Abstract
The theme of meaningful work has a difficult standing in sociology. Whereas research on meaningful work in the Humanities and Organization and Management Studies is booming, sociological theory and research remains comparatively silent. Why is that? While there is no clear-cut answer to that question, the contributions of the most influential founding scholars of this discipline, Marx, Weber and Durkheim, have significantly contributed to the tendency of the discipline to shy away from theoretical and empirical engagements with meaningful work. Certainly, this group of social theorists offer distinct, often contrasting, conceptualizations of the nature of labour and the characteristics of work under capitalism. However, what they have in common is the understanding of waged work under capitalism as a powerful social structure that grounds human labour within the sphere of economic and social dependency and necessity. It follows from this that waged work is considered as a burden for workers that constrains the development of their human capacities, causing suffering, exploitation, social inequality and conflict between owners of production and themselves. Arguably, this influential framing that finds its most poignant expression in Marx’s concept of alienation, continues to inform sociology’s difficult relationship with meaningful work. After all, how can an activity one is forced to do out of necessity, be meaningful? Thus, there are good reasons to bypass the notion of meaningful work and engage instead with fashionable discourses about ‘the refusal of work’ (Frayne, 2015), ‘bullshit jobs’ (Graeber, 2018) and hopes that, finally, technological advancements will allow us to overcome waged-work and create a ‘post-work’ society (Mason, 2015).
Yet, how do we make sense of the paradox that for a significant proportion of people work is a source for meaning and attachment, despite the harm it can also cause? A cynical answer would refer back to Marx’s notion of ‘false consciousness’ and thereby deny that the experiences and actions of workers are genuine. While many work arrangements certainly invite cynicism, it should not be the bedrock for sociological thinking.
Side-stepping into the meaningful work discourse in the Humanities offers inspiration for sociological undertakings. Despite the considerable heterogeneity of meaningful work discussions in the Humanities (Bunderson and Thompson, 2009; Lips-Wiersma et al., 2009; Roessler, 2012; Veltman, 2016; Yeoman, 2014), what they commonly promote is the creation and experience of meaningfulness as a human condition. This perspective is ingrained in existential philosophy, such as the widely referenced work of Viktor E Frankl (1959), which understands the ‘will to meaning’ as innate to the human being that pushes the individual to search for and find purpose in life that makes it meaningful. In this vein, Bailey and Madden (2017) propose a definition of meaningful work in this journal that focuses on the individual experience of a genuine bond between work and the person’s transcendental life purpose that goes beyond the self. This is a valuable perspective for sociologists of work who seek to understand the impact workers’ multi-layered interests, desires for purpose and meaning have on the experience of work. And yet, the heavy emphasis on the individual and her innate drive to make meaning, tends to treat the material reality of the workplace as very much secondary to individuals will to meaning and purpose. Overall, this means that conceptual and empirical approaches that tackle how the experience of meaningful work is shaped by the interplay between the politics of working life, the nature and organization of work and workers’ agential responses remain scant.
This issue illustrates that the sociology of work can address this shortcoming and has much to contribute to the meaningful work debate. Even though the articles in this issue are not consistently engaging explicitly with meaningful work as a concept, they add critical insights into the complexity and ambivalent result of the interplay between what workers want from work and what the particular workplace is offering. A distinctive contribution of this volume is the understanding that the explanatory power of meaningful work as a concept is strengthened when it is conceptualized as a dynamic continuum, and not as a dichotomy, to meaningless work. 1 Indeed, the articles in this volume express in different ways how fragile the experience of meaningful work is in the light of managerial workplace regimes that operate according to efficiency and profitability paradigms. In fact, this issue emphasizes that experiences that contribute to meaningless work, such as powerlessness, exhaustion and disrespect, are all too often part and parcel of the labour process. Nevertheless, the articles also unravel the power of labour agency and workers’ irresistible impulse to experience meaningful work. This impulse does not suggest that overly demanding and drudgery work can be transformed into meaningful work. What it does show is that the desire for purpose, voice, recognition and worth are not eliminated by the organization, but continue to inform workers’ actions, thoughts, relational engagements and wider work orientation, guiding their search for meaningful work.
The first article of this issue develops a distinct sociological theory of meaningful work. In ‘Towards a Sociology of Meaningful Work’, Jan Ch Karlsson and I combine selective social theory with conceptual and empirical research on the politics of working life and promote objective and subjective dimensions of autonomy, recognition and dignity as key theoretical pillars for analysing meaningful work. To showcase how the subjective and objective dimensions of autonomy, recognition and dignity interact, we discuss six tendencies that combine the dimensions in different ways and range from strong and balanced cases of meaningful work to weak and unstable, but also meaningless work. In this way, the article promotes a novel meaningful work framework that captures the complexity and ambivalence of meaningful work within the realm of the capitalist labour process and amplifies the strength of a meaningful work framework that treats meaningful work and meaningless work as a dynamic continuum.
