(p.140) Intervening in the market processes to bring about greater satisfaction of the particular preference for meaningful work unfairly privileges certain preferences (and the people to whom they happen to be important) over other preferences (and people), and this is morally wrong. The key point is that there are a great many goods other than meaningful work that people might reasonably pursue via their economic activity. There is no good perfectionist case that meaningful work trumps these other goods, and no good paternalist case that overruling people's own judgements to pursue some mix of goods other than meaningful work would advance...

(p.144) In some range of these cases, a welfarist egalitarian might be able to block the complaint of the frustrated fans of meaningful work from having a claim to extra resources in response to their frustration, on the ground that it is the fault or voluntary choice of the fans that has placed them in this predicament. But in other cases, this excuse compatible with welfarism for declining to intervene will not be available (see Arneson 2000; 2001; 2007). Suppose these people have come to have a need for meaningful work through prudent and responsible conduct of life, so one cannot...

(p.12) Workplace dignity can be considered not just a concept in management studies (Lucas, 2015; Lucas et al., 2013), but a paradigm that offers an alternative perspective on 12 hegemonic management discourse and theorizing. It responds to the current debates around the tensions between shareholder and stakeholder value and the rising gap between corporate profit and wage stagnation (Lazonick, 2014). However, in contrast to proposed solutions around balancing organizational and shareholder interest in profit maximization with the needs of the environment, a dignity paradigm offers a more radical proposal towards today’s questions. A dignity paradigm confronts the problematic nature of the...

(p.14) Following a dignity logic, new meanings for resilience in the workplace can be generated. In contrast to a neoliberal anchoring, a dignity-perspective offers a number of key principles in relation to resilience at work. While resilience denotes the ability to bounce back from adversity at work, a dignity paradigm does not advance this concept as instrumental and as an individualized responsibility. In contrast, while dignity assumes intrinsic worth, it also denotes resilience as an important capability of human beings. As adversity is part of everyday life of every human being, it is indeed important to strengthen the resilience capabilities of...

(p.171) Although we do not seek to romanticize precarity, our research illustrates that artistic workers may have different experiences of precarity than other kinds of workers affected by the shift to casualized employment, such as retail service workers or contract academics. However, we note that for craft vendors, a strong sense of identity as proud, independent artisans and an attachment to the autonomy inherent in their work, as well as conditions of this work itself, may actually hinder their abilities and desires to work collectively or to advocate for changes that might ameliorate more negative aspects of their precarious work conditions,...

(p.182) For many, the major draws of artistic labor and self-employment are autonomy, freedom, and flexibility. Vending at the craft market offered a relatively low-cost and lowcommitment opportunity for artisans to sell their own products and reach a large customer base without having to invest in retail space or commit to set days and hours of work. However, as scholarly research on flexible, creative, non-standard self-employment shows, these qualities almost invariably come at the expense of security, income, benefits, unionization, and stability. Stress, long hours, and self-sacrifice may become an accepted standard in casualized creative labor, as the individual “autonomous” worker...

(p.46) Postcapitalism within the context of platform-based sharing economy as we have revealed, may not be an anti-capitalist alternative but it has presented new challenges, insights, and configurations of capitalism. One such expression of postcapitalism that this article has reflected on is the work and lives of Uber drivers. Driving for Uber is a personalized, commercial endeavor, established in the dark spaces that current business models and legislation are only starting to venture into. It does not remedy threats to instability, precariousness or work intensification. Rather, for some drivers, it exacerbates these realities.

(p.140) Meanwhile my beans, the length of whose rows, added together, was seven miles already planted, were impatient to be hoed, for the earliest had grown considerably before the latest were in the ground; indeed they were not easily to be put off. What was the meaning of this so steady and self-respecting, this small Herculean labor, I knew not. I came to love my rows, my beans, though so many more than I wanted. They attached me to the earth, and so I got strength like Antaeus. But why should I raise them? Only Heaven knows. This was my curious...

(p.143) When my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music echoed to the woods and the sky, and was an accompaniment to my labor which yielded an instant and immeasurable crop. It was no longer beans that I hoed, nor I that hoed beans; and I remembered with as much pity as pride, if I remembered at all, my acquaintances who had gone to the city to attend the oratorios.

(p.66) Since neither the burdens nor rewards of work are proportionately shared under capitalist modes of production though, one criticism of capitalism is that it inadequately compensates workers for the sacrifices that they endure. Karl Marx’s concept of exploitation may be read as this kind of critique, since for him workers are exploited under capitalism because their wages are systematically less than the value of the goods their efforts produce. As Axel Honneth’s early analysis has stressed though, there is a second line of critique that also stems from Marx, but which invokes a very different underlying conception of the role...

(p.67) I argue that one intrinsic contribution of work to human life is to express what Richard Sennett terms craftsmanship – the “desire to do a job well for its own sake” 5 – and that craftsmanship in this sense provides a normative standard against which the organisation of work can be assessed. More precisely, I argue that craftsmanship can meet the standards of social critique within the Critical Theory tradition, especially as Honneth has interpreted this tradition.

(p.72) [C]raftsmanship at work carries normative significance because the opportunity to “work well” can substantially affect workers’ well-being under contemporary social conditions, where well-being is conceived in broadly Aristotelian terms.