The contribution of meaningfulness to the work of democratic will formation

Abstract

A response to Axel Honneth’s 2021 Walter-Benjamin Lectures on ‘The Working Sovereign’

Introduction

The organisation and experience of work is under pressure from technological change, amplified by demands arising from the Covid 19 pandemic and the urgencies of sustainability transitions. Consequences for work regimes are ambivalent and contested. As organisations take advantage of new technologies to secure control of work processes and outcomes, many scholars argue that worker autonomy has been degraded, exacerbating tendencies towards poor quality and exploitative work (Barley, 2020). Bakhshi et al. (2018) find that, due to investments in machine learning, one-tenth of occupations are likely to grow and one-fifth are likely to decline, with high levels of uncertainty regarding the impact on 7 out of 10 occupations. However, they also find that nearly all US job growth since 1980s has been in occupations requiring high social skills that are among the ‘tools for the rich and versatile coordination which supports a productive workplace’ (Bakhshi et al., 2018: 21). Thus, a complex set of factors is shaping technology and work, with tensions between the importance of worker autonomy for maintaining organisational culture and sociotechnical practices, and management use of technology in attempts to gain control over work processes. Drawing upon European cross-national surveys, Gallie (2019: 377) finds that initiative and task discretion are important to employees. The British Skills and Employment Surveys show that 57% of people who have little influence over organisational decisions want more participation. But technological solutions to the control/autonomy tension may be shutting down opportunities for them to take part in shaping their work and organisations. For both functional and ethical reasons, organisations can make the control/autonomy tension productive for developing human capabilities by democratising work. Increasing worker influence over the design of – and involvement in – work processes and organisational decision-making is formative of their cognitive and ethical skills. Such skills are needed by citizens to participate effectively in the public realm. This opens up new frontiers for humanised work regimes, where occupational and civic work are combined in participatory activities for maintaining and enhancing democratic systems. In this way, the value of paid and unpaid work is reclaimed as central to the democratic way of life, and hence to the forms of human flourishing democracy affords.

In his 2021 Walter-Benjamin Lectures Axel Honneth (2021) examines how we can critique unacceptable working conditions when the ideological backdrop to the experience of work means people struggle to articulate the harms done to them by alienating and isolating structures, processes, and practices of modern work, with the consequence that they are unable to form the solidarity needed to resist exploitative and degrading working conditions. To find a way forward, Honneth argues that work derives its value from its contribution to the capacity of people to participate in democratic will formation. He ties legitimate and normatively desirable working conditions to those needed for people to acquire the sense of efficacy, confidence, and capabilities to participate as equals in democratic will formation, where worker democracy plays a key role in providing contexts for such capabilities to be developed.

In outlining his proposal, Honneth (2021) focusses upon our anxiety that working conditions are worsening. The swiftness of technological change has the potential not only to degrade working conditions, but also to threaten the elimination of work as a collective endeavour, and source of social progress. Given this, Honneth is rightly concerned with what is realistic and possible to achieve right now. He argues that the speed and scale of change demands an instrumental ideal of work, which can bring forward public policies and organisational practices aimed at alleviating unacceptable working conditions for everyone. To this end, he outlines an ideal of work as socially necessary work – a contributive good that enables people to access the resources and form the capabilities they need to participate in democratic will formation. Honneth considers two other ideals of work to fall short of the necessary pragmatism. The first is meaningful work, understood as subjectively valuable or personally satisfying labour. The second is objectively valuable labour, or the effort to achieve the intrinsic value of work through free and joint cooperative activities. For Honneth, both these ideals of work are intrinsic goods. As such, they lack the motivating drive of a consequentialist ideal – one that is effective in stimulating social change in the organisation of work.

Describing and implementing practical pathways to humanising work regimes is an essential project. However, in reaching for a manageable programme that can deliver better working conditions in real-time, Honneth’s (2021) treatment of meaningful work marginalises the role such work could play in countering degraded work, and supporting the human capability development needed for participating in democratic will formation. Honneth dismisses meaningful work as a too demanding ideal: one which cannot be fully realised in all kinds of work, and so is not useful for critiquing already existing working conditions. To make this move, Honneth relies upon a concept of meaningful work as non-alienated, uncoerced labour, generating intrinsic goods relevant to the individual worker. Honneth does not deny our need for meaning and purpose, but in the task of evaluating work and defining valuable aspects of social labour, he ascribes little critical value to meaningful work. As an ideal of personally satisfying, intrinsically valuable goods, meaningful work is not graspable for the pragmatic transformation of undesirable work regimes. Meaningful work is too diffuse and individualised for evaluating work relations, and so cannot play a significant role in a critical conception of socially valuable labour that motivates improvements in working conditions. However, this seems like a missed opportunity. A more expansive understanding of meaningful work could provide resources for Honneth’s project of describing routes to better working conditions for everyone. I shall argue that these resources are rooted in the potential role of meaningful work for forming the ethical capabilities that people need for contributing to democratic will formation.