Is the exploration of the subjective and objective dimension of meaningful waged-work pointless as current trends in the capitalist regime, namely financialization and managerialization, inevitably lead to the prevalence of useless jobs that possess no value? This position has most recently been prominently advocated by David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs (2018). Deploying data from the European Working Conditions Surveys, Magdalena Soffia, Alex Wood and Brendan Burchell critically assess in their article ‘Alienation Is Not “Bullshit”: An Empirical Critique of Graeber’s Theory of BS Jobs’ five hypotheses that they derived from Graeber’s thesis. Even though the authors agree with the significance of workers’ experience of doing meaningless work, their findings do not support Graeber’s claims of the extent of ‘bullshit jobs’ and the factors that lead to workers experiencing undertaking work that is not useful. Soffia et al. promote Marx’s writings on alienation as an alternative approach to understand how the social relations of work significantly shape the experience of useless work. Thereby, the article stresses that battling draconian workplaces and degrading managerial regimes is essential to unleash the potential of work as a meaningful experience.
In ‘Families under Pressure: The Costs of Vocational Calling, and What Can Be Done about Them’, Stephanos Anastasiadis and Anica Zeyen explore the dark side of meaningful work by analysing the burden of work calling for the person and her family. Even though the elusive sociological notion of ‘calling’ and its connection to work is conceptually distinct to meaningful work, it plays a prominent role in contemporary meaningful work discourses (for an overview please see Yeoman et al., 2019). The idea of work as calling goes back to Max Weber’s (2001[1930]) classic on the emergence of the Protestant work ethic that infused a normative order into early capitalism, characterizing calling as ‘God’s commandment to the individual to work for the divine glory’ (p. 106). In the meaningful work literature, calling is deployed as emerging from within the person and is thereby an individualized experience that is tied to a person’s identity and underpins one’s meaningful engagement with work. Yet, it has been argued that those who pursue their calling are shown to be also more prone to self-exploitation and workaholism (Bunderson and Thompson, 2009). This dark side of work as calling is the focus of Anastasiadis and Zeyen, who put the spotlight in their conceptual article on the burden families of called employees have to cope with. The authors argue that called employees display a strong tendency to prioritize their work over family commitments, which is informed among other factors by self-exploitative behaviour that hampers their boundary management abilities. Through an ethics of care framework, the article makes the case that organizations have the responsibility to take care of called employees and in particular their families.
In their article ‘Killing Them “Softly” (!): Exploring Work Experiences in Care-Based Animal Dirty Work’, Linda Tallberg and Peter Jordan explore the reality of animal shelter work.
There is a strong perception in the wider public that animal shelter work is meaningful work, as shelter workers have been reported to enter the occupation with passion and the perception that they are pursuing their calling (Schabram and Maitlis, 2017). Yet, the reality of animal shelter work is shattered with contradictory organizational demands and professional values that result in contradictory ideologies of care, rationality and control. Informed by autoethnographic research, the authors analyse the dilemma between caring and killing that is at the heart of animal shelter work. The article illuminates the emotional burden combined with perceptions of powerlessness shelter workers cope with when killing unwanted animals in order to control the shelter population and meet the financial and spatial limitation of the organization.
Meaningful work research has thus far been silent on disabled workers’ wants and experiences of meaningful work. Indeed, not only does meaningful work literature focus predominantly on high-skilled workers in the Global North, but also on physically and psychologically healthy workers. Anne Revillard makes a first step towards filling this void and explores in her article ‘Disabled People Working in the Disability Sector: Occupational Segregation or Personal Fulfilment?’ the ambivalent experience of work in the disability sector of workers with mobility or visual impairments. Utilizing Thomas’s social relational model to connect the political economy of disability with its psycho-emotional dimension, Revillard showcases that the experiences of this group is multi-layered, ranging from the perception of their work as a means of self-fulfilment and antecedent of meaningfulness to a sense of relegation and degradation. By emphasizing the psycho-emotional dimension of disability, Revillard offers an important understanding for exploring the relationship between the political economy of work and employment and its impact on disabled workers’ experience of the meaning of work.
Even though the relationship between relational work and meaningful work has neither conceptually nor empirically been explored in detail, meaningful work literature illustrates how workers derive significant meaning, but also economic advantages, from creating, sustaining, enriching, terminating and negotiating interpersonal relations at work with customers and co-workers. In ‘It’s Not Just Sex: Relational Dynamics between Street-Based Sex Workers and Their Regular Customers’, Oselin and Hail-Jares draw on 36 qualitative interviews with street-based sex workers in Washington DC, USA. The authors highlight the advantages of relational work, such as a relatively stable income stream, financial benefits and a reduction of risk and its disadvantages that refer to the illegality of this work and the challenges relational work poses on establishing and maintaining professional boundaries between the client and the sex worker. The article unravels that street sex work is in many ways not so different to other interactive service business ventures and the way relational work is used in meaningful ways.
