finding them meaningful to some extent (‘I pop cysts sometimes and I trim dogs and like get away all their eye goop . . . that’s like meaningful work’), she is increasing the meaningfulness of her calling career by reducing the hours she spends grooming to take on additional conformation clients and travel more widely to dog shows.
When informants, usually because of circumstances beyond their control, had to make periphery jobs their predominant form of calling enactment, they would experience frustration and a loss of meaningfulness. Noel had been a full-time performing musician ‘for many years’. He then took a job as a musician on a cruise ship, but ‘when I came back, I kind of lost all my previous gigs and it’s been really difficult to get back into the musical community that I had been such a huge part of before I went away’. To make ends meet he has expanded his periphery jobs of lutherie and teaching music. He takes some meaningfulness from these jobs (‘I’m working in an area of work [music] that I love doing and is rewarding’), but less than what he experienced in his core as a performing musician: ‘[I]t’s a job, it’s what I need to do to make money.’
In addition to increasing the proportion of their time engaged in calling core jobs when possible, informants also described deepening the sense of meaningfulness from periphery jobs by crafting them to embody more elements of the core. A reliable periphery job for Jacob was dance class accompaniment. Over time, he developed relationships with the instructors such that, rather than playing preselected pieces as required at the outset, ‘they just count a meter that they want to do an exercise in and then I just make some stuff up’. The arrangement shifted this periphery job to be more aligned with his core of musical improvisation.
Informants in the above two configurations spent all their time in calling-related jobs, whereas those in the next two configurations held both calling core and non-calling jobs. For individuals in the expanding unconditional calling core jobs configuration, non-calling work was viewed as interim and they intended to eventually replace it with work in their calling domain. In contrast, for those in the preserving conditional calling core jobs configuration, non-calling work can not only be enjoyable, but more importantly enables them to be purists about their core.
Expanding unconditional calling core jobs
Informants in this configuration experience a stark distinction between the meaningfulness of their calling core jobs and lack thereof in their non-calling ones. When asked if he found his non-calling property maintenance job meaningful, Greg said ‘as bluntly as I can put it, it’s work and the overall . . . no’, compared with ‘making music, it brings a lot of meaning to people’s lives . . . For me? Same thing, I mean it brings so much meaning, joy, happiness’. The stated desire to move out of this configuration by taking on as many calling-related jobs as possible meant that it was inherently liminal. Some informants felt that expansion needed to be an immediate endeavour. Isla was working as an early childhood educator, while pursuing her music calling with the aim that ‘I would just do it full-time, that would be my job that would support me.’ She had recently reduced her childcare hours to make room for additional work in her music calling, which if successful would allow her to further shrink the time she spent in her non-calling job. Others saw expansion as an inevitable, but longer-term project. Helen, who worked a stable full-time non-calling job, envisioned staying there for at least another decade before she would be ready to take the leap and phase it out: ‘[Art] is what I want to do . . . but I’m being like, responsible about it.’
Because their non-calling work was seen as ‘secondary’ and ‘supplemental’, to use Quinn’s words, informants struggled when it interfered with their calling performance or participation. Connor shared his frustration: ‘Certain gigs come up, often to play with players I’ve wanted to play with in the past, and I’ve looked forward to playing with, but I couldn’t take the gig because I had a shift that day.’ They also sometimes had to battle a feeling of resentment towards their non-calling work. Isla described feeling ‘a little bit bitter’ towards her childcare job: . . . because I really wanted to focus more on music . . . it was making me feel like I wanted to be home and playing or learning and not being at work all the time. I wasn’t enjoying my [non-calling] job as much as I would have liked.
For individuals driven to short-term expanding, a solution that was compatible with their greater tolerance for instability was simply leaving jobs that became too consuming in favour of ones that allowed them to prioritize calling opportunities. Lara switched from a non-calling job in business administration to massage therapy, where she could set her hours around her calling: ‘I’m the boss, I can reschedule people when it’s convenient for me.’ Informants with longer-term orientations described focusing on growing the most financially viable components of their calling to pave the way for eventually quitting non-calling work. Narrowing their enactment in this manner was still highly meaningful because of the unconditionality of their calling cores. Helen’s core incorporated all forms of visual art, but she concentrated on painting model horses because ‘it’s easier to break into that market, rather than traditional artwork. Once you have a name in the horse world, people are willing to spend money and there’s less people who paint’. She was strategizing her next step to ‘sculpt completely from scratch, and then cast in resin. That’s something that I’d like to do. That’s where the real money is’.
