The communicative constitution of calling: From individual possession to relational processes of meaningful work

Abstract

Precarious employment, artificial intelligence (AI), and disengagement are eroding work’s role as a reliable source of meaning—namely, that one’s work is or should be one’s calling. Although psychological research typically frames calling as stable, beneficial, and individual; communication theory reveals it as collectively co-authored, relationally sustained, and thus inherently fragile and open to disruption. This tension raises the question of whether calling functions as a safeguard or becomes a source of added vulnerability when its promised meaning can no longer be maintained. Drawing on communicative practices and Communicative Constitution of Organization (CCO), we reposition calling as an emergent communicative process (rather than individual possession or ontological given) that takes shape through everyday talk, storytelling, and power-laden interactions. Purpose, therefore, is not possessed but continually constituted. This reconceptualization advances three shifts in the literature—from individual perception to collective co-authorship; from static ontology to emergent process; and from “having” to “doing” a calling. These shifts pivot theory toward process- and context-sensitive models; call for multi-level, longitudinal, and narrative methods to trace how everyday communication aggregates into institutional norms and identities; and reorient communicative practices toward cultivating spaces where diverse voices co-author adaptive callings through collective, ongoing sensemaking rather than imposed ideals of what constitutes meaningful work.

The meaning of work is at a critical inflection point. Advances in artificial intelligence (AI), widespread disengagement, and unstable employment are challenging how people define and pursue meaningful work and “the good life.” AI’s rapid rise is estimated to disrupt or radically transform at least one third of jobs (Mayer et al., 2025) and up to 86% of the job market by 2030 (Mastry and Watson, 2025). These disruptions include socially desirable, rewarding jobs previously considered shielded from automation (e.g., writers, researchers, designers, software engineers, translators, teachers). Such vulnerability threatens people’s sense of identity, economic security, and purpose. Moreover, persistent, rising worker disengagement signals deeper struggles with meaning (Gallup, 2025). Even before AI arrived, evidence suggested the rise in precarious work (work that is unstable, insecure, and lacking predictability and social protections) had weakened workers’ sense of purpose (Kalleburg, 2009; McWha-Hermann et al., 2024). Unpaid work shows comparable patterns of disengagement and strain (Ervin et al., 2022).

These overlapping threats are straining longstanding connections between work and calling even as younger cohorts bring growing expectations for authentic, purposeful work that supports holistic wellbeing (Deloitte Global, 2025). Although definitions vary, calling is generally understood as a consuming, meaningful, and sometimes transcendent, passion for a particular domain (often paid work) that is central to one’s identity and oriented toward purpose or meaningfulness (Dobrow et al., 2023). Unlike a job (oriented toward material benefits) or a career (oriented toward advancement), calling often emphasizes fulfillment of other-oriented needs and alignment with broader social values (Wrzesniewski et al., 1997). The converging pressures of AI disruption, disengagement, and precarity highlight the need to examine how people are making sense of calling within and beyond paid employment as work’s capacity to serve as a primary site of meaning is increasingly undermined, if still desired.

Although valuable, the dominant psychological perspectives tend to treat calling as an individual disposition or orientation, paying far less attention to its social and discursive foundations than its enactment and outcomes (see Dobrow et al, 2023; Thompson and Bunderson, 2019 for summaries). Even when scholars invoke narratives or other forms of vocational sensemaking (e.g., Bloom et al., 2021; Bunderson and Thompson, 2009; Schabram and Maitlis, 2017), communication itself is rarely foregrounded as a central mechanism through which work comes to be experienced or named as “a calling” (see Berkelaar and Buzzanell, 2015; Molloy and Foust, 2016 for exceptions). Without centering communication, scholars risk reifying calling as an individual disposition or orientation rather than an intersubjective accomplishment. Yet communication actively originates and constructs—not merely transmits—calling’s meanings, definitions, and legitimacies (Berkelaar and Buzzanell, 2015; Molloy and Foust, 2016) revealing who accesses callings, and whether such callings foster resilience or exploitation, especially during periods of turbulence.

Against this backdrop, we advance a communicative constitution approach to calling—highlighting how communication actively shapes, sustains, and transforms how people understand and experience meaningful work. By tracing how calling emerges, becomes institutionalized, and evolves, a communicative constitution approach reveals the often-hidden dynamics of legitimacy, contestation, and fragility obscured by intrapsychic models, while urging inquiry into the role of communication in meaningful work. It broadens calling research by linking it to collective and organizational processes, emphasizing how calling is dynamically negotiated, contested, and redefined through the texts and rituals that shape relationships, work conditions, and outcomes. In short, talk does things.

Talk matters because “perceptions are real in their consequences” (Thomas and Thomas, 1926). When applied to calling, a constitutive perspective examines how individuals and groups talk about and enact meaningful work. It emphasizes how everyday communication helps create, reinforce, contest, or transform broader norms and values, shaping who can access a calling and under what conditions. From this view, communication is not just how people explain their calling; rather, it is a core activity that defines what counts as calling, how a calling is made possible, and “what sustains its existence over time” (McMillan, 2017: 151).

By employing a communicative constitution perspective, this theoretical article complements and challenges predominantly psychological and management approaches to calling scholarship. It centers communication as the process by which meaning and calling are constructed, locating meaning and meaningfulness in the unfolding of interaction, as an ongoing collectively and contextually negotiated accomplishment, rather than primarily an internal state or orientation. Moreover, a communicative constitution perspective counters the common assumption that communication is merely transmission, representation, or exchange of symbols (see Cooren, 2012; Cooren and Seidel, 2022, on communicative constitution). Instead, it emphasizes that meaning fundamentally arises in and through social interaction (see Schoeneborn et al., 2025). A constitutive approach thus highlights how discursive as well as material resources enable or constrain who can claim or enact their work as “calling,” drawing attention to the role of power and politics in meaningful work.

This article advances the calling literature in three ways: (1) It expands calling research by integrating collective and organizational processes alongside predominant individual and dyadic perspectives, broadening levels of analysis and emphasizing multiple actors, sites, and temporal dimensions of calling enactment; (2) It shifts theoretical framing from variance-driven stage models toward dynamic, process-oriented, context-sensitive models focused on how calling emerges and unfolds through interactions; and (3) It highlights how power dynamics, collective negotiation, and inclusion shape whose voices and interests define, sustain, or challenge what counts as a calling. Collectively, these contributions reveal how calling is formed, sustained, and transformed through communication at both micro and macro levels. Scholars are thus encouraged to consider calling as contingent, contested, and negotiated as practiced and studied. Practitioners are prompted to recognize the communicative, cultural, and political dimensions that affect how and for whom work is made meaningful.

The following sections develop a communicative constitution approach to calling through three conceptual moves: (1) from individual perception to co-authorship; (2) from static ontology to emergent process; and (3) from “having” to “doing” a calling. Building on the idea that calling is fundamentally, yet not exclusively, communicative (Berkelaar and Buzzanell, 2015; Molloy and Foust, 2016), we extend communicative practices (Craig, 1999) and Communicative Constitution of Organizations (CCO) perspectives (for summary, Schoeneborn et al., 2025) to calling’s relational and discursive dynamics. Communicative practices refer to everyday talk, texts, and interactions that perform meaning-making in specific contexts, producing shared understandings through situated social action (Craig, 1999). CCO holds that communication does not merely occur within organizations but actively constitutes their reality—from emergence, through persistence, and transformation via ongoing negotiation and meaning production (Schoeneborn et al., 2025). We first situate this article within the calling literature and efforts toward disciplinary coherence, acknowledging generative contributions while interrogating assumptions that cast calling as presumptively beneficial and individually held.

Contesting calling’s construction

An enduring scholarly commitment to meaningful work has yielded a rich, diverse body of research on the theory, practice, and ethics of calling. Calling is work-oriented around a meaningful, fulfilling, and often transcendent, or prosocial purpose—whether secular or sacred (Berkelaar and Buzzanell, 2015; Cheney et al., 2009; Dobrow et al., 2023). Although research on calling is not confined to a single paradigm or discipline, in recent years psychological and management perspectives have predominated. For example, in management psychology, work on the job-career-calling typology (Wrzesniewski et al., 1997) and on job crafting (Wrzesniewski and Dutton, 2001) have become foundational to understanding meaningful work. Building on Bellah et al.’s (1985) tripartite model, Wrzesniewski and colleague’s work provided empirical support for the idea that individuals actively shape their roles to align with desired meanings and identities. This agency-centered approach now anchors modern, identity-based models of calling across organizational, psychological, management, and career research. Grounded in vocational psychology, the Work as Calling theory (Duffy et al, 2018; also see Duffy et al., 2023) draws on research on calling motivation, organizational support, person-environment fit, and job crafting to predict the likelihood an individual will live their calling at work and the outcomes associated with doing so. Their outcome-centered approach has become influential for research on individual job satisfaction, career development, and well-being, particularly in vocational and counseling psychology.

