doi: 10.1177/0090591715600035

(p.7) Nussbaum and Weidel are right that human beings need not just work but quality work. My point has been that the structure of work determines its quality. Formal structures of firm ownership and control pervasively affected what countless human beings can be and do, with ripple effects throughout families and societies. They condition the very possibility of the kind of cooperation and mutual recognition that constitutes meaningfulness in the sphere of labour. Absent an enquiry into these structures, we default to the neoliberal assumption that an economy dominated by autocratic firms owned by absentee investors is optimal and that development...

"The relationship between workers and managers is in many cases ultimately an issue of decision-making power and authority. In many workplaces management enjoys a wide range of decision-making powers with regard to the workers. This decision-making power includes the determination of a worker’s actual work activity (e.g., whether a worker carries out task A or task B, with A and B possibly varying quite significantly in complexity, demandingness and fulfillingness), the change of fundamental working conditions (e.g., hours of employment, access to and quality of tools and equipment, location and actual workplace, etc.) as well as the prescription of strategic...

(p.10) I aim to show that to engage in the conceptual evaluation of meaningful work is not simply an exercise in remote abstraction, but directs us toward the pragmatic political possibility of ensuring that all work possesses the structure for meaningfulness. Furthermore, not only can the value of meaningfulness in the concept of meaningful work be described, but social institutions can be arranged according to normative principles conducive to enabling all persons to attribute meaning content to their lives because of the work they do. Following Kovacs (1986), I take work to be ‘a basic mode of being in the world’,...