More recent understandings of meaningful work draw upon ethical and relational accounts of meaningfulness, where the meaning content of work is co-constructed in public arenas of collective action (see Bailey et al., 2019; Yeoman et al., 2019). For example, in my own work, I have described meaningful work as collective action structured by relational goods of autonomy as non-alienation, freedom as non-domination, and dignity as being recognised as having a life of one’s own to lead. In this formulation, activities are directed towards taking care of beings and things with independent value and moral significance, through activities and orientations that are experienced as emotionally engaging and worthwhile (Yeoman, 2014a, 2014b, 2021a). Meaningful work draws upon the moral value of meaningfulness, yielding critical perspectives that citizen-workers can apply to the means and ends of their collective action, and in so doing illuminate normatively undesirable ways of organising, even up to the societal level. Of significance for Honneth’s project, the lack of meaningful work deprives people of opportunities to form their meaning-making capabilities, and inhibiting confidence in their status as equal co-authorities in meaning-making. Capabilities and status are both necessary for participating in the ethical and practical demands of democratic will formation. Without them, illegitimate attempts to distort organisational level meaning-systems are more likely to succeed by depriving people of positive meaning sources they could carry into deliberative arenas of democratic decision-making. The harms to the organisation include dysfunctional organisational habits such as upward management and wilful blindness.

This view upon the instrumental importance of meaningful work challenges attempts to reduce meaningful work to subjective experience. Rather, work structured by the moral value of meaningfulness, and constituted by the relevant goods of autonomy, freedom and dignity, is contributive to the practical reasoning of democratic will formation. Or the question of ‘what ought we to do’, understood here as ‘what are the morally viable means by which we act together to achieve morally viable ends?’ When people co-create meaningful work, they are afforded insights into the interplay (integrations, tensions, dilemmas and contradictions) between the objective and subjective dimensions of meaningfulness – insights that can be carried into the content and process of democratic will formation. Worker voice and representation provides action contexts productive for the co-creation of meaning, and the formation of meaning-making capabilities that are also general ethical capabilities for democratic deliberation. Thus, meaningful work has consequentialist features that affords important resources for supporting Honneth’s project. Solving complex problems – which are the stuff democratic will formation has to work upon – increasingly involves combining occupational and civic work into collective action within associational ecosystems of private, public, and civic organisations. Even relatively ordinary jobs often require people to work across organisational boundaries, in networks and temporary projects, or multi-stakeholder initiatives involving occupational work and civic work (Yeoman, 2022: 44). In modern complex societies, democratic will formation has to emerge from the dynamic interaction between different action contexts at multiple levels of economic, social and political organising. In fits and starts, democracy is becoming a distributed system of deliberation and representation, such that ‘most democracies are complex entities in which a wide variety of institutions, associations and sites of contestation accomplish political work’ (Mansbridge et al., 2012: 1–2). Holdo (2020: 2) argues that deliberative systems require a relational perspective, in which participants critically evaluate sites of intersubjective encounter for their capacity to foster ‘deep learning of social meaning and practice’. And here technology can play an enabling or disabling role in creating new kinds of work meanings around worker voice. In the implementation of worker engagement technology, for example, the WEST principles, aimed at identifying worker exploitation in global supply chains, seek to ensure that dialogic spaces are equipped with digital tools to support worker voice (Yeoman, 2020: 106). Using the value of meaningfulness in deliberation picks out integrations of objective and subjective value that can translate resistance and contestation into novel responses for collaborative organising. Amazon workers, for example, understand themselves to be not only mobilising for better working conditions, but also connected to many others, in multiple arenas, who are working to mitigate the climate emergency (see @AMZNforClimate and @AMZNSolidarity).

Conceptualising meaningful work

Our need for meaning in work and in life is a neglected dimension of human motivation that could be used more consciously to inform work design and public policy. Work that lacks consistency with the value of meaningfulness suppresses vital aspects of our humanity, with consequential impacts for not only work but also political dissatisfaction and social breakdowns. The lack of meaningful work cannot easily be remedied elsewhere in our lives because of the continuing central importance of work – despite forecasts of the technological elimination of human work.