Although management and psychological perspectives have shaped much of the research on calling, the domain’s expansion is driven by broad multidisciplinary interest: Direct and indirect engagement with calling literature spans disciplines such as sociology, education, business, religious studies, history, economics, medicine, and communication. This multidisciplinarity likely contributed to the marked increase in peer-reviewed publications since 2005, with an exponential rise around 2011 (Dobrow et al., 2023; Thompson and Bunderson, 2019). In response, scholars have continued to wrestle with calling’s indeterminacy (Dik and Shimizu, 2019: 323; also see Dobrow et al., 2023), expressing worries about the lack of coherence as research accumulates. Whether seeking clarity via a top-down theory or a bottom-up explication of calling’s dimensions, research has often emphasized seeking conceptual consensus to answer calls to organize calling’s fragmented landscape (Dik and Shimizu, 2019; Dobrow et al., 2023).

Challenging conceptual convergence

Recent attempts have coalesced around efforts toward a unifying conceptualization typically anchored around two idealized types or dimensions: neoclassical and modern (first formalized by Bunderson and Thompson in 2009; also, Dobrow et al., 2023; Thompson and Bunderson, 2019). Broadly speaking, neoclassical conceptualizations of calling are motivated by an externally-focused, prosocial, other-orientation to one’s individual work—an “outer-requiredness” anchored in traditional Reformation conceptualizations that maintain an external or transcendent source of calling (Dik and Shimizu, 2019). Neoclassical definitions tend to be anchored in calling’s historical roots including notions of destiny, duty, and discovery—evident in Dik and Duffy’s definition of calling as “a transcendent summons, experienced as originating beyond the self . . . in a manner oriented toward demonstrating or deriving a sense of purpose or meaningfulness” [with] “other-oriented values and goals as primary sources of motivation” (2009: 427). In contrast, modern conceptualizations of calling are motivated by an internally focused, passion-driven, self-actualizing “inner-requiredness” (Bunderson and Thompson, 2009), anchored in expressive individualism and self-fulfillment (Dik and Shimizu, 2019)—evident in the job-career-calling typology (Bellah et al., 1985; Wrzesniewski et al., 1997) and more directly in Praskova et al.’s framing of calling as a “mostly self-set, salient, higher order career goal, which generates meaning and purpose for the individual” (2015: 93). Problematizing this binary categorization, Vianello et al. (2018) combined calling’s internal and external motivations into a single, multidimensional construct with seven facets (i.e., prosocial orientation, identification, pervasiveness, purposefulness, transcendent summons, sacrifice, passion), finding that the degree to which individuals experience each facet varies based on country of residency and career stage (Vianello et al., 2023).

In their recent arguments, Thompson and Bunderson (2019) asserted that neoclassical and modern notions of calling are better understood as orthogonal rather than categorical. Inspired by Maslow (1967), they argued that the concept of calling invoked “both an ‘inner requiredness’ . . . felt as a kind of self-indulgence rather than as a duty. . ..[that] is different and separable from ‘external requiredness’ which is rather felt as a response to what the environment, the situation, the problem, or the external world calls for, or requires of, the person” (pp. 95–96). Their orthogonal approach afforded the potential for a transcendent calling characterized by high inner- and outer-requiredness—consistent with Buechner’s view of calling (and its frequent cognate, vocation) as the place “where your deep gladness meets the world’s deepest need” (in Palmer, 1999: 16). Whether conceptualized or operationalized as categorical, multidimensional, or orthogonal, defining calling in terms of an individual’s external (neoclassical), internal (modern), or combined motivation has become the dominant way people explain and define work as “deeply meaningful” (Dobrow et al., 2023: 518).

Understandably, pursuit of a unified conceptualization is often one of the first ways scholars work to cohere pluralistic domains. This approach is compelling given its potential to highlight useful characteristics and to disentangle calling from cognates, at least locally; but it also comes with unintended repercussions. Consider, for example, Thompson and Bunderson’s (2019) orthogonal framing of neoclassical and modern callings; and Vianello et al.s (2018) multidimensional model, which delineate distinct facets such as passion, purposefulness, sacrifice, and prosocial orientation. Although both approaches advance more complex understandings of calling (i.e., acknowledging systematic complexity by delineating different dimensions; Thompson and Bunderson, 2019; or the multifaceted interplay between varied dimensions; Vianello et al., 2023), each abstraction carries risks: Taken too comprehensively or literally they can mask, downplay, or misrepresent the emergent, non-linear lived experience of human meaning-making. This tension mirrors a persistent challenge in theory building: Although scholars often pursue unified conceptualizations to impose coherence on pluralistic domains and aid in systematic measurement, such efforts also risk concealing the very complexity they aim to clarify—flattening nuance and hiding underlying assumptions. Even if scholars could agree on a single definition, reliance on a unified conceptualization creates problematic byproducts: It hides implicit, yet influential assumptions about what calling is or should be.

Consequently, focusing on a unifying definition or conceptualization does not address the fundamental limits of definitions as tools for topical or field-level coherence because definitions necessarily localize attention: Although definitions do not tell us what to think, they do tell us what to think about—that is, what to attend to, and what to ignore (Tversky and Kahneman, 2000). Such framing can inadvertently hide the complexities that foster robust dialogue, greater empathy, and new ways of understanding and addressing theoretical and practical challenges of enacting meaningful work. Thus, the act of defining calling does more than direct attention: It also masks assumptions that, although subtle, shape dominant interpretations and enactments of calling—namely enduring assumptions of calling as beneficial and necessarily individual.

Problematizing calling’s presumptive benefits

To date, framing calling as beneficial and desirable has guided much of the theoretical and empirical work in the field. This positive framing has informed research design and interpretation such that scientific outcomes often focus on the advantages of viewing or enacting work as calling. Indeed, positive relationships between enacted calling and satisfaction in job, life, domain, and career are “easily the best-established finding in calling literature” (Bunderson and Thompson, 2009: 426). Since Wrzesniewski et al.’s (1997) formative publication on job-career-calling, management scholars have highlighted how crafting work as meaningful enables individual and organizational benefits including engagement, career success, wellbeing, retention, and productivity (for summaries see Dobrow et al., 2023; Rawat and Nadavulakere, 2015; Thompson and Bunderson, 2019); work and life satisfaction (Duffy and Dik, 2013); and attachment to one’s employer or organization (Cardador and Caza, 2012). Research in vocational and career counseling reinforces these conclusions, highlighting how living one’s calling promotes career agency, mental health, and the “good life” (for summary, Dobrow et al., 2023).

Given the preponderance of studies on calling’s beneficial outcomes, scholars understandably continue to frame calling as a positive, prosocial, and propitious pursuit. Yet over-indexing calling’s benefits can background negative cases, empirical research, or theories suggesting that callings are not necessarily positive (Bell and Taylor, 2003; Berkelaar and Buzzanell, 2015; Cardador and Caza, 2012), nor necessarily beneficial for everyone all the time. Viewing calling as dynamic and socially constructed exposes how its meaning and impact change depending on context, relationships, and evolving circumstances.

A smaller, yet growing, body of research has documented how calling can also have detrimental consequences. Bunderson and Thompson’s (2009) work on zookeepers was one of the first to show how deeply meaningful work has the potential to demoralize, as well as galvanize. Similarly, research on hospital janitorial staff during COVID-19 challenged assumptions about calling as universally positive: Community and supervisor ideals of heroism and shared responsibility invoked personal demands, with employees feeling duty-bound to risk their lives to fulfill their calling (Sharma et al., 2022). Across contexts, individuals’ willingness to sacrifice is influenced by social expectations and relational commitments, revealing collective pressures behind personal sacrifices (Clinton et al., 2024; Schabram and Maitlis, 2017). Negative outcomes such as burnout and exploitation are exacerbated by collective framing of certain occupations as “tainted” or “invisible” and contributions are overlooked (Hedden, 2023; Sharma et al., 2022). Moreover, financial, informational, social, and other resources enable or constrain calling opportunities, highlighting that calling is not only individual but also embedded in social networks and collective infrastructures (Duffy et al., 2015; Rawat and Nadavulakere, 2015). Work as calling theory has helped to formalize the potential for negative (i.e., workaholism, burnout, exploitation) as well as positive (i.e., job satisfaction, job performance) outcomes when living a calling (Duffy et al., 2018: 426); however, calling scholarship continues to center individual agency—positioning the individual as accountable for job crafting and alignment to realize their calling even amid organizational constraint or unequal access to opportunity.