With few exceptions, meaningful work discourses have focused on formal and paid employment as empirical prototypes of work. This resulted in scant knowledge about the nature, ingredients and challenges of meaningful volunteering work. In the article ‘Betwixt and Between: The Invisible Experiences of Volunteers’ Body Work’, Katharine Venter suggests that volunteers performing body work experienced meaning by embedding their labour in the wider social relationships that crosscut between informal, formal, public, private and paid and unpaid dimensions of social life. In this way, Venter also makes a case for a total social organization of labour framework to overcome the dichotomy between paid and unpaid work.
Meaningful work discourses have neglected thus far an in-depth discussion of the ontology of work. Sociology has a well-established track record in discussing the thought of work and analysing it as a context-dependent activity that is socially created and performed relationally. The importance of investigating who defines work and with what consequences is evident in Patricia Ward’s contribution to this issue. Informed by qualitative research on refugee volunteers in Jordan’s aid sector, Ward explores in ‘The Worth of their Work: The (In)visible Value of Refugee Volunteers in the Transnational Humanitarian Aid Sector’ how sociolegal mechanisms render volunteering work invisible by delineating it as noneconomic. Ward contributes important insights from the Global South, illustrating that when volunteering work is framed as aid and characterized as noneconomic activity, the meaningful labour volunteers perform becomes devalued, degraded and invisible. The degradation of volunteering work as aid is a multi-directional process that caused volunteers to experience different forms of precarity that related to their contested relationship with aid organizations.
Madhusree Jana and Anita Hammer theorize in their article ‘Reproductive Work in the Global South: Lived Experiences and Social Relations of Commercial Surrogacy in India’ surrogacy as a meaningful, yet stigmatized and exploitative social activity that contributes significantly to value creation. Against the backdrop of structural inequalities that characterize commercial surrogacy in North India, the authors explore the political economy of reproductive work by identifying the mechanisms of recruitment, contracting and control of surrogates through dense networks of social and material relations that are ingrained in exploitative structures that inform surrogates’ powerlessness vis-a-vis fertility clinics and agents. The article poses important questions for research on meaningful work and beyond, such as whether meaningful work can exist when its existence is rooted in structural inequalities, such as exploitation and dependency, and goes along with experiences of alienation.
That meaningful work can inform distinct moral dilemmas to workers is discussed by the On The Frontline (OTF) article ‘Moral Dilemma of Striking: A Medical Worker’s Response to Job Duty, Public Health Protection and the Politicization of Strikes’. Yao-Tai Li presents the first-hand account of Jenna Ng who works as a medical worker in Hong Kong and went on strike together with more than 9000 colleagues to protest against the government’s refusal to close the border during the COVID-19 pandemic to protect the medical workforce and the health system. The decision to strike fuelled the tension between medical workers’ professional commitment to protect public health and their concerns about their own health and wellbeing. Thereby, the article elaborates the inner conflicts of deeply meaningful work that intersects between self-responsibility, occupational responsibility for others and the moral texture of striking during a pandemic.
‘When Values and Ethics of Care Conflict: A Lived Experience in the Roman Catholic Church’ is the second OTF article in this issue and presents the narrative of Esther, a female youth work leader. Faith-based organizations are often portrayed as genuine hubs for meaningful work. Indeed, Esther reports ‘a calling to serve the church [. . .] a very deep calling to work with young people’. And yet, she experiences a clash between institutional and personal values of clerical leaders and the congregation in the Roman Catholic Church in England. The article gives voice to her position on care, gender and participation, identifies how these differ to the clerical leaders she has been subject to, her relation to the congregation and how she copes with the discrepancies emerging from these relations.
This issue makes the case that sociology is well-equipped to explore meaningful and meaningless work. Indeed, despite conceptual disparity, the articles in this issue pave the way for the development of new sociological understandings about the continuum of meaningful work–meaningless work in different workplace settings. By illustrating how workers fight for and struggle over meaningful work in different ways, the articles emphasize that meaningful and meaningless work are subjectively experienced but enabled or constrained by the formal organization of work and its conditions. In this way, an alternative to the dichotomous understanding of meaningful and meaningless work in the meaningful work debate is overcome and the strength of a critical analysis of the conditions, structures and relations of work that constrain the experience of meaningful work is amplified. To further establish the field of meaningful work in the sociology of work, more theoretical discussions on its ingredients, boundaries and politics are needed.