Preserving conditional calling core jobs
Informants in the final configuration were ‘calling purists’ in that they strove to only take calling-related jobs that met all their conditions. They achieved stability in their overall careers by engaging in non-calling work, which they saw as supporting them to enact their calling in the ways they most valued. Skylar stated: ‘I’m pretty clear in my head that I can’t not have both things in my life: I need the business and the law, and I need the performing. I could never do one to the exclusion of the other.’ Similarly, Divija described her ideal as a full-time non-calling job ‘that is stable, secure for my family, that I do find meaning in’ and gigging with her band ‘three weekends out of each month, whether that be one night or two nights’ on top of their weekly jam sessions. While their calling jobs were deeply meaningful and essential to their sense of self – what Kayla called ‘being on your shining star’ – as Divija’s explanation indicates, they could also find meaningfulness from their non-calling work. Some informants believed that relying on their calling for full-time work would transform it into an obligation, which would undermine the meaningfulness they derived from it. For example, although she had contemplated relocating to pursue an all-encompassing equestrian career, Aurora ultimately chose the preserving conditional calling core jobs configuration because: ‘I don’t want [working with horses] to become a chore to do it, because I love it.’
A challenge faced by individuals in this configuration relates to the logistics of pursuing calling jobs, while meeting the obligations of their non-calling work. Some had struggled with periods of exhaustion. Pablo, for instance, who worked a full-time public service job and was enacting his calling to performing through an intensive theatre run at the time of his interview, said: ‘I’m tired today and I’m going to be even more tired tomorrow, and we’ve still got several weeks, or four weeks or whatever, left of doing it. So, it’s a marathon.’ They may also face questions about their career commitment from non-calling colleagues. Skylar shared how: ‘Most of the firms I’ve worked at have been super like celebratory and understanding of the artistic stuff that I pursue, but this one firm in particular, where I spent 18 months, was not at all.’ Throughout over a decade of jointly engaging in legal and theatre work, her time at this non-accommodating firm where she had to ‘pretend that the theatre stuff wasn’t happening, like there was no give at all’ was her most frustrating and exhausting experience.
Informants described two strategies for protecting the meaningfulness they experienced from their calling jobs without sacrificing their health. One of these was to be even more ‘choosy’ (to use Skylar’s term) in the calling jobs they take on, which for her meant ‘waiting for . . . the people that I want to work with or the parts that I want to play’. A second approach was to seek out a non-calling job that was highly supportive of their calling work. Rachel responded to having to justify her decision of ‘leaving at 6 or 6.30 in the evening, having been there since 7 in the morning . . . because I had this other thing that I wanted to go and do’ at her previous non-calling job by finding one that is less time-intensive, and where she is better able to pursue her calling without being made to feel guilty for doing so or burning out.
Thus, all of our informants have ‘answered’ their callings (Berg et al., 2010), but they have done so in distinctly different ways and resultantly face unique challenges in attempting to realize the promise of callings. Table 2 summarizes the implications for experienced meaningfulness associated with the four configurations of calling jobs.
Differentiating enacted calling configurations.
Trajectories of enacted calling configurations
Each configuration, while requiring ongoing actions, offers a path to living one’s calling in a fulfilling way. However, they are also only a snapshot of one time in our informants’ lives. In tracing their experiences, approximately half had formerly been in at least one other configuration or were in the process of moving between configurations at the time of the interview, and several had stints of temporarily exiting calling-related work.
In some cases, informants were forced to make changes to their configuration because of events such as reduced job opportunities or increased family demands. A few had successfully enacted an alternating configuration with all calling-related jobs, but when these opportunities dried up needed to take on non-calling work, thereby returning to an expanding unconditional calling core jobs configuration. Brayden was currently only doing music jobs but shared how he was shortly going to have to return to his previous grocery store job to make ends meet. Yet, he viewed this incorporation of a non-calling job as another temporary phase, while he worked to take on new and more lucrative calling jobs: ‘I wouldn’t consider the possibility of just staying, doing part-time jobs and pursuing music just for the fun of it.’ Having children could also prompt configuration change. After finishing music school, Divija pursued singing full-time until she became pregnant, which led her to abandon enacting her calling for several years. Now that her children were a bit older, she opted for a preserving conditional calling core jobs configuration, which she saw as the optimal path for enacting her conditional calling core while providing stability for her family, which was equally important to her.