Reconceptualizing calling as collective

The implicit assumption that calling is an inherently individual pursuit has also guided much of the theoretical and empirical work. A nascent body of knowledge counteracts this assumption to instead consider how calling may manifest as a collective pursuit. In particular, Sánchez Sánchez’s (2021) research on Latinx immigrant families showed how individuals may inherit or be “granted” a collective cross-generational calling: First- and second-generation individuals are often (implicitly) asked to bear the obligatory costs of the extended family’s calling without necessarily realizing its promised benefits—or feeling they have a choice in the calling or its pursuit. Moreover, although research highlights how individualized operationalizations of calling manifest across countries (e.g., China, Germany, Italy, Japan, Portugal, USA; Esteves et al., 2018; Hirschi and Herrmann, 2012; Vianello et al., 2023), culture is often treated as a static category rather than a complex dynamic system.

Perspectives from Indigenous and Eastern communities challenge the mainstream assumption of calling as individually centered, even though formal research remains relatively sparse. For example, avodah (work and service) from Jewish history and culture (Miller, 2007), ikigai from Japan (i.e., that which makes life worth living; Mathews, 1996; Sartore et al., 2023), dream fasts and ando pawachige from Anishinaabe (Ojibway) societies (i.e., seek your dream, live your dream, understand your dream, move forward with your dream; Simpson, 2000); and Māori Kaitiakitanga obligations asking “kai wheat e wahi moku” (what and/or where is the place for me?; Pohatu, 2003) offer underexplored lenses that question and expand predominant assumptions of what calling is and how it could or should be enacted (particularly calling assumptions rooted in Western, individualistic, and Christian traditions). Certainly, existing research on calling recognizes social or other-oriented motivations or constraints (e.g., Work as Calling theory; neoclassical vs. modern frameworks); however, these perspectives still center the individual as the primary agent of calling. In contrast, Indigenous and Eastern perspectives not only reframe calling as inherently collective, contextual, and co-constructed, they often challenge the separation of the individual from the collective. For example, studies of Alaska Native Yup’ik culture demonstrate that leadership simultaneously manifests as both individual and collective (Gram-Hanssen, 2021), unlike Western views that define it mainly as a personal trait or pursuit. Specifically, leadership emerges through a process of co-becoming via “communal activity embedded within a particular context” (Pidgeon in Gram-Hanssen, 2021: 147). Although individual agency is present, it operates in the collective; thus, a strict individual-collective separation reflects a Western construct that does not fully apply (Gram-Hanssen, 2021).

The need to complexify calling

The need for more nuanced understanding about calling’s complexity is mirrored in mainstream scholarship that seeks to unify calling conceptually. In a review of 84 articles, Thompson and Bunderson (2019) found 14 distinct formal definitions and 23 different measures, with only 7 measures used more than once. Four years later, Dobrow et al. (2023) found 34 measures of calling, with only 14 measures used more than once. Most of the measures overlooked dynamic processes, favoring state- or stage-based models (Dobrow et al., 2023). Methodologically, inconsistent mappings undermine generalizability, relevance, validity, and confidence (Dik and Shimizu, 2019; also see Dobrow et al., 2023), contributing to the jingle fallacy—the erroneous assumption that results of research measured differently measure the same thing. ¹ This fallacy undermines theory development, scientific communication, and practical application by masking critical differences and implicit assumptions (Peters and Crutzen, 2024). Yet, more than methodological looseness, the diversity of operationalizations may also reflect efforts to capture calling’s multifaceted complexity. Were the implicit assumptions of these measures transparently addressed and synthesized, they might reveal complementary and interconnecting dimensions.

How then do scholars move forward in ways that foster coherence, while embracing the intellectual diversity needed to understand calling’s complexity for work, organizing, and “the good life?” Dik and Shimizu (2019) offer a clue. They assert that scholars should not “aim to forge consensus” by proposing new or improved definitions. Instead, they recommend that scholars: (a) allow for different types, taxa, or dimensions of calling; and (b) continue to investigate how people’s talk about work evolves. In responding to their call, we show how viewing calling as communicatively constituted—emerging, sustained, and transformed via dynamic, socially-constructed patterns of meaning-making—complements and challenges conventional understandings of communication as transmission or representation. In so doing, we broaden the analytic lens, inviting more varied definitions, problems, and vocabularies to foreground calling’s complexity and unsettled, taken-for-granted assumptions.

Constituting calling communicatively

The word calling carries communicative overtones—implicitly in its notions of being “summoned” or “called”; and explicitly when discussing how people receive feedback about their calling or express or give voice to their calling (see Berkelaar and Buzzanell, 2015). That said, calling research often relies exclusively on a transmission model of communication, that is, treating communication as messages that are simply received, interpreted, and then acted upon (see, critically, Axley, 1984; also, Schoeneborn et al., 2025). With its attention to clarity, accuracy, and the mechanics of message delivery, the transmission model does provide useful insight into how calling messages are conveyed and interpreted; however, its focus on information transfer tends to oversimplify relational dynamics and meaning-making. In contrast, the constitutive model focuses on communication as complex, contextual, dynamic, and multidirectional (Ashcraft et al., 2009) such that no participant fully controls the outcomes of meaning negotiations that actively shape calling. A constitutive approach thus provides a vital complement to the transmission model by positioning communication as the very process through which callings are formed, sustained, and transformed.

Evaluating the transmission model’s utility and limits

Although the name may be unfamiliar, the transmission model of communication is one many people see reflected in everyday interactions, media, and education (e.g., when people talk of “sending” and “receiving” messages, “getting your point across” or the problem of “mixed messages” and the need for feedback loops). Originating from classic information theory (Shannon, 1948), the transmission model (also called the conduit or linear model) treats meaning as a relatively fixed entity passing from sender to receiver. Developed to solve the technical problem of maximizing information transfer over telephone wires, the transmission model was quickly adapted to explain human communication. From a transmission perspective, communication is positioned as a neutral process of message or meaning transfer that exists independently of the communicative interaction. Misunderstandings are viewed as a technical failure (i.e., an error in coding or decoding) rather than as a normal feature of interpretive, social, or symbolic complexity (Axley, 1984). Meaning, therefore, exists prior to communication and is merely transported from one mind or institution to another by being “put into” words and “conveyed” to a recipient who then “unpacks” the meaning with an assumption of fidelity between sent and received messages (Axley, 1984). Certainly, transactional models account for receiver interpretation and shifting sender-receiver roles (Barnlund, 1970); however, even when the flow becomes two-way, simultaneous, and interpretive, communication is still framed as a linear exchange of discrete messages rather than a generative, ongoing, co-constructed interaction embedded in relational, historical, and cultural processes, norms, and meanings.

This conduit logic can be seen in foundational calling scholarship that frames calling as “discovering” or “finding” one’s calling (e.g., from God, society, family, internal voice); as if a calling exists fully formed and external to the self with minimal transformation. For example, Hall and Chandler’s (2005) calling sub-scale described calling as a “sense” or preexisting orientation, consistent with Bellah et al.’s (1985) framing of calling as a transcendent message. As a result, emphasis is often placed on identifying and expressing one’s “true” or “authentic” calling rather than on understanding the interpretive and social processes that give rise to its meaning(s). Recent reviews often focus on motivations, stages, and outcomes (e.g., Dobrow et al., 2023; Thompson and Bunderson, 2019), typically relegating communication to the role of an invisible or secondary conduit useful for expressing or explain one’s calling.

Other calling scholarship has evolved from a strict transmission model to consider interpretive enactments, softening the sender-receiver dichotomy into more nuanced roles. Such evolutions are often grounded in stage models, as people move from “seeking a calling” to “living a calling” — leveraging narrative sensemaking, social feedback, contextual adaption, and available resources. For example, Work as Calling theory (Duffy et al., 2018, 2023) advances a more interpretive approach by positioning job crafting (Wrzesniewski and Dutton, 2001) as a key mechanism for transitioning from “perceiving” to “living” a calling at work. Employees use job crafting to reshape cognitive, task, and relational boundaries by using communication (as transmission) and behavior to align work with their purpose, while negotiating organizational noise like tasks, demands, resources, and power dynamics with colleagues or superiors.