Work structured by the moral value of meaningfulness occupies a distinct presence in the normative landscape. It is not just work that is satisfying for the individual – a kind of faded image of non-alienated, creative activity. Drawing upon the philosophy of life meaning, the moral value of meaningfulness describes how subjective attachment to objectively valuable beings and things is a source of human motivation and life-identity (see, e.g. Wolf, 2010). Gallie (2019: 373) describes meaningful work as highlighting the ‘importance to people of pursuing activities that they view as worthwhile in terms of their values’. People want to experience involvement with things and things of independent value and moral significance in their working day. Meaningful work is a normative concept combining intrinsic goods and instrumental social value, such that work is ‘meaningful to oneself and meaningful to others’ and also ‘meaningful independently of personal experience and social perception’ (Michaelson, 2021, original emphasis). It is also a multi-level concept where processes of meaning-making and normative governance of meaning-systems manifests at different scales of organising (Yeoman, 2021c). In organisational contexts, formulations of meaningful work directed to realising the good for morally valuable objects – beings, things, projects etc. – affords meaningful work a public character, where activities are evaluated by their instrumental impacts upon the world.

Understanding meaningful work to be co-constructed, processual and collective implies that the meaningfulness of work is not simply a matter of personal satisfaction but entails collective and public judgements upon values and meanings which people use to solve complex social and organisational problems. Of particular importance in applying the moral value of meaningfulness in practical ethics is critical evaluation of integrations of the objective/subjective dimensions. People are better equipped to engage in such critical evaluation when their work is structured to deliver the relational goods of autonomy, freedom and dignity. When combined with employee voice systems, such relational goods provide enriched collective action contexts where each person has a part to play in surfacing, augmenting, and promoting meanings that underpin the shared culture, norms and values needed for complex coordination.

Conceptualised this way, meaningful work is a potentially important resource, in its own right, for supporting Honneth’s aims, and especially in developing his account of the instrumental value of work as consisting in its contribution to democratic will formation. Honneth argues that socially useful labour – and the social relations associated with this work – is the most impactful ideal for critically assessing whether work is adequately organised, and for directing people to the ultimate aim of free democratic participation for all. Normatively desirable work inculcates political efficacy, or the confidence that one has the resources, abilities, and self-respect to speak up in public for a. As a critical ideal, socially useful labour picks out the emancipatory potentials arising from contestation and struggle happening inside existing work regimes, but below the political register. However, these are pre-political potentials until they are activated by informal sites of resistance or formal democratic organisations, where meanings derived from meaning-making are subject to critical evaluation (Yeoman, 2014a). Honneth directs us to such possibilities when he suggests that informal sites of resistance can generate communities of respect, or ‘counter cultures of respect’, where people draw upon ‘unexpressed meaning’ to co-create and co-construct positive meanings in their work activities and working relationships. When brought forward and evaluated using the moral value of meaningfulness, such sources of meaning are promising for illuminating emancipatory possibilities, helping people to co-create work communities, and providing them with the solidaristic basis to resist unacceptable working conditions.

Meaningful work and practical reasoning

So, meaningful work – derived from the moral value of meaningfulness - involves interactive social processes that integrate the moral-ethical objective dimension with the cognitive-emotional subjective dimension (Yeoman et al., 2019). When applied to social contribution, this ethical structure illuminates features of work such as caring for, engaging with, and fulfilling values inherent in other beings and things. In a critical conception of meaningful work, beings and things become worthy – acquire independent significant and moral value – in social, historical and social contexts that are shaped by personal and collective interpretations of meanings. When participating in processes of meaning-making, under conditions of equal status and equipped with the relevant capabilities, people use these interpretations to build organisational and societal meaning-systems that underpin culture and knowledge, thereby aiding social coordination and decision-making in collective action. By adopting meaningful work as a viable social objective, citizen-workers can bring forward resources which help them to collectively evaluate what is wrong with the current state of work, and to envision what work could and ought to be. Importantly, the instrumental value of meaningfulness in forming ethical capabilities for practical reasoning is a potent – and undeveloped – resource for critical evaluation in democratic will formation. Contributive work raises ethical questions that can be examined using the interplay between the objective and subjective dimensions of the moral value of meaningfulness; such as, for example, What is worth valuing? How well are valuable beings and things doing? How are they impacted by our caring activities? These questions play a role in the practical reasoning of democratic will formation.