At other times, called individuals would change their configurations by choice after learning more about themselves and what they are truly drawn to. While some informants’ understanding of their core remained stable, others identified either more or fewer conditions than they had originally believed. It was in pursuing his photography calling full-time that Derek realized he did not find jobs doing choreographed or children’s photo shoots meaningful; in other words, his calling core had unrecognized conditions. This realization sparked his move into a preserving conditional core jobs configuration, where he earned stable income through a non-calling job that he enjoyed and that created freedom to choose only photography jobs that met all of his conditions. He had no intention of returning to enacting his calling full-time.
Conversely, some informants discerned that previously valued calling conditions were no longer important. They essentially realized their callings were less conditional. This discovery could occur because a person accepts opportunities that they expect to be periphery jobs and are surprised by how meaningful they find them. Greg described intending to only be a performing musician, but ‘what I like to do and never thought I’d like to is teach, but you get into it and since music is what I like, sharing that with people is like a hundred per cent satisfying and meaningful’. He therefore relaxed his conditions within his music domain. As another illustration of this process, Isabel initially felt called to horse showjumping, but her career was cut short owing to a serious riding injury. She later adopted a pet dog, and the meaningfulness she found in training him allowed her to appreciate that her calling core encompassed the broader action of animal training. She ultimately decided to quit her non-calling work to pursue this less conditional calling full-time through a combination of dog training-related jobs.
Discussion
Our abductive theorizing reveals that there is underacknowledged complexity inherent in having a calling: some people’s calling cores are conditional, meaning that they derive the most meaningfulness from engaging in certain actions, settings or with others in their calling domain. Core conditionality is integral to how people enact their callings within the context of multiple jobholding (see Figure 1 for a summary). Those with unconditional calling cores are likely to thrive by alternating calling core jobs or by combining core and non-calling jobs, while making significant progress towards expanding the former. By contrast, those with conditional calling cores are likely to thrive either when they limit themselves to a reduced set of activities that protect their core enactment – even if it means spending less overall time doing their calling – or when they prioritize calling core jobs, while engaging in periphery jobs only as needed to maintain financial stability. Our findings also highlight that transitioning between configurations is common. Such changes can be precipitated by factors outside of people’s control, such as shifts in consumer demand, as well as by choice, as they learn more about their calling cores. To conclude, we explain how these and other findings add to what is known about callings.
Theoretical implications
New core–periphery conceptualization of callings
Despite proliferation of research about callings’ outcomes, there is a need to broaden our understanding of exactly what callings are, especially given the rapidly changing nature of work (Lysova et al., 2019). We follow the lead of scholarship aimed at conceptually differentiating callings beyond source or strength (see Pratt et al., 2013; Zhou et al., 2024) by further opening the ‘black box’ of the nature of callings. Specifically, our concept of calling conditions provides a finer-grained picture of ‘what’ people are called to do. An individual without calling conditions will experience deep meaningfulness in any job within their general domain (e.g. music), whereas someone with multiple conditions will only experience such meaningfulness in a limited set of calling-related jobs (e.g. playing the drums onstage with select other musicians). The distinction we introduce between the calling core and periphery can be drawn upon to elucidate findings from previous studies. For example, Bennett and Hennekam (2018) noted that called workers can have multiple but unequally valued identities, such as artist or administrator; we posit that such valuing is likely determined by how the associated work addresses their conditions. Moreover, Dobrow and Heller (2015) speculated that calling strength accounts for why individuals focus on different activities within their domain. Our findings suggest core conditionality as an alternative explanation for such choices.