Such approaches hint at constitutive nuance, yet transmission logic lingers: Calling remains a pre-existing orientation, summons, or essence to be clarified and transmitted into action with communication as an enhanced pipeline for alignment, rather than communication operating as the site for calling’s emergence. Even though interactions are framed alongside tasks as “the raw materials employees use to construct their jobs” (Wrzesniewski and Dutton, 2001: 179), communication typically remains an instrumental tool to transform the work one has into the work one wants with the presupposition that the core “signal” of purpose precedes job crafting. In contrast, a constitutive perspective views communication as primary—a generative, ontological force that constitutes calling without pre-supposing a prior calling.

Far from dismissing transmission models, our argument is that transmission models are useful but incomplete. Transmission models help further illuminate calling’s mechanics by quantifying message flows, while also identifying opportunities for actionable intervention. Analytic opportunities include: (a) mapping sources (i.e., where callings come from; e.g., family narratives, faith traditions, organizational messaging, professional codes, organizational culture); (b) identifying senders and receivers (i.e., who transmits and receives messages about calling, for example, to reveal motivations for control and power dynamics in vocational influence); (c) examining how calling messages are packaged (i.e., their form, delivery, and channels, such as slogans, narratives, rituals, job descriptions, training videos, social media; performance criteria); (d) enabling clarifying and renegotiating messages (e.g., individuals re-encoding calling into statements that allow for enactment via job crafting; organizations refining purpose messaging to avoid manipulation and to foster healthier expectations; and (e) supporting critical reflective questions (i.e., prompting self-examination of influences and feedback, for example asking questions such as: Which messages am I receiving as my calling? Who benefits from my acceptance?). Even as the transmission model considers how people express and enact a calling through communication, it does not fully capture a core tenet of constitutive approaches—namely, that calling is created through communication, not a pre-existing meaning that people later express or explain.

Shifting from communication-as-transmission to constitutive communication

Constitutive models of communication challenge “the widely accepted idea that language is a system of reference for denoting objects ‘out there’,” arguing instead that meaning is co-created to help people differentiate experiences (Cooper in Schoeneborn et al., 2025: 478). This approach represents a transformative shift for calling scholarship: Calling is not seen as a relatively static possession that one “has”; but as a dynamic system of meaning that human and non-human actors co-create via interconnected communication (Kuhn et al., 2017 for summary). A constitutive approach thus shifts attention from reception or expression to co-participation.

From a constitutive perspective, communication is not secondary to one’s calling but the foundational means through which calling is defined, negotiated, and enacted. For example, Sánchez Sánchez (2021) finds calling emerging in exchanges between immigrant parents and first-generation children as they express or resist expectations; or give or withhold discursive or material support. Bloom et al. (2021) describe similar back-and-forth interactions that build calling legitimacy and authenticity. Likewise, studies of gig and remote work reveal how people navigate, negotiate, and re-interpret callings and “decent work” across cultural, technological, and institutional boundaries amid customer demands, platform algorithms, and organizational policies (Lysova and Zeng, 2025). Material objects can also function as “calling symbols,” serving as direct, indirect, or ambient messages to solicit inquiry, prompt reflection, or remind people of unfulfilled callings (Felix and Cavazotte, 2019). Meaning, thus, takes shape within, not outside, communications’ ongoing fragile, complex processes. This contrast highlights a deeper theoretical divergence: The transmission model assumes preexisting entities that a person communicates about, while a constitutive view holds that entities (including “the self” and “calling”) are communicatively produced.

Shifting from a transmission to a constitutive lens thus expands theoretical possibilities by viewing calling—with its identities, meanings, and relationships—as something deeply embedded in social dynamics. Whereas the transmission model often obscures or suppresses the complexities and vulnerabilities inherent in social processes, the constitutive model centers ongoing contradictions, complexities, vulnerabilities, and fragilities as core to the calling experience. Every exchange becomes a site where meaning, values, and behaviors are negotiated in real time (although not always consciously, formally, or verbally). Acknowledging the uncertainty and emotional risk inherent in constitutive processes legitimizes aspirational talk, partial enactments, and evolving pathways as meaningful, rather than failed, or hypocritical expressions of calling. These expressions may take the form of productive idealizations (Christensen et al., 2013), possible selves or imagined selves (Oyserman and Horowitz, 2023), resilient adaptation (Buzzanell, 2018), experimentation, or good faith failures. Ultimately, the constitutive model reframes calling as relationally achieved—co-created through interaction as people negotiate expectations, shared stories, advise, or otherwise engage with the enabling or constraining forces of others’ direct, indirect, and ambient aspirations and doubts.

Reframing a phenomenon like calling as communicatively constituted is transformative, yet not wholly new. Scholars have long argued that communication is not merely a conduit for transmitting meaning, but rather is the central force that constitutes meaning (e.g., Ashcraft et al., 2009; Craig, 1999; Schoeneborn et al., 2025). Recent reviews of management literature show how a constitutive approach has proven valuable for revisiting core processes such as decision-making, strategic planning, cultural transformation, and employee engagement (see Ashcraft et al., 2009) joining with practice and process theories to counter common conceptions of organizational phenomena as “ordered, fixed, and stable” (see Schoeneborn et al., 2025: 2). Thus, the novelty here lies not in advancing constitutive processes broadly, but in applying a constitutive perspective to the study of calling, a domain where transmission models still dominate (for exceptions see Molloy and Foust, 2016; Sánchez Sánchez, 2021).

Examining everyday communicative practices

If calling is communicatively constituted, the pressing question becomes how exactly this constitution occurs. Communication theory holds that meaning arises not in the abstract but in the patterned ways messages—verbal and nonverbal; conscious and unconscious; direct, indirect, or ambient—are produced and interpreted in social life; what Craig (2005) calls communicative practices. From a constitutive point of view, a calling, or the sense that one should have, find, or enact a calling, begins to take shape via everyday communication—the small-scale moment-to-moment communicative practices through which social realities, including calling, are created, shaped, negotiated, and transformed. Consider, for example, a friend, colleague, or relative’s supportive remark; acquiescent silence signaling doubt; the presence of a symbolic object; job ads or billboards encouraging people to “find their calling”; or mentoring discussions cultivating, advising, or reflecting on calling. Such recurrent, everyday interactions (which include questioning, texting, feedback, and storytelling; Craig, 2005), invite interpretation and negotiation, accumulating to reinforce, or undermine, people’s sense of calling and the actions perceived as desirable and viable. These everyday micro-practices accumulate through repetition and institutionalization, sedimenting into macro-patterns (e.g., institutional discourses, rituals, norms) to constrain or enable future micro interactions, creating recursive cycles of social reality.

Communicative practices as everyday micro-practices

As culturally recognized and tangibly situated ways of using language and symbols to (inter)act in social life (Craig, 1999, 2005), communicative practices enable joint sensemaking as people resolve dilemmas and disagreements through patterned message production and interpretation. Notably, communicative practices are more than messages. Alongside (a) patterns of absent and present messages, communicative practices also include: (b) patterns of activities of the group within a context; and (c) patterns of ideologies—that is, situated values, ideals, and evaluative norms guiding meaning and action (Craig, 1999, 2005; Hanks, 1996).

Together, these three elements explain and regulate what counts as possible, desirable, or prohibited for perceiving or living a calling. For example, talk about calling as a lifelong quest sourced by a divine or relationally powerful other may encourage people to relinquish control in a single decision of “agentic self-abnegation” (Rosso et al., 2010). In contrast, talk about calling narrowed around a specific job, occupation, or field can undermine agency by discouraging development of career competencies (Cardador and Caza, 2012) or consideration of worthwhile career advice (Dobrow and Tosti-Kharas, 2012) or alternative job configurations (e.g., multi-job or non-job; Robertson et al., 2025). In particular, Robertson and colleagues show how community messages reinforced the ideology of living one’s calling via a singular full-time paid role. When circumstances shifted, subsequent implicit and explicit messages shaped activities people considered possible, desirable, or prohibited. Messages that allowed for a revised and more expansive understanding of calling encouraged positive engagement with multi-job activities needed to serve instrumental (money) and teleological (meaning) ends. Communicative practices thus help explain how vocational meanings emerge via micro-practices accumulating to build or erode people’s sense of purpose. Viewing calling as communicative practice thus offers a “grammar” for understanding organizing and sensemaking about calling as it emerges and evolves in situ (see Leonardi, 2017: 236 on discursive processes for theorizing).