Outlining a role for meaningful work in practical reasoning suggests that, even when it is only partially realised in work, meaningful work is a useful regulatory ideal for governing and transforming work and organisations, as well as stimulating variety in the range of lives available for people to live. When allied to the institutional conditions for supporting status and capabilities in meaning-making processes, meaningful work provides meaning sources and a critical stance that enriches democratic will formation. These institutional conditions are not guarantees that everyone will experience their work as meaningful but are structures and practices which provide opportunities for people to co-create meaning in occupational and civic work, and to use meanings to coordinate their collective action and steer innovation. An institutional framing for promoting meaningful work in organisations combines governing strategic meaning-systems with mobilising meaning-making processes in occupational work (Yeoman, 2021c). As part of a democratic system, such an institutional framing has the potential to be replicated beyond the boundaries of the organisation by enabling citizen-workers to develop a general ethical capability for participating in the governance of collective meaning-systems at different scales of organising, and for combining civic work and occupational work in democratic will formation.

Practical reasoning

I am arguing that meaningful work – when normatively governed by inclusive deliberative social processes and framed by institutional meaning-systems – plays an important role in the collective practical reasoning needed for democratic will formation. In the cognitive sciences, rationality is increasingly understood to be interactive and social, involving combinations of intuition and reason-giving. In his psychology of rationality, Daniel Kahneman (2012) identities two routes to decision-making - intuition and deliberation. In a 2022 BBC Radio 4 interview, Kahneman (2022) proposes that we can overcome cognitive biases in decision-making by designing organisations that are able to engineer better judgement-making procedures. Under supportive institutional conditions, the two pathways of intuition and deliberation can interact more effectively to improve decision-making. Organisational procedures aimed at facilitating deliberative worker voice can be used to stimulate multiple perspectives upon a collective problem, and delay intuition. Deliberation improves organisational decision-making by tapping into diverse sources of data, including meanings, values, emotions, narratives, and cognitions. However, Kahneman (2022) says this is a new field of knowledge: ‘the human engineering of judgement and decision-making is a discipline yet to be born’. Meaningful work, by engaging with diverse sources of meanings in practical reasoning, and when governed by democratically legitimated organisational meaning-systems, has an important role to play in any new discipline of human decision-making. Furthermore, meaningful work provides insights for a synthesis of occupational and civic work in democratic systems.

All work contains emancipatory traces consistent with the requirements for work to be meaningful. Such traces are interpretations of the experience of work, arising from reflections and evaluations of the meaning-content of work: what work is, how it is done, what standing it has for people in their lives. In many work settings – and especially when these settings are democratically organised – these meanings are pre-political potentials that offer dynamic resources for people to make the most of participating in democratic will formation. When pre-political potentials are activated by worker democracy, they are made available for translation into the public understanding and knowledge needed for democratic will formation.

The moral value of meaningfulness is potentially a powerful resource for surfacing emancipatory potentials, putting them to work in practical reasoning concerned with the means and ends of collective action. Oliva (2019) derives from Nozick an understanding of meaningfulness as ‘a relational dimension of reality’ where ‘the meaning of life is not one value among many, but rather represents the connectedness of human life’ (Oliva, 2019: 469). Oliva (2019) observes that relational accounts of meaning in life can accommodate ‘volitional’ and ‘intelligibility’ understanding of meaningfulness, where volitional or action-based understandings are concerned with engaging with projects of objective value (Wolf, 2010) or personal satisfaction (Frankfurt, 1988) and intelligibility or reflection-based understandings are related to meaning in life being ‘something that we understand and contemplate’ (Oliva, 2019: 477). Bringing together the objective and subjective dimensions of meaningful work involves an appreciation of values inhering in beings and things, of their moral-ethical significance: ‘Values without meanings are motiveless; meanings without values lack moral viability’ (Yeoman, 2020: 41). Perceiving and appreciating values collectively depends upon explorations of meanings being made intelligible for acts of organising through intra- and inter-subjective processes of meaning-making.