Our concept of calling conditions also offers a new understanding of how and why calling strength may temporally change. Dobrow (2013: 436) observed that the strength of an enacted calling deteriorates over time, dubbing this phenomenon the ‘honeymoon-hangover effect’. Our results point to the possibility that this decline in calling strength may not be universal, but instead may be more likely for those with a conditional core who face greater challenges in the labour market in enacting their callings. If they lack awareness of the conditionality of their core, or how important enacting that core is to their sense of meaningfulness, they may interpret their dissatisfying experiences as indicating that the overall strength of their calling has declined, rather than that they have ended up in a non-ideal configuration of jobs. Those in the preserving conditional calling core jobs configuration consciously manage this risk through their simultaneous engagement in non-calling work, and report benefits from the resultant ability to adopt a purist approach to enacting their calling.
According to extant theorizing, individuals with flexible conceptualizations of their calling – in our terms, those without conditions – are likely to be most open to pursuing their callings outside the work realm in leisure activities (Berkelaar and Buzzanell, 2015; Zhou et al., 2024). Our findings point to different conclusions: when individuals have unconditional cores, it widens the alternatives for how they could enact them and promotes a belief that doing so is possible. To exemplify, a calling to work with horses will be easier to enact than a calling to be a competitive showjumper. At the same time, we did not find evidence that individuals with conditional cores, even if they earned high income from periphery or non-calling jobs, would be more likely to constrain their core to leisure. Especially for these informants, a drive to enact their calling goes beyond financial remuneration, and instead relates to the symbolic value of labour market success. We theorize that it provides validation that one’s calling is worthy to others beyond oneself. In Lepisto and Pratt’s (2017) terms, it incorporates both meaningfulness as realization (‘I am living my calling’) and as justification (‘My calling is socially valuable’).
Broadening possibilities of calling enactment
Because callings have been put forth as ideal careers (Schabram et al., 2023), an assumption underlying current theorizing has been that they will result in ever-growing commitment because of their close link to identity (Bunderson and Thompson, 2009), ultimately making people vulnerable to workaholism and exploitation (Cinque et al., 2021; Dean and Greene, 2017). Accordingly, if people are not enacting their calling full-time, it is presumed to be because they are encountering barriers to doing so (Lindstrom, 2016; Throsby and Zednik, 2011), such as the actor who lamented having to ‘work as a slave three times a week as a waiter in a restaurant’, owing to an inability to survive off wages earned through her calling (Cinque et al., 2021: 1770). We offer a new perspective on callings as part-time work where people deliberately choose not to live their callings in a full-time, all-encompassing way, and instead embrace less time-intensive but more selective enactment, which is enabled by the simultaneous pursuit of stable and well-compensated non-calling employment.
Berkelaar and Buzzanell (2015: 161) and others (e.g. Bunderson and Thompson, 2009) have pointed out that ‘calling operates as a form of social control’, pressuring individuals to accept that there is one right way of living their calling, which is by devoting themselves more to it than any other aspect of their lives. Not only is the preserving conditional calling core jobs configuration a way of resisting the narrative that callings are ever-consuming – awareness of core conditionality serves as a guide – but we also found that it gives people more confidence to set boundaries around their non-calling work. These informants’ experiences further the proposition that called individuals are not indifferent to financial security (Schabram et al., 2023) and that part-time enactment does not represent a lesser expression of calling. Rather, it can empower some individuals to find a ‘sweet spot’ of protecting the meaningfulness and authenticity experienced when enacting their calling while meeting other important life needs.
Relatedly, scholars have cautioned that specific and inflexible callings are ‘unhealthy’ and prone to bring about worse outcomes for individuals (Berkelaar and Buzzanell, 2015; Zhou et al., 2024). A corollary has been that helping people to think more broadly about their callings can prevent them from being exploited. We propose an alternative perspective: people who are less flexible about their conditional calling core may resultantly be more flexible about how they enact their callings. Turning to one’s non-calling work for financial stability and career progression to enable rigidity around core enactment can yield net positives for some people’s overall lives. Another potential upside to the preserving conditional calling core jobs configuration relates to the finding that behavioural involvement predicts disenchantment with callings (Dobrow, 2013), along the lines of the ‘too much of a good thing’ adage. Indeed, some participants expressed concern that pursuing their calling full-time could turn it into a chore. Thus, not only might this configuration help some people to achieve desired stability (e.g. income and benefits from non-calling work), but it may also stave off erosion of calling strength.