From communicative practices to the communicative constitution of calling

Extending a constitutive grammar for organizing to the concept of calling (Brummans et al., 2024: Schoeneborn et al., 2019) helps recast calling as a dynamic accomplishment, opening up new ways of conceptualizing and understanding meaningful work. Calling might function, for example, as noun, verb, adjective, or adverb. As a noun, calling operates as an entity, status, or subject recognized by the self and/or others as a stable identity marker. As a verb, calling describes the dynamic processes by which individuals and groups identify, enact, or negotiate work that matters. As an adjective or adverb, calling acts as a quality, attribute, orientation, or characteristic that modifies certain types of work. These modes often generate and co-exist in productive tensions. For example, verb–noun tensions (e.g., communicating as process and calling as fixed status) invite questions about how dynamic practices reify into stable identities; verb–verb tensions (i.e., both as ongoing accomplishments) invite questions about how processes interact, align, or conflict; and verb–adjective tensions (i.e., work as more or less “calling-like”) invite questions about where calling begins and ends, and how its boundaries are drawn.

A constitutive communication approach, therefore, invites scholars to trace how calling’s meanings and behaviors unfold dynamically, amid social resources and constraints (Alvesson and Kärreman, 2000). It reveals how talk orders social worlds; and sanctions values and actions through tacit socialization and specialized vocabularies (Craig, 1999, 2005; Leonardi, 2015). Studying “what got said and done and by whom” (Weick, 1984: 97–98) uncovers commonplace beliefs and core challenges as people make sense of, enact, or resist purposeful work’s meanings and ethics through distinct vocabularies and conversational moves (Mitra and Buzzanell, 2017).

Certainly, existing calling theories attend to micro-level interactions and interpretations of calling to varying degrees. For example, Work as Calling Theory (Duffy et al., 2018) explores how individuals perceive and “live out” their calling through job crafting messages and motivational alignment given local resources and constraints. Similarly, calling orientation (Wrzesniewski et al., 1997) and job crafting literature (Chang et al., 2020; Wrzesniewski and Dutton, 2001) highlight how individuals reinterpret their work orientation, work tasks, and interactions to align with personal calling narratives. Even as these frameworks acknowledge the messages, activities, and ideologies of communicative practices, such elements remain secondary to the focus on individual motivations and outcomes that define much of calling scholarship. Calling scholarship rarely addresses how micro-level practices coalesce into macro-level structure or how calling emerges from such micro–macro intersections. In contrast, a communicative practices lens shows how repeated micro-interactions accumulate into enduring shared phenomena: messages form discourses, activities become rituals, and ideologies solidify as norms. These macro structures, in turn, shape the lived experience of calling, shaping communication practices within broader social, historical, and institutional contexts rather than treating it as an isolated individual or localized pursuit.

One of the most prominent frameworks useful for understanding how calling dynamically arises from micro-level communicative practices to macro-level identities, structures, and social realities is the CCO perspective. The CCO perspective originated to explain how organizations and organizing are communicatively constituted—ontological products of communication rather than preexisting structures that merely facilitate communication (Schoeneborn et al., 2025). At its core, the CCO paradigm posits that communication—including conversations, texts, actions, and material artifacts—is not simply a conduit for exchanging information. Rather, it is the very means by which meaning, identity, power, and organizational boundaries are continuously negotiated, stabilized, and transformed (Cooren and Seidl, 2022). In this view, organizations—and by extension, organizing phenomena such as calling—do not exist independently of communication; they are brought into being and sustained through it. These processes constitute organizations as communicative and/or decisional flows wherever relational ties recursively orient or stabilize around shared goals, whether perceived or actual. Here, “organizations” are understood broadly to include employment, volunteer, activist/terrorist, interpersonal, familial, religious, recreational, educational, and political organizational forms and process (see Berkelaar, 2016: 33).

Although calling exists outside of organizations, CCO offers a powerful set of tools for examining how a sense of calling emerges, endures, or shifts across communicative contexts. Research applying CCO to identity formation, sensemaking, decision-making, and nonhuman agency (see Schoeneborn et al., 2025) parallels key dimensions relevant to vocational calling—such as vocational sensemaking, job crafting, power relations in narrative construction, and message enactment. Across its three major schools of thought—the Four Flows (McPhee and Zaug, 2009), the Montréal School (Cooren, 2012), and Luhmann’s (1995) Theory of Systems—CCO affords complementary perspectives on how micro-level communicative acts accumulate into macro-level patterns of meaning and identity that sustain or reshape a calling. Our aim here is to briefly introduce and orient readers to the three major CCO schools at a high level. Given space limitations, we recommend readers consult recent detailed reviews or edited collections of CCO scholarship (e.g., Basque et al., 2022; Cooren and Seidl, 2022; McPhee et al., 2025; Schoeneborn et al., 2014, 2025).

Calling as communication flows: Four Flows theory

Grounded in Giddens’ duality of structure, the Four Flows model views organizing as the interplay of four recursive communication processes or “flows” that constitute and stabilize any collective (not just employment organizations): membership negotiation, reflective self-structuring, activity coordination, and institutional positioning (McPhee and Zaug, 2009; McPhee et al., 2025). Calling only gains traction by navigating and negotiating these flows. Consider a software engineer leaving ad-tech for civic open-source work. Membership negotiation flows define “who belongs” and “what it means to be one of us” such that calling becomes a key membership criterion (e.g., “People join us because they feel called to public-interest tech”). Such discourse helps mark belonging and redefines roles (e.g., from coder to ethics lead). Reflexive self-structuring flows may create roles, rules, hierarchies, and procedures such that calling becomes the structuring rationale for codifying or redefining a role (e.g., “public interest engineer,” or job descriptions shifting from coder to “ethics lead”), which in turn guide decisions and actions. Activity coordination flows sequence and guide everyday work (e.g., standups, design reviews) helping to frame daily decisions whereby calling might operate as a recurrent decision premise or touchstone for moment-to-moment work. Institutional positioning flows define and legitimize identity externally (e.g., responsible AI narratives in funder pitches). Together, these flows anchor micro-interactions (e.g., chats, reviews) into macro patterns of meaning (e.g., making civic tech the default trajectory for enacting calling). But macro patterns are fragile: If one flow shifts (a funding pivot to emphasize profit over purpose), changes ripple through the other flows (e.g., coordination prioritizes monetizable features, positioning shifts to “pragmatic AI solutions”) destabilizing calling and reorganizing meaning at personal and institutional scales (see McPhee and Zaug, 2009; McPhee et al., 2025 on the Four Flows model generally).

The Four Flows model thus recasts calling not as a fixed trait but as an emergent property understood retrospectively as people talk, write, and interact, in ways that position themselves, others, and their organizations around a sense of “higher purpose.” Calling thus might be understood (a) on a membership basis (i.e., “what it means to be one of us”); (b) as a structuring principle, role, or routine to rationalize how work is organized and who does what (e.g., “because I’m/we’re called to serve x, I/we prioritize y tasks in z roles”); (c) a coordination device (e.g., “given our calling, we choose to do x”); (d) a positioning narrative or shared touchstone to narrate identity to internal and/or external audiences; or (e) some combination thereof (see McPhee and Zaug, 2009; McPhee et al., 2025 on the Four Flows model)

The generative power of the Four Flows model lies in mapping calling’s communicative emergence and infrastructure heuristically. By operationalizing calling into concrete communicative functions, the Four Flows model helps reveal calling’s recursive constitution—namely, how individual calling can aggregate to produce collective structures (micro-to-macro); and how collective rules can impose structure on (the need for) individual meaning-making (macro-to-micro). It also offers a tractable taxonomy for analysis and intervention by helping to pinpoint where and how calling dynamically coheres, fractures, or repairs with what individual and structural outcomes (e.g., adaptive vs. maladaptive emergence, innovation, resilience, sustainability; see Schoeneborn et al., 2025 on Four Flows generally). Like other CCO schools, the Four Flows model would view calling as communicatively constituted; however, it uniquely stresses human agency as the key drivers—unlike the Montréal School’s inclusion of non-human agency (Cooren, 2012) or Luhmann’s (1995) self-reproducing systems.