In sites of meaningful work citizen-workers engage with ethical/moral and cognitive/emotional dimensions of work. Such sites provide a training ground for applying integrative rationality (intuition and deliberation) in multiple spheres of collective action, and especially where these involve a synthesis of occupational and civic work. Wallace (2006: 395) identifies a form of ‘eudaimonistic reflection’, where people assess ‘whether engaging in these pursuits is worthwhile, something that makes our own lives choice-worthy as human lives’. Eudaimonistic reflection incorporates into practical reasoning the objective and subjective dimensions of meaningfulness, thereby allowing participants to include in moral and public deliberation not only those values associated with impartial morality but also those values they derive from their particular projects, people and other things, such that they ‘find ways of integrating the various objectives that matter, bringing them together in a single life that makes appropriate room for each’ (Wallace, 2006: 404). But eudaimonistic reasoning has public as well as personal relevance. In sites of meaningful work, the private inner world of meanings and the public realm of meaning-systems intersect dynamically. Murdoch (2001) says that practical reasoning involves moral attention where we harness ‘normative-descriptive talk in the presence of a common object’ (Wallace, 2006: 426) as a form of moral learning through which we build ‘structures of value around us’ (Wallace, 2006: 429). This is a tensional process of difference-making that generates meaning resources both for getting the work done and for democratic will formation.

Reasoning that makes critical use of the value of meaningfulness enriches the democratic group life, making deliberative spaces productive for excavating, interpreting, and curating meanings, understanding, and knowledge of what constitutes the good for morally valuable objects (Yeoman, 2021b). When occupational and civic work is directed towards problems of common concern, the value of meaningfulness provides an evaluative standpoint, enabling people to appraise meanings and develop the ‘ability to integrate challenging or ambiguous situations into a framework of personal meaning using conscious, value-based reflection’ (van Den Heuvel et al., 2009: 510). This ability applies not only to personal meaning, but also to the public meanings by which people coordinate collective action and joint purpose. Meanings help people to ‘actually know what to do together in the next few minutes, hours, or years’ (Lo and Eliasoph, 2012). Mary Parker Follett – the pioneer theorist and practitioner of the democratic group life - says that purpose is made out of action: purpose is not ‘preexistent, but involved in the unifying act which is the life process. It is man’s part to create purpose and to actualise it’ (Follett 1998 [1918]:58). We make collective purpose from inside the experience of acting together, since ‘ends and meanings truly and literally make each other’ (Follett, 1919: 579). Managerial attempts to forge organisational purpose in order to control the content of work and the motivation of employees have become widespread: ‘compelling purpose instils the organisation with value and through actively supporting employees to identify with and find meaning in it, stimulates commitment and inspires action’ (van Tuin et al. 2020: 2). But power asymmetries arising from the absence of worker democracy means that handed down versions of corporate purpose by managers and owners create legitimation problems. The moral value of meaningfulness can play a critical role in legitimating the means and ends of normatively desirable collective action within an institutional framework that combines the democratic governance of meaning-systems with inclusive meaning-making processes. Being able to participate in such a framework generates sources of meanings and forms capabilities that are relevant for participating in democratic will formation, more broadly.

Governing collective meaning-systems and mobilising meaning-making processes

As workers and citizens, we make our world by combining beings and things into complex ensembles that often acquire independent significance, and involve diverse intelligences and agents, both natural and artificial. Given the urgent question of how to sustain life within planetary boundaries, we need new ways of thinking and feeling with these complex ensembles. When the normative governance of meaning-systems is combined with processes of meaning-making at multiple levels of organising, eudaimonistic reflection is translated into a social rationality. Citizen-workers are afforded a basis for evaluating intuitions and reasons emerging from their interactions with complex ensembles. The problems these pose are the stuff of deliberation and democratic will formation. An important aspect of this social rationality is the active development of the relational inter-spaces where we make ourselves available to be influenced by the value inhering in other beings and things (Yeoman, 2020). Our relational entwinement with other beings and things is a ‘prime mover of human agency in the continuous work of cultivating its world’ (Cooper, 2005: 1690), presenting us with many complex problems which have the potential to become the target of democratic will formation, and requiring both occupational and civic work.

