(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...

Our findings indicated that the average amount won among those who chose to continue working was relatively high ($2.59 million), suggesting a relatively high monetary threshold for discontinuing work, and even among these high winners, a sizable number still continued working. For instance, a 64-year-old bus driver who won $20 million dollars stated (in the open-ended section of the questionnaire) that the “lottery is just a bonus that came my way, it has not or will not affect my work habits and goals in life.” (p. 415-6)

(p.14) Finding your work meaningful is an experience that reaches beyond the workplace and into the realms of the individual’s wider personal life. It can be a very profound, moving and even uncomfortable experience. It arises rarely and often in unexpected ways; it gives people pause for thought not just concerning work, but what life itself is all about. In experiencing our work as meaningful, we cease to be workers or employees and become human beings, reaching out in a bond of common humanity to others. For organizations seeking to “manage meaningfulness” the ethical and moral responsibility is very great, since...

(p.1) Meaningful work is a topic of significant interest at present in the management field, particularly in light of concerns over job quality and the availability of decent work (Bailey, Yeoman, Madden, Thompson, & Kerridge, 2018). Among recent debates, a growing body of literature has begun to shed light on the processes by which work is rendered meaningful to the individual worker (Mitra & Buzzanell, 2016; Rosso, Dekas, & Wrzesniewski, 2010). Central to these are a sense of unity with others, the perception that one’s work is of service to others or a transcendent cause, self-expression, and the development of one’s...

(p.2) Work always has a meaning for the individual worker which, as Budd (2011) has argued, can range at the extreme from being a curse, a disutility or, conversely, a source of freedom. However, not all work is meaningful, and meaningful work is not the same as the “meaning of” work. Meaningful work is conditional on its connection to something beyond the immediate tasks and roles, to something that is deemed, voluntarily, to be worthwhile in terms of overall life purpose (Bailey & Madden, 2017; Dik, Duffy, & Eldridge, 2009). Meaningful work is therefore work that goes “beyond the self” in...

(p.3) The affordances of work for the experience of meaningfulness are bound up in the social and ontological significance of the tasks we perform and the viewpoints of those in our netdom towards them (Mei, 2006). The implication is that work in and of itself has little or no inherent value as meaningful or meaningless, but rather the evaluation of these depends in large part on the perspective of the individual (Kenny, Whittle, & Willmott, 2011), whose viewpoint is formed within the context of the multiple, contested perspectives of netdom participants. One question that arises from this notion is who, specifically,...

(p.10) Our research reveals how meaningless work experiences arise through the relational processes of powerlessness, disconnection, devaluation and self-doubt. In dealing with these, we have shown that individuals deploy a complex and interconnected range of agential responses. Not all responses are geared towards the reinstatement of meaningfulness; rather, in some instances, individuals are concerned with coping with the experience of meaninglessness which some informants explicitly state to be an inevitable, yet episodic feature of their work (Bailey & Madden, 2016). Our research moves understandings of meaningful/meaningless work beyond the self-oriented mechanisms more commonly used to explain these, towards a more relational...

(p.434) As one of the principal domains in which experience is organized and self-under standing emerges (Gini 2001, Michaelson 2008), work is critical for agents' ongoing "search for meaning" (Frankl 1959). The question of whether and how work that is also paid employment can be experienced as meaningful in itself is debated within both social psychology and ethics, but largely in isolation from each other. Enquiries in social psychology are thereby denied the resources that might be provided by ethical enquiries for the critique of its findings, whilst ethics, as Aristotelians have long argued (Anscombe 1958), is hopelessly abstract if uninformed...

(p.2)

productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely automated away […]. But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning of not even so much of the ‘service’ sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those...

(p.5)

This is a profound psychological violence here. How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labour when one secretly feels one’s job should not exist? How can it not create a sense of deep rage and resentment.

Kaplan (1985) reports that in his study of 576 lottery winners in the USA, only 11% of them ceased working. Similarly, in a recent study, Arvey, Harpaz, and Hui (2001) disclosed that more than 86% of an American sample that won an average of US$3.39 million (sd US$5.08 million) in the lottery, continued working. Hence, these findings are supportive evidence that the hypothetical ‘lottery question’ may in fact be regarded as an accurate indicative of actual behavioural intention in the work place” (p 179-80)

(p.322) Many participants in recent public discussions about the coming workforce transformation focus only on the economic sustenance of displaced workers in our envisioned future society; there is a consensus on the need for a proper (re)distributive scheme to ensure societal stability. This will be some form of a basic income guarantee, usually defined as “an income paid by a political community to all its members on an individual basis, without means test or work requirement” (Van Parijs 2004, p. 8). In a similar manner, a “negative income tax” (people whose income is below some amount receive cash from the government...

(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...

(p.364) In the opening pages of The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith describes how pins are made in a factory: "One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it,"' and so on to eighteen distinct operations. Some workers may perform two or three of these tasks; many repeatedly execute only one operation. In contemporary industrial societies, many people work at analogues of Smith's jobs: jobs in which persons are hired to perform series of set actions such as assembly line work, keypunching, or being a clerk on an automated checkout line.2 These routine...

The earliest accounts of the meaning of work reach back to religious teachings about the purpose of human existence. This heritage provides a rich theoretical grounding for understanding the characteristics of meaningful work. The word ‘‘vocation’’ reflects this religious heritage, coming from the Latin word vocare, ‘‘to call.’’ For most of Western religious history, vocation referred to the belief that people were called by God to engage in religious vocation. This perspective maintained a hierarchical separation between the idealized, sacred work of monastic life and the more base, secular work of the common people. However, Augustine, Aquinas, and Benedict discussed...

Anecdotal support exists for the behavioural manifestation of this predisposition. For example, one report concerns several London factory workers who won substantial sums of money from football pools. With wise investment, the sums of their individual winnings would have provided sufficient income for these men to live comfortably for the remainder of their lives. Yet each of the men returned to work after a brief vacation. Perhaps even more amazing in these cases is the fact that these men held jobs that could be reasonably described as dull, routine, and repetitive” (p. 362)

(p.74) Despite her careful explication of Marx’s sense of a truly human life grounded in species-being, Nussbaum has neglected to take up the element of Marx’s conception of species-being that runs as an undercurrent through all of the aspects discussed above: the activity of labor. For Marx, the fully human person is actively shaping her world and her consciousness by laboring and producing objects that satisfy her needs. Without the possibility of a productive outlet (and that productive outlet being of a quality that allows one to utilize practical reasoning), a person is living a life that is for all intents...

(p.80) A central characteristic of meaning for meaningful labor is creation, as distinguished from passive consumption. This does not create an equivalency with actions in general,as there are actions that may not involve labor in any real sense (such as interpersonal relationships).9 The object generated by meaningful labor may be considered more ethereal than substantive (such as a song, or perhaps meeting a physical need of a care charge), but it is produced rather than consumed. Admittedly this capability as I have proposed it entails a broad categorization of what counts as “labor,” but this is an advantage, not a liability....

(p.86) In order to best combat the harms caused by a lack of meaningful labor, Nussbaum’s capabilities approach cannot focus solely on providing broad opportunities to seek employment. It must be amended to include a capability for meaningful labor, so that each individual person may engage with her environment and community in ways that help her to actively shape herself into a more fully human person.

(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’,...