Calling as ventriloquism: The Montréal School

Drawing on a range of theories including Actor-Network Theory, Speech Act Theory, linguistics, and semiotics (Cooren and Seidl, 2022), the Montréal School of CCO reframes communication as ventriloquism whereby humans and non-humans (e.g., text, policies, ideals, technologies) jointly “speak” through delegated, hybrid agency (Cooren, 2012). Organizations emerge from the recursive interplay between conversations (immediate, situated, ephemeral exchanges) and text (stable, decontextualized inscriptions). Driven by performative urgency, conversations generate textual candidates—provisional utterances that serve as raw material. Through distanciation, fleeting talk is transformed into durable forms via four phases: local utterance, fixation, decontextualization, and recontextualization (Cooren, 2012; Cooren et al., 2008). What one utters in a discussion may be fixed into an artifact (e.g., written charter), decontextualized from its origins (e.g., removing spatiotemporal and personal ties for instance from “I said in that room on Thursday” to “The charter states”) before being recontextualized when invoked trans-situationally in later decisions.

Once stabilized, texts enable ventriloquism: Humans delegate authority to nonhumans (“the charter calls us to . . .”), while nonhumans authorize human action by speaking through them, thereby producing plurivocality—the conflation of multiple voices into unified agency (Cooren, 2012). The result is hybrid agency, where people and artifacts collectively orient around shared objects creating metaconversation (talk about talk-as-text) and distributing what Cooren (2012) calls scopal agency across human and material actors (i.e., the capacity for an action or utterance to have influence beyond its immediate, physically proximal scope). These cycles of conversation → distanciation → ventriloquism continuously regenerate organizational life. Organizations are thus viewed as dynamic imbrications of text-conversation overlays (Schoeneborn et al., 2014)—fluid, revisable, and vulnerable to textual modification and conversational breakdown.

Calling, thus, becomes organizationally performable when ventriloquized through this talk-text dialectic as humans and artifacts co-orient around meaningful work, animating emergent collectives from ad hoc collaborations to enduring institutions. For example, the same hypothetical engineer voicing concerns about “public good” work in forums may see those conversations crystallize into official project charters or mission statements (fixation). Later, those texts “speak through” the engineer in meetings (The “charter calls us to prioritize impact”) enacting the hybrid agency that blends person and text as a unified actor. Over time, these sociomaterial communicative hybrids—engineer-through-charter, team-through-values—stabilize calling as both personal and collective. Yet, if texts are revised (e.g., profit-driven rewrites) or conversational communities fragment (e.g., membership turnover), ventriloquism falters and hybrid agency collapses disarticulating calling and reopening vocational alternatives.

Thus, the Montréal School recasts calling as a ventriloquized presence constituted through the dialectics of: (a) conversation, the co-oriented, fleeting, situated interactional moment; (b) textual authority, the durable manifestation that allows calling to “speak” through people, documents, and artifacts; and (c) hybrid collectives, the sociomaterial ensembles (e.g., people+text) that embody shared purpose (see Cooren, 2012; Cooren et al., 2008 on the Montréal School). Calling, may thus manifest as: a textual macro-actor that speaks through formal documents, authorizing actions and identities by invoking a higher purpose beyond individual speakers; an emergent conversational consensus where participants co-orient toward a negotiated “what we are called to do”; or a hybrid collective animated by human and non-human agents (e.g., logos, policies, websites, “sacred” texts).

The generative power of the Montréal School lies in revealing calling’s sociomaterial enactment through ventriloquism and hybrid agency. By operationalizing calling as text-conversation dialectics, the Montréal School of CCO demonstrates how individual vocation emerges through nonhuman delegation (micro-to-macro) as texts “speak through” people to authorize collective purpose—and how stabilized artifacts (charters, mission statements) constrain or enable personal meaning-making in return (macro-to-micro). It also offers a toolkit for analyzing plurivocality’s stabilization or breakdown, tracing where calling coheres via distanciation, fractures through textual revision, or repairs through meta-conversation—with outcomes like resilient hybrids versus disarticulated agency (e.g., Cooren, 2012).

Calling as autopoiesis: Luhmann’s Social Systems

Drawing on Luhmann’s (1995) Theory of Social Systems and subsequent CCO elaborations (e.g., Basque et al., 2022; Schoeneborn et al., 2014), a Luhmannian perspective defines organization not as a collection of actors or texts but as an autopoietic network of decision communications—a self-reproducing system that perpetuates itself through the continual selection and connection of decisions. All organizational communication is thus paradoxical: Every decision presupposes contingency (it could be otherwise), yet the system must continuously deparadoxify any open contingency to maintain connectivity and boundary integrity. From this view, calling emerges not as a subjective conviction or moral stance but as a decision premise, a recursive organizational structure that guides future selections by constraining what can be meaningfully acted upon (Luhmann, 1995; Schoeneborn et al., 2014).

Consider again the software engineer who leaves ad-tech for civic technology. In a Luhmannian sense, the organization’s decision to “hire for civic-fit” simultaneously negates alternatives and reproduces prior decision premises that define what counts as mission-aligned work. Over time, these recursive selections condense into communicative logics such as “public good trumps profit,” which function as binary codes mediating identity and continuity within the system. Calling, here, operates as an organization of meaning—a self-referential subsystem whose decisions about “who is called,” “what counts as fulfilling the calling,” or “which actions advance the calling’s past premises to future ones.” The system thereby stabilizes meanings even as environmental volatility irritates but does not penetrate structural boundaries.

A Luhmannian perspective recasts calling as a systemic decision premise that reduces organizational contingency through recursive binary coding (see: Luhmann, 1995; Schoeneborn et al., 2014 on Luhmann’s Social Systems). Calling can therefore function as: (a) a binary code for membership decisions, where the organization distinguishes between those who are “called” (in-system) and those who are not by specifying if/then conditions to explicitly structure recruitment, retention, and role legitimacy; (b) a decision program for task allocation, where communicative selections are filtered by the conditional logic “does this advance our calling?” translating environmental complexity into system-relevant operations; and (c) a temporal connectivity premise, where references to founding or future callings link identity across time, stabilizing continuity amid change. From a Luhmannian perspective, personal experiences of “calling” would register as irritations in psychic systems—cognitive true/false judgments meaningful only to individuals, becoming solely relevant when communicated as decisions that recursively connect to other decisions, forming self-reinforcing chains.

The generative value of a Luhmannian approach lies in its capacity to reconceptualize calling as a self-reproducing systemic structure rather than a psychological state—an autopoetic form generated through ongoing communicative operations (see Luhmann, 1995; Schoeneborn et al., 2014). By operationalizing calling as decision premises, scholars can trace how calling becomes recursively integrated into organizational programs, how connectivity is maintained or disrupted when a paradox resurfaces, and how meaning is closed or reopened through decisions. Analytically, this model illuminates micro-macro recursivity—that is, how local communicative selections reproduce enduring institutional structures of “purpose” (micro → macro) and how organizational closures condition individual sensemaking in return (macro → micro). Like the Four Flows and Montréal School, this approach conceives calling as communicatively constituted, but it diverges by emphasizing communication itself as the only operative element.

Calling across CCO schools: Stabilization and fragility

By tracing micro-level communicative acts—conversations, texts, decisions, and artifacts—and how they recursively generate macro-level meanings, roles, and institutions, the CCO paradigm views calling, not as a fixed trait or inner essence, but as a communicatively constructed trajectory. Across its three schools, movement from micro (interactional talk and text) to macro (systemic, institutional, and identity structures) embodies a key insight: Communication constitutes calling, making it real, sustaining it, and enabling its transformation rather than merely expressing an ontological given.

From a CCO perspective, calling thus emerges not as a static individual trait but as a fragile communicative achievement—stabilized through distinct yet complementary mechanisms (e.g., flow-stabilized trajectories, ventriloquized hybrid agency, self-referential decision subsystems that deparadoxify contingency through operational closure). Each school’s lens reveals calling’s dual nature: resilient in recursive stabilization, yet vulnerable to the contingency it seeks to conceal. By linking micro-interactions to macro-structures of enduring vocational significance, calling coheres as a recursive communicative formation; yet it remains precarious—disrupted by flow interruptions, textual reconfigurations, or resurfaced paradox. “Perceiving” and “living” a calling thus become intertwined communicative practices shaped by legitimating and delegitimating forces (e.g., supervisors, peers, discourses, non-human agents, autopoietic systems) that co-produce calling’s meaning and applicability. Thus, a communicative constitution perspective reveals calling’s fragility and power dynamics: Calling functions both as micro-level agentic sensemaking and as a macro-level disciplinary discourse that normalizes overwork, self-sacrifice, and structural alignment. In sum, CCO views calling as a fluid, contested, fragile communicative achievement rather than a straightforward path to fulfillment.