The preserving conditional calling core jobs configuration also helps to refine prior conclusions about pursuing a calling in addition to non-calling work. This is important because of the need to extend knowledge of how people enact callings through multiple jobs (Schabram et al., 2023). One of the few studies that has focused on this issue found that having a part-time calling job drained individuals’ resources and diminished their engagement in non-calling work (Webster and Edwards, 2019). Our results differ by showing that engagement and performance in non-calling work need not suffer when conducted along with a calling. We suspect that negative performance implications stemming from pursuit of calling as an additional job are most likely to occur in the expanding unconditional calling core jobs configuration, especially when people have a pressing desire to phase out all non-calling work. Some such interviewees described putting the bare minimum into their non-calling jobs and felt little compunction about doing so. However, those in the preserving conditional calling core jobs configuration almost all found their non-callings jobs to be somewhat meaningful and an important part of their overall lives. When these individuals are supported, both structurally through flexible scheduling and emotionally such as when coworkers celebrate their calling achievements, they may be especially committed to their organizations.
Temporal evolution of calling enactment
Our concept of calling conditions also contributes to the underexplored question of why and how callings evolve over time (Dobrow and Tosti-Kharas, 2011; Zhang et al., 2020). Informants fell into two categories: one where their sense of their core was affirmed through calling enactment, and another involving experiential revision of that core and hence how to best enact it. Bloom et al.’s (2021) research suggests that exploration, or trying different occupational roles, can help people determine whether they have a calling. Our results extend this idea, by showing that even when people know their calling, continuing to experiment by taking on jobs with different conditions can spur the realization that their core is different from what they may have believed at the outset of their career.
When these insights lead people to transition between configurations, as was the case for several of our informants, it provides much-needed explanation as to why enacting a calling is dynamic (Lemke, 2021). Some of the limited research related to this question has focused on how calling enactment evolves in response to negative events, and in ways that result in disappointment and even abandonment (Schabram and Maitlis, 2017; Sturges and Bailey, 2023). In contrast, our informants surface more positive ways that callings might evolve, such as by realizing that a long-held condition is not necessary to live one’s calling in a highly meaningful way: for instance, an artist who at first wanted to spend all their time painting and only took on teaching to pay the bills, might over time find greater than anticipated fulfilment through helping their students to become better painters. Discovering that one’s core is less conditional than believed can open up new meaningful ways of earning a living. Alternatively, by recognizing new conditions, a called individual might come to appreciate that part-time but selective enactment may be a better overall fit for their life.
Finally, our findings offer new insights into the potential dark side of pursuing one’s passions. Previous research has noted that individuals who make career decisions based on the ‘passion principle’, which values pursuing meaningfulness over all other considerations, can become trapped in detrimental economic situations (Cech, 2021; Cech and Hiltner, 2022). This risk is particularly pertinent to individuals in the expanding unconditional core jobs configuration with strong felt urgency to phase out non-calling work. These informants were most inclined to sacrifice better-paid hours at non-calling jobs in favour any calling opportunities that arose, or even to choose poorly paid non-calling jobs with few prospects for advancement to facilitate a focus on their callings. An alternative strategy, enacted by other informants, balanced passion and pragmatism through phasing out non-calling work more slowly and capitalizing on the unconditionality of their core to prioritize calling jobs that are better-paid and in-demand (such as Evan’s decision to pursue his music calling in a cover band that would appeal to the numerous local casinos). Their experiences show that strategically considering one’s combination of jobs can enable the hope and meaningfulness of pursuing one’s calling through an expanding unconditional core jobs configuration without inherently entailing socio-economic costs.
Practical implications
Our research indicates that people should think carefully about what lies at the core of their calling. We urge called individuals to experiment with conditions early in their careers. We learned of people identifying new conditions or relaxing conditions that they used to believe were essential, which allowed some to ultimately craft more rewarding calling careers than they initially thought possible. For those who do have conditions, taking on periphery calling jobs may be necessary; none of our informants’ entire work lives were comprised solely of jobs in their conditional cores, so while theoretically possible, doing so may be practically difficult. However, ignoring one’s allocation of time between periphery and core jobs comes with risks. If the former take over, the likely result is a sense of frustration and forgone meaningfulness. Well-paid non-calling work that enables enactment of one’s conditional core may be a more desirable option than being relegated exclusively to periphery calling jobs.