Democratically arranged work regimes mediate productive possibilities for translating meanings into values, knowledge, and understanding in collective action. Their capacity to do so depends upon harnessing different perspectives that arise from valuing and recognising the diversity of selves that inhabit work regimes. Sites of meaningful work, ordered by worker democracy, and incorporated into the governance of meaning-systems, afford us a sense of our individuality, of our unique selves in relation to others. An individuated sense of self is crucial to the possibility of social cooperation: ‘human groups flourish by capitalising on selves that are inherently different and maintain recognition of differentiated individuality, such as by moral accountability and the division of labour’ (Baumeister and von Hippel, 2020: 8). Seeing ourselves and others as individuals who matter by virtue of our personal distinctiveness underpins confidence in our status as equal co-authorities in meaning-making. This self-understanding gives us a sense of our dignity as particular persons with lives of our own to lead, and confidence that we possess perspectives and contributions only we can offer into practical reasoning. Indeed, called upon people engaged in community action to ‘give me your difference’ (Follett, in Yeoman, 2014a, 2014b; 175), as a kind of duty. For Nozick (1981), the process of meaning-making is of intrinsic value, generative of personal distinctiveness and collective patterns of living:

“This process is valuable because, in addition to containing valuable unities as its stages, it itself constitutes a pattern which unifies the widest diversity of human activity. Into this patterned process fall our hopes and activities, our desires to attain and to transcend, our search for value and meaning. Processes as well as resulting end states, becoming as well as being, can have value and can provide the context in which meaning is embedded” (Nozick, 1981: 616).

Meanings (symbols, norms, values, narratives) and life meaning (having reasons for action, significance, mattering) exist together on a spectrum – one which includes work as a potentially fruitful source of meanings, and a site for reasoning rooted in the value of meaningfulness. Repp (2018: 404) argues that ‘a meaningful life is one that is rich in perceived sign meaning’, where sign meanings are indispensable indicators of what things matter to us and thereby structuring how we value our lives. In her global meaning system model, Park (2010) combines content, or beliefs about the world/identity and goals/values, with judgement, or a sense of comprehensibility, mattering, and purpose. Evaluations of significance interact with subjective factors, such as ‘positive affect, engagement, conscience, mindfulness and spiritual resonance’ (Medlock, 2017: 10). Park (2017) identifies how meaning tensions, manifesting at various scales (micro, meso and macro), are a source of differences that can be rendered productive, given the right relational conditions. Sensitivity to the diversity of sign meanings stimulates pluralistic eudaimonistic reflection upon the context and nature of situations involving complex ensembles of beings and things.

Aliveness and attentiveness to meanings helps accumulate collective knowledge about the problem at hand. This is especially the case when we have something to care about, or investments and commitments relating to that problem, since ‘meaningfulness only arises in a life in which things matter’ (Repp, 2018: 412–413). And here sites of meaningful work yield many connections to beings and things that matter. However, the connection between sign meaning and life meaning is vulnerable to domination, indifference and disrespect in ways that have important implications for meaningful work. Organisational action contexts can result in meanings being appropriated, corrupted or eliminated to serve the interests of some at the expense of others. Broken or distorted links between values, meanings, understanding, and knowledge alienate people from one another, their activities, and even their own selves: ‘Without the interest, knowledge, or attention necessary to derive meanings from one’s experiences, one is likely to feel estranged from the world’ (Repp, 2018: 413). Using the value of meaningfulness to surface, explore and evaluate meanings in collective practical reasoning facilitates goals, actions, values and purposes from within the process itself. This helps to counter knowledge hiding and hoarding, silencing and marginalisation of people who have concerns about organisational behaviour, as well as mediating innovation in socio-technical practices. Hence, a governance framework for meaning-systems and processes of meaning-making proliferates meaningfulness within the democratic group process – enriching it with diverse meanings, experiences, reasons, intuitions and values.

Meaningful work, organisation and democratic will formation

To summarise where we are at this point: meaningful work as currently understood in the field is more complex than subjective experience of satisfaction or preferences. Work structured by the moral value of meaningfulness is processual, relational, and socially constructed using collective and public meanings that are directed at achieving external goods, including taking care of other beings and things. It brings forward ethical dimensions of practical reasoning and has the potential to expand the concept of socially useful labour, as well as support democratic will formation. This affords meaningful work an instrumental character, entailing contributive connections to valuable beings and things, especially those implicated in the complex ensembles constituting organisations and systems. In this way, meaningful work – properly conceived – could be retrieved to play an important role in Honneth’s project. The diversity of values, and the richness of meanings, constituting meaningful work are part and parcel of the pluralism necessary for democratic will formation. When activated by worker democracy, varieties of meanings provide ethical resources for surfacing the problems that we must collectively work upon. Such meanings inhabit the narratives, knowledge and understanding by which we mobilise around the complex problems that are one of the reasons why we need democratic will formation at all.