Toward the communicative constitution of calling

As the body of calling research has grown, scholars have sought coherence through definitional unification—structuring the field around two interpretations of calling—neoclassical (emphasizing external purpose and duty) and modern (focused on internal self-motivation). Although valuable, we argue this framing oversimplifies calling’s complexity, in particular overlooking how calling emerges dynamically as a product of communication, rather than an ontological given. Expanding on Dik and Shimizu’s (2019) call to consider how talk about work evolves, we advance a communicative constitution approach, drawing on communicative practice and CCO perspectives to argue that calling arises through situated micro-level interactions that recursively aggregate into macro structures. Viewing calling as situated communication highlights how everyday interactions—including ambient messages and notable absences—can transform routine work into meaningful contributions (or vice versa; Lysova and Zeng, 2025), cumulatively influencing broader norms, within (e.g., Cinque et al., 2021) and beyond specific organizations and occupations (Berkelaar and Buzzanell, 2015).

Viewing calling as communicatively constituted challenges and complements dominant calling research paradigms. Specifically, this approach critiques prevailing models which reify calling as a necessarily individual, presumptively beneficial realization of a static psychological possession or discovery—rather than a relational emergent phenomenon that may be collective and not necessarily beneficial for everyone all the time. Consequently, a constitutive approach repositions calling’s downsides not as individual risks but products of constitutive rhetoric that normalizes exploitation and traps identities, complicating implicit assumptions of calling. At the same time, a constitutive approach enriches prior constructs by recasting them from static categories to living, discursive resources. Consider, calling orientations invoked fluidly by audience—framing the same role as a “steady paycheck” when talking to HR, “advancement ladder” to mentors, or “sacred mission” to peers—which with reinforcement and pattern repetition coalesces into norms over time. This example reveals more than audience-centered talk. It illustrates: (a) processual dynamism, as orientations function not as fixed traits but as active tools strategically used to navigate shifting contexts; (b) relational emergence, where calling is co-produced through audience expectations, responses, and alignments; (c) power and norm formation, as repeated framing aggregate micro-acts into institutionalized “truths”; (d) complementary enrichment, transforming Wrzesniewski et al. (1997) job-career-calling trichotomy from static categories that dynamically explain continuity and change; and (e) socio-material circulation, as framings persist via texts, institutions, and other nonhuman actors.

Advocating for viewing calling as communicatively constituted advances theoretical progress via three conceptual shifts—from individual perception to co-authorship; from static ontology to emergent process; and from “having” to “doing” a calling. These three conceptual shifts: (1) Highlight calling’s organizational and collective dynamics, broadening levels of analysis to capture multiple actors, contexts, and temporalities—challenging implicit assumptions that calling is inherently individual or necessarily beneficial; (2) encourage a theoretical shift from linear stage-based models to dynamic, contextually attuned interaction models that foreground calling’s social embeddedness; and (3) elevate communication from transmission to constitutive force that shapes how and which callings are legitimated and contested in everyday life and scholarship.

From individual perception to co-authorship

The first move—from individual perception to co-authorship—expands analysis beyond personal and dyadic perspectives to multilevel processes involving multiple actors, contexts, and temporalities. Neoclassical and modern conceptualizations (e.g., Bunderson and Thompson, 2009; Thompson and Bunderson, 2019; Vianello et al., 2018, 2023), as well as models such as Work as Calling Theory (Dik and Duffy, 2009) and job-career-calling framework (Wrzesniewski et al., 1997) typically locate calling within individuals as a stable pre-existing essence (whether externally or internally discovered) measured through dispositional traits such as self-efficacy, opportunity access, and prosocial motivation. In contrast, a communicatively constituted perspective disrupts this essentialist logic, instead viewing calling as a set of communicative practices, co-produced across multiple actors (human and/or non-human), sites, and temporal dimensions that affirm, redirect, or resist particular instantiations or enactments of calling as received and enacted. These micro-level interactions feed into constitutive organizing processes such as membership negotiation, reflexivity, ventriloquism, and disruption, linking personal sensemaking to collective and institutional formations. In revealing calling’s organizational and collective dimensions, this conceptual move challenges assumptions that calling is: (a) inherently individual; and (b) presumptively (if not consistently) beneficial by considering which voices (de)legitimize callings, how contexts enable or constrain enactment, and how socio-temporal shifts (e.g., career crises, technological change, economic pressure) disrupt or destabilize meanings across relational networks. In leveraging communicative practices and CCO perspectives to illuminate multilevel processes, the conceptual move from individual perception to co-authorship offers more nuanced understanding of how calling emerges, evolves, and gains significance across interconnected levels of social life.

From static ontology to emergent process

The second conceptual shift—from static ontology to emergent process—redirects attention from linear, variance-driven stage models to dynamic, context-sensitive interactional models that treat calling as socially embedded, continuously emerging, transforming, and contested rather than a fixed, pre-existing essence to be discovered, expressed, or enacted. Stage-based models such as Work as Calling Theory (Duffy et al., 2018) assume static ontologies, from which calling progresses predictably from perceiving a calling to living a calling with positive and negative outcomes dependent on individual and situational variables (e.g., motivation, job crafting, person–environment fit, access to opportunity, personality). Conceptual models (e.g., neoclassical/modern conceptualizations; job-career-calling typology) also frame calling as a preexisting inner-requiredness, outer-requiredness, or orientation. In contrast, a communicatively constitutive view collapses “perceiving” and “living” a calling into intertwined processes of co-authorship, positioning calling as an emergent, precarious phenomenon continually enacted through situated communication (e.g., the stories people tell, the categories they invoke, and the identities they negotiate in everyday interactions). Rather than measuring whether someone has a calling or is living a calling, a constitutive perspective asks what communicative resources—discursive and material—construct the idea of a calling; make it possible for people to see or enact their work as a calling at all; or make it risky, impossible, or undesirable to sustain a calling. Through ongoing discursive practices, calling repeatedly emerges, amplifies, or dissolves across shifting organizational, cultural, and socio-temporal contexts, underscoring calling continuously as collective meaning-making rather than internal realization.

From “having” to “doing” a calling

The third conceptual shift—from “having” to “doing” a calling—elevates communication from a transmission tool for expressing stable internal traits to the constitutive force of calling itself, shaping how and which callings emerge, gain legitimacy, face contestation, or become delegitimated in everyday life. Conventional calling research treats discourse as secondary—a channel for articulating pre-existing vocations or negotiating dyadic support (Berkelaar and Buzzanell, 2015). In contrast, a communicatively constitutive perspective positions calling as a communicative achievement: Through everyday talk and activities—narratives, rituals, symbols, storytelling, labeling, questioning, persuasion, and silencing—actors (human and nonhuman) constitute what counts as a calling, whose voices gain authority, and how power dynamics enable or marginalize meanings. These acts do not merely reflect calling but actively produce it, revealing how inclusion/exclusion, ventriloquism, and institutional ideologies determine which callings endure and which erode for which people in which contexts under which circumstances. By centering communication as constitutive this shift integrates co-authorship and emergence, illuminating calling as a precarious, negotiated achievement continually made and unmade through micro-macro flows of meaning constitution.

Implications

Viewing calling as communicatively constituted reorients how scholars and practitioners understand meaningful work. Rather than treating calling as an inner essence to be discovered, a communicative practices approach positions it as a dynamic, multilevel process—coauthored through discourse, relational negotiation, and institutional flows. This reorientation involves three conceptual moves—from individual perception to co-authorship; from static ontology to emergent process; and from “having” to “doing” a calling—which together generate new implications for both research and practice.

Implications for theory

Reconceptualizing calling through a communicative constitution lens carries profound theoretical implications. First, it repositions the ontology of calling—moving calling from being a psychological possession to communicative process and product. Rather than asking who has a calling or how strongly a person feels a sense of calling, questions would focus on how different communicative practices make certain forms of calling (more) possible, visible, or legitimate. In rejecting essentialism, a constitutive approach challenges traditional models that locate calling within fixed personal categories (job-career-calling; Wrzesniewski et al., 1997), historical conceptualizations (neoclassical vs. modern; Bunderson and Thompson, 2009; Vianello et al., 2023), or linear stages (Work as Calling Theory; Dik and Duffy, 2009). This lens also reveals calling as the product of dynamic co-authorship among actors, texts, and institutions—linking personal meaning to collective discourses, while highlighting that what counts as a calling is not universal but is historically and culturally situated, changing as language and institutional logics evolve.