Managers can also learn from our informants’ experiences. As people increasingly become interested in finding their calling (Cardador et al., 2011), a trend that was accelerated by the pandemic (Cech and Hiltner, 2022), there is a strong probability that some of their employees will be pursuing additional jobs in their calling. These activities should not be viewed as anathema to high commitment and performance in non-calling work. In fact, when managers show an interest in and willingness to support employees who are additionally pursuing calling jobs, those individuals (particularly in the preserving conditional calling core jobs configuration) may respond with increased effort. The skills and experiences garnered through calling jobs can also have positive spillovers to non-calling work performance. On the flip side, as clearly demonstrated by our informants, when non-calling managers push called employees to exclusively focus on one job or are perceived as being unreasonably unaccommodating, they will leave for organizations willing to take a more flexible approach.
Limitations
Our focus on callings emerged through our data collection. We based our inclusion criteria on how callings have been operationalized in the literature, including evidence that there is little difference between internally and externally derived ones (Dobrow et al., 2023). Yet, it remains possible that the structuring of neoclassical callings – those defined as an external summons towards a prosocial activity – may be distinct from that of the more modern callings described by our informants. We believe that variance in the conditionality of one’s core can apply to neoclassical callings. Although not conceptualized as such, consider the quotes from physicians interviewed by Bott et al. (2017), which indicate that some found certain roles associated with their calling (e.g. healer) to be more meaningful than others (e.g. teacher, administrator), while others appeared to value all of them equally. One might capture the differences among these physicians in terms of the conditionality of their calling cores.
While the multiple jobs context makes the actions associated with each configuration highly apparent, which is useful for constructing theory, the same distinctions could apply to more traditional occupations with respect to roles or tasks, as alluded to in our physician example above. These jobs might be subdivided into tasks that fall along the dimensions of calling core (all conditions met), calling periphery (some or no conditions met but falling within the domain) and non-calling (outside the domain). For example, a physician for whom performing surgeries is the most meaningful action in their calling domain, might benefit from adopting a balancing approach where they allocate proportionally more of their time towards this task while reducing their engagement in teaching or administrative tasks. Conversely, a physician with an unconditional calling core might be most fulfilled in a role that allows them to predictably alternate between tasks. Finally, while our preserving conditional calling core jobs configuration applies most naturally to people in gig-based industries, the growth of multiple jobholding among professionals (Caza et al., 2023) leads us to believe that it will become increasingly relevant. We see applying and extending our ideas to individuals with neoclassical callings and in standard employment arrangements as promising areas for future research.
Conclusion
Through in-depth conversations with people who have diverse callings, we found that the process of turning that beloved activity into a job can be challenging and depleting, or exciting and enriching. We hope that our findings underscore how called individuals can use awareness of their calling core as a guide towards crafting a fulfilling career. Furthermore, for those who are currently pursuing a calling, but finding that their experiences fall short of expectations, our informants’ stories may help them appreciate that this can be a temporary phase. It is common for individuals to modify how they are enacting their callings, whether those changes are in response to labour market pressures, personal circumstances or rethinking what truly matters to them. By reflecting on their calling conditions, the nature of their engagement with those conditions, as well as the challenges and opportunities that surround them, called individuals can increase the likelihood of living their lives ‘to the core’.
Supplemental Material
sj-pdf-1-hum-10.1177_00187267241251956 – Supplemental material for Living life ‘to the core’: Enacting a calling through configurations of multiple jobs
Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-hum-10.1177_00187267241251956 for Living life ‘to the core’: Enacting a calling through configurations of multiple jobs by Kirsten Robertson, Brenda A Lautsch and David R Hannah in Human Relations
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank our associate editor, Karan Sonpar, and three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and guidance. Our article also benefitted from feedback provided by ‘Write Club’ colleagues at the Beedie School of Business: Rekha Krishnan, Mila Lazarova, Andrew von Nordenflycht, Jeff Yip and Natalie Zhao. Lastly, we are grateful to our informants who generously took the time to share their experiences with us.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Supplemental material
Supplemental material for this article is available online.
Notes
References
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