Furthermore, meaningful work mediates the collective work of creating and maintaining the organisation as a democratic entity (or indeed any kind of entity – democratic or otherwise). The urge to find life and work to be meaningful has afforded humanity powerful tools for social organisation. But these are relatively modern tools. If they are to contribute to a science for improving human decision-making, they must be brought more deliberately into policy and practice, particularly to identify and ensure equal distribution of the relevant status and capabilities. Our ability to use patterning to give meaning to the future, by using meaning-systems to orchestrate collective action, has permitted more and more complex forms of organising. Baumeister and von Hippel (2020:15) argue that ‘meaning enables organisation’ because meaning-making accumulates meanings into the organisational meaning-systems that provide cultural context, norms, and coordinate elements for creating and maintaining organisations. Meaning is critical for collective learning, building knowledge and creating culture in shared worlds as contexts for acting and being: ‘communication involves the social transmission of meaning’ (Baumeister and von Hippel, 2020: 7). But the processes of meaning-making through which such collective contexts are created must be ‘principled’ (Bruner, 1990). In the practical reasoning by which organisations and social worlds are created and maintained, the moral value of meaningfulness provides a standpoint for assessing the normative desirability of meaning-making in organising attempts.

When work is structured by the moral value of meaningfulness, emancipatory potentials – differences in meanings – can be brought into public arenas, to be activated for countering unacceptable working conditions. Even under poor quality working conditions people will hunt for meanings that can provide their work with a sense of mattering and significance, and generate sources of solidarity, connectedness and collective being. But when harnessed into meaningful work structured by autonomy, freedom and dignity, these flows of meanings are channelled into emancipatory pathways, and can be rendered productive for coordination at multiple levels of organising. Under conditions of worker democracy, positive meanings become available for evaluation and assessment, and constitutive of meaningful work, or work structured by the goods of meaningfulness. Meaningful work can therefore be adopted as a complementary strategy for alleviating unacceptable working conditions. Indeed, democratic will-formation can be considered a type of citizen work that itself can be organised to be more or less meaningful. We have seen the emergence and spread of new kinds of citizen work in both the public and private realms, such as, for example, urban place-making, multi-stakeholder initiatives in supply chains, mutual organisations in public services (JPI Urban Europe, 2020). Meaningfulness equips participants in civic work with the equal status and capabilities to surface, interpret, and endorse morally viable meanings implicated in complex problems of public concern that are related to caring for morally valuable beings and things. This includes elements relevant to a moral education that can facilitate democratic will formation, such as: having a valuable object to work upon, participating in surfacing and defining of the shared problem, experience in difference-crafting and the cultivation of fields of meaning, as well as imaginative expansiveness in what matters and has significance.

A politics of meaningfulness

The urge to realise the value of meaningfulness in our lives and work derives from a fundamental human need to feel that our beings and doings have value and significance. This need is expressive of our shared human nature as patterning, meaning-making, norm-generating creatures. As patterning creatures, we cannot help but make meaning: ‘it is a condition of being human to make meaning’ (Lips-Wiersma and Morris, 2009: 505). But to translate this instinct into an ethical and critical capability for evaluating and creating meaning-systems requires normatively desirable forms of work, organisation, and ways of life. And for this project, we need an active politics of meaningfulness. Such a politics must ensure that meaningful work is not reduced to ‘a product of management practices that fit attitudes [. . .] whilst neglecting the politics of working life and wider [. . .] dynamics’ (Laaser and Bolton, 2022). As a moral value, meaningfulness is formative at a societal level when human beings develop the social and collective capacity to evaluate desirable and undesirable meanings, and patterns of meanings. And it is now especially important to develop such a collective moral sensibility and capacity for evaluating meanings. This matters not only for critiquing unacceptable working conditions but also because lacking a sense of life having significance and value lies at the root of some of our most pressing political problems – such a sense of powerlessness and anxiety in the face of complexity that is fuelling populist and authoritarian politics.

We live in times of political uncertainty when many settled meaning-systems are being disrupted, providing opportunities for those who would exploit the confusion of change and transition to construct new meanings and narratives which serve their own interests at the expense of others. We face the potential erasure of many ways of life, the work that reproduces such ways of life, and the meaning-systems associated with them. In writing of the confinement of the native American Crow people to reservations, Lear (2006) highlights how practical reasoning for the Crow came to an end with the collapse of their way of life. He quotes Two Leggings, who said about the loss of the buffalo: ‘Nothing happened after that. We just lived’. Lear captures a ‘peculiar form of human vulnerability’ where impoverished or emptied frameworks for living a meaningful life deprive people of the symbolic meanings with which to understand events, and make their actions intelligible. Such losses are critical for anxiety and resentment, sometimes spilling over into politics, and seized upon by ‘entrepreneurs of hate’ (Reicher et al., 2005). For Lear, however, radical hope, or collective hope held onto stubbornly, despite the fracturing of meaning-systems and the meaningful lives they afford, provides a way to resist hate, and to re-make the future by crafting new subjectivities in a revitalised moral landscape.