Second, a communicatively constitutive approach shifts theoretical attention from states to processes, such that “living” a calling is no longer an achieved state but rather an emergent process that is continually negotiated, stabilized, and disrupted through everyday interactions, relationally embedded across multiple actors rather than in isolated individuals. Such a focus considers how everyday talk and interactional sensemaking aggregate into broader organizational norms and discourses thereby linking individual meaning-making to institutional structures (Schoeneborn et al., 2025). As certain narratives gain discursive traction, they institutionalize norms that govern who can claim a calling and which forms of work can be deemed meaningful. Consequently, a constitutive approach foregrounds power dynamics, revealing calling as a technology of control that normalizes (self-)exploitation as “sacred duty” (e.g., Bunderson and Thompson, 2009; Sharma et al., 2022). Thus, rather than asking questions like, “Does calling enhance well-being?” a constitutive approach would ask questions like, “Beneficial for whom?”

Finally, viewing calling as communicatively constitutive recasts calling’s paradoxes as generative tensions that sustain rather than hinder meaning-making (e.g., agency vs. constraint, authenticity vs. performance, transcendence vs. instrumentality, individual vs. collective, stability vs. change; Fairhurst and Putnam, 2024; also, Bunderson and Thompson, 2009; Berkelaar and Buzzanell, 2015 for summaries). From this perspective, paradoxes are not problems to overcome but ongoing sites of negotiation through which individuals and communities continually (re)constitute what “calling” means in lived practice. Drawing from Dewey’s (1938) notion of productive doubt, a communicatively constitutive approach to calling thus reframes uncertainty and contradiction as necessary conditions for growth, creativity, and ethical responsiveness. Rather than treating ambiguity as a deficit to be eliminated, it invites reflexive experimentation—encouraging individuals to engage dialogically with competing values, purposes, and identities as part of the communicative process of becoming called (Fairhurst and Putnam, 2024). In addition to examining paradoxes’ sociomaterial foundations (e.g., tools, bodies, and/or discourses enacting agency vs. constraint), power dynamics (dominant discourses sustaining contradictions), and response repertoires (either-or splitting, both-and integration, more-than reframing), promising avenues for future research include examining (a) emerging callings (e.g., aspirational talk, possible/imagined selves, good faith failure) to help legitimize calling as an ongoing relational process; (b) power imbalances (i.e., which inequalities drive communicative silencing and ventriloquism to elevate privileged callings while recasting overwork as noble duty in (disengaged) workplaces); (c) sociotechnical changes (e.g., AI automation and gig platforms fusing “mission-driven” rhetoric with precarious worker narratives (see Lysova and Zeng, 2025); and (d) non-Western approaches to reveal culture’s role and challenge pre-existing assumptions of calling.

Implications for methodology

Approaching calling as ongoing communication-in-action necessitates expanding methodological imagination to illuminate how callings are talked into being. Such an approach encourages the use of multi-scale, process-oriented research designs that trace how calling is co-authored across contexts and levels of analysis (e.g., Schwing and Pitt, 2024). For example, at the micro level, conversation analysis of coaching, mentoring, or team dialogues can reveal how speakers negotiate meaning and legitimacy around “calling” in real time. At the meso level, ethnographic studies of gig or precarious work settings can observe how workers and organizations collaboratively construct callings amid structural uncertainty. At the macro level, computational or network analyses can model how local discourses circulate and aggregate into institutionalized meaning systems. Moreover, multi-level analysis of calling as communicatively constituted can integrate micro, meso, and macro methods by nesting data hierarchically: treating interactions as Level 1 (people talking), families/groups/organizations as Level 2 (emergent norms), and institutions as Level 3 (aggregated discourses); using mixed-methods to trace discursive flows longitudinally. Few studies fully execute this exact multi-level integration for calling, but precursors exist that are extensible to calling (e.g., Cooren et al, 2008).

Treating calling as communication-in-action also implies that calling unfolds across time and interaction rather than existing as a fixed trait or belief. Methodologically, this calls for longitudinal and processual designs capable of capturing how calling talk evolves, stabilizes, fragments, or dissolves. Researchers might employ discourse tracing, narrative analysis, or multimodal ethnography to track calling’s discursive life cycle—from initial articulation to institutional embedding. Studies tracking calling’s development over time validate processual approaches. Dobrow and Heller (2015) used an 11-year panel design to show the link between early callings and long-term career decisions and consequences. Given that calling is something one “does” rather than something that one “has,” researchers must attend to the practical, situated performances through which it is sustained (see Alvesson, 2003). Research designs that privilege talk, text, and interaction (e.g., narrative inquiry, relational ethnography, participatory analysis) offer a pivotal counterpoint to variable-analytic surveys for understanding non-Western enactments of meaningful work—underexplored lenses that question and expand predominant assumptions of what calling is and how it could or should be enacted. Finally, embracing communication as constitutive demands pragmatic reflexivity: Researchers must articulate interpretive vocabularies, theoretical commitments, and cultural assumptions to avoid semantic drift and overrelativism; and to maintain empirical traction (Alvesson, 2003).

Implications for practice

Applied in practice, shifts from individual perception to co-authorship, from static ontology to emergent process, and from “having” to “doing” a calling invite a reorientation in how organizations, leaders, counselors, and everyday practitioners understand and engage with the notion of calling. Instead of seeing calling as an inner truth to be discovered or bestowed, this view highlights it as something created in relationship—with others, with communities, and through shared dialogue. Conversations, storytelling, and collective reflection become essential means for people to articulate, contest, and reshape their sense of purpose together. In any organization or organizing, recognizing the plurality of callings allows multiple narratives of meaning to coexist rather than be subsumed under a single dominant ideal. Attending to which voices are amplified or silenced in these conversations helps uncover exclusionary narratives and fosters more inclusive co-authorship of meaning and more adaptive notions of calling.

Second, reframing calling as an emergent process emphasizes that calling is not established once and for all but is continually negotiated through discourse and lived experience. Leaders, educators, mentors, or community facilitators can nurture this emergent sensemaking by inviting meta-communication (i.e.,open reflection on how meaning itself is constructed as well as more/than paradox navigation; Fairhurst and Putnam, 2024) to foster adaptive callings amid constraints. Viewed this way, the work of calling lies less in defining “what a calling is” and more in keeping dialogue alive about “how calling is becoming.”

Understanding calling as something done through communication and action—rather than possessed as a personal asset—reframes both ethical and collective responsibilities for scholars, practitioners, employers, and the public. That enactments can both empower and constrain (i.e., cultural stories of passion, service, or sacrifice can inspire meaning while also masking unfair expectations or unacknowledged labor) necessitates cultivating critical awareness so that the “doing” of calling remains equitable, sustainable, and adaptive. In this sense, the task becomes one of curating productive communicative ecologies—spaces where diverse participants can meaningfully contribute to evolving, collective expressions of purpose.

Moving forward

Although a communicatively constitutive approach to calling holds promise, it is not without limitations: It may underemphasize stable psychological predispositions from traditional research; it risks over-relativizing meaning in pragmatic contexts or prioritizing discourse over material realities and power structures; and it relies on resource-intensive qualitative methods less scalable than surveys (Schoeneborn et al., 2025; although new methods offer potential, Schwing and Pitt, 2024). These limitations highlight opportunities for integration and methodological innovation that strengthen the approach's empirical traction. Still, its core value lies in foregrounding calling as a dynamic, co-authored process that reveals power dynamics, generative paradoxes, and collective meaning-making—illuminating pathways for reflexive, adaptive, and ethical practice amid disruption.

At a time when advances in AI, widespread disengagement, and precarious employment are reshaping the very meaning of work, this article argues for a fundamental shift in how we understand calling—not as an individual possession or pursuit, but as a dynamic, often fragile, communicative achievement. By reframing calling as a process co-authored through everyday interactions, shared narratives, and power-laden ideologies, this article shows that meaning is continually forged and contested in the flow of social interaction. It urges scholars and practitioners to question calling’s presumed individuality or presumptive benefits; broaden analytical lenses to consider multiple actors, contexts, and temporalities; to transition from static, linear models to fluid, context-sensitive interactions emphasizing social embeddedness; and to reposition communication as a constitutive force that legitimates or contests callings in practice and theory. In brief, it urges scholars and practitioners to move beyond static definitions and embrace the complexity, fragility, and collective nature of meaningful work with the goal of providing tools to foster more resilient, adaptive understandings of meaningful work.