When organised around deliberative contexts with the capacity to generate novel bases of meaning, meaningful work affords people the resources to participate in democratic will formation which is concerned with finding pathways through complexity and anxiety. Most importantly, transitioning to sustainable societies and economies may demand new forms of life, where we experience our interconnectedness to each other, and other being and things as a mutual inter-dependency by which all beings and things flourish together. This may involve, for example, the co-creation of more-than-human worlds – not just experiencing other living beings and ecosystems as object-relations but bringing them into shared social worlds as social relations. This account of meaning is more visceral and embodied than intelligibility, and more responsible and ethically reflective than action. It is derived from the relational structure of a life-value meaning-system that mirrors and replicates the meanings we derive from our relational experience of being-in-the world, of our mutual dependence with other people, living beings and ecosystems, extending to the material basis of the earth, atmosphere, rock, seas and technology.

So, the moral significance of something is not simply a private subjective and individualist assessment, but under conditions of worker democracy brings forth public claims related to objective value, or collective evaluations of ‘what is of worth’, as well as assessments of our subjective orientations to valuable beings and things. Indeed, much democratic will formation is directed at this question of ‘what is of worth’. People – as workers and citizens – must weigh up what is of value, form judgements, and in the end, make difficult choices. Even imperfectly realised meaningful work (constituted by participatory work) makes an important contribution to democratic will formation necessary for addressing questions of worth. And as theorists we should certainly claim and develop this territory. Because if social reformers abandon meaningful work as too difficult to realise, and thus as unhelpful for critiquing unacceptable working conditions, then we leave the field open to management elites and organisational designers. These groups certainly perceive the potential for meaningful work. Some are, right now, mounting efforts to create meaningful work in support of ideologies that benefit the organisation at the expense of workers or communities. When unaccountable power, unmediated by worker democracy, is permitted to shape meanings and meaning-systems, the potential harms are considerable because meaningful work programmes tap into more of our humanity than do employee engagement initiatives. For example, in a recent McKinsey blog (June 28, 2021 – ‘making work meaningful from the C-Suite to the Frontline’), three purpose archetypes are identified to help managers identify the ways in which their employees are aligned or misaligned with organisational purpose. Furthermore, neglecting the value of meaningfulness in societies and their politics leaves the field open to those manipulators of popular opinion who would capture public meaning systems to distort democratic will formation – and therefore acquire undue influence over the forms of life and work that society makes available to us.

But perhaps this is all simply too burdensome. And I would indeed admit that thinking of the moral value of meaningfulness in meaningful work and practical reasoning adds demands to Honneth’s proposal. However, I would also say the stakes are very high. We lose considerable resources for not only addressing undesirable working conditions, but also for developing the democratic way of life more broadly, if we push aside meaningful work as an unrealistic ideal, one that is too difficult to attain, and so is irrelevant to practical change. Since this is not the view of organisational managers and their HR departments, nor of policy makers searching for the next frontier to influence voters, I suggest meaningfulness requires our intellectual and practical attention. So, I turn to Viktor Frankl, and his 1972 speech on life meaning to the Toronto Youth Corps:

“[. . .] if you take man (and woman) as he really is, we make him worse, but if we over-estimate him [. . .] we promote him to what he really can be. So we have to be idealist in a way because then we wind up as the true, the real, realist [. . .] if we take man (and woman) as he should be, we make him capable of becoming what he can be [. . .]. If you don’t recognise a young man’s (and young woman’s) will to meaning, you make him worse, you make dull, you make him frustrated [. . .] there must be a spark or search for meaning. Let’s recognise this, let’s presuppose this and then you will elicit it from him [. . .] you will make him become what he is in principle capable of becoming’ (Frankl, 1972, https://www.ted.com/talks/viktor_frankl_why_believe_in_others, emphasis added).

By giving the organisation of work a stretching goal – a demanding regulative ideal such as meaningful work - we not only avoid making work worse, but also promote work to what it could be: a humanising experience that, whilst not fully realised, nonetheless helps us to participate in collective determinations of synoikismos, or how we are to live together.