Until the early twentieth century there has been little basis for thinking about meaningful work in Management Research beyond the perfect match between the supply and demand of labour and technical methods to get as much work as possible out of this breathing factor of production. Then, however, the interplay of political, economic and cultural dynamics forces management theory to reconsider. This is the point in time in which this chapter sets off and illustrates who spread the seeds of meaningful work ideas on the contested soil of economic rationality ideas and with what result. The chapter captures the development that has led to complementary, but also competing thoughts of meaningful work in the domain of classical and contemporary Management and Organisational Behaviour literature. We claim that management interest in meaningful wage labour for employees is based on the idea that such work leads to the kind of work orientations that enhances efficiency and productivity. From this perspective, meaningful work is not a gift from the employer, but the latter’s strategic choice.

In this chapter, we explore this possibility when it comes to the three most known exploitative work forms slavery, serfdom and wage labour. It turns out that they all have an attached ideology, explaining why respective way of organising work is the only morally good and therefore meaningful one. Each work form is portrayed as the single one being beneficial to all involved and thereby meaningful to all. Slavery is good for slave owners as well as slaves, serfdom for feudal lords as well as serfs, wage labour for capitalists as well as wage labourers. Each ideology also says that all other work forms are morally reprehensible and therefore meaningless. The aim of the chapter is to illustrate that the theorisation of the concept of work in the way we suggest opens up the possibility of comparative studies of the meaning of different work forms.

A particularity about the literature on the meaning of work is that the concept of meaning is discussed extensively and deeply, while the concept of work is hardly debated at all. Tackling this shortcoming, we start out by taking up contradictions in the social science debate on definitions of the concept of work. Four such contradictions stand out: (1) Subjective vs. objective definitions; (2) a single vs. several work concepts; (3) certain activities in themselves vs. any activity within specific social relations are to be regarded as work; and (4) empirical vs. ontological basis of the concept. In investigating them, we take help from what are often said to be the three most important classics of social science: How have Émile Durkheim, Max Weber and Karl Marx handled the concept of work? Specifically, can we get inspiration from them to take stands concerning the contradictions? The answers to these questions lead us to suggest this definition: Work is any activity performed in internal social relations that structure the sphere of necessity. Finally, we discuss the three suggested explicit conceptualisations of ‘work’ that we have found in the meaningful work literature.

Engaging in normative discussions about the characteristics and requirements of a good life in a good society, Political Philosophy has a long-standing history in identifying the economic, political and social requirements for turning waged work into a practice that contributes to human flourishing. Meanwhile, a widely shared scepticism towards meaningful work under capitalism is another powerful theme in the field, arguing that the alienating nature of waged work cannot be overcome. This chapter argues that contributions to meaningful work in the realm of Political Philosophy have a strong tendency to incorporate both positions, presenting an ambivalent understanding of wage labour as activity that is burdensome and alienating for the many and emancipatory and meaningful for the few. Discussing two of the most significant schools of thought in this field, virtue ethics and political materialist contributions, the chapter identifies and compares their ontological understandings of work and its nature under capitalism, the conceptualisation of labour agency and the guiding principles of meaningful work that they promote.

This chapter develops a novel theory of meaningful work that is informed by the politics of working life perspectives and grounded in Critical Realism’s stratified theory of the human being. This combination allows us to identify the structural constraints and enablers of meaningful work as objective dimensions of meaningful work that interact with agential responses that we term subjective dimensions of meaningful work. Approaching meaningful work in this way promotes an understanding of meaningful waged work as a dynamic continuum that emerges from the interplay of its objective and subjective dimensions. The objective and subjective dimensions identify autonomy, dignity and recognition as the central pillars of meaningful waged work. The first part of this chapter recapitulates the relationship between structure and agency and establishes the key parameters of the stratified social ontology of human beings that guides our undertaking. This displays how the interplay between the structure, which is represented here as the objective dimensions of meaningful work, and the agential responses to it, encapsulated in the subjective dimensions of meaningful work, culminate in the experience of different forms of meaningful work or its absence.

‘Work’ is a contested concept and so is the notion of ‘meaningful work’. The debate on work is hundreds of years old, while the discussion about meaningful work is recent. The historical discussions about the concept of work show, however, not just conceptual and value-free disagreements about the content and form of work, but also, and more fundamentally, its meaning for workers and society. This chapter discusses different approaches to the concept of work in the field of meaningful work. We contrast this scholarship with debates in the realm of job satisfaction and job quality. This allows us to embed the meaningful work discourse in alternative debates in the research on work and its meaning.

The previous chapter conceptualises the objective and subjective dimensions of autonomy, dignity and recognition with the aim of building a comprehensive meaningful wage labour theory that is informed by the interplay between human agency and structural conditions at the societal, workplace and agential level of analysis. This chapter follows this premise and identifies the parameters of theorising in the tradition of Critical Realism by first outlining the concepts of mechanisms and tendencies, before presenting the theorising technique of property spaces. Against this backdrop, the chapter moves on to analyse how the six meaningful work dimensions function as mechanisms whose interplay produce four hypothetical tendencies along the meaningful–meaningless work continuum. These hypothetical tendencies are matched with five empirical workplace studies from five different countries. The in-depth workplace studies illustrate the explanatory power of the framework along the continuum of meaningful-meaningless work. The analysis casts light on the benefits of the theory for illuminating the connections between work, employment and society through the lens of meaningful work.

In this chapter we suggest that a fundamental shortcoming of the meaningful work scholarship is the neglect or misrepresentation of employee agency. Indeed, when employee groups, teams and communities are mentioned in the literature, they are associated with the formal work organisation – not informal self-organised groups, teams and communities among workers. This position turns a blind eye to the politics of working life and the multi-layered consequences of the interplay between structure and agency. Addressing this issue, this chapter argues that employers seldom provide workers with meaningful wage labour for its own sake; to the extent meaningful work exists, workers mainly capture it with the help of informal self-organisation and trade unions. Therefore, in this chapter we stress the importance of employee agency in the politics of working life for attaining meaningful wage labour.

There are a number of theoretical problems in the growing field of ‘meaningful work’: a lack of precision in the basic concept of work, leading to dearth of comparative research. A disregard of worker agency, leading to an impression that meaningful wage labour is a gift from employers to employees. A dichotomisation into meaningful work being either a subjective or an objective phenomenon, leading to unnecessary simplification. And, finally, another dichotomisation into waged work or types of jobs being either meaningful or meaningless, leading to a lack of variation. In this concluding chapter, we suggest solutions to these problems that we have dealt with at several places in the book, before we take up the new framework for analysing meaningful and meaningless wage labour.

Informed by the everlasting concern with what a good life is and how it can be achieved by the individual in a society, the field of Humanities have a rich tradition in discussing different domains of meaningfulness, including meaningful life and work. This chapter discusses a variety of humanist contributions to meaningful waged work. An integral feature of Humanist accounts is the understanding that what constitutes humanity is people’s drive to endow their relations, interests, abilities and desires with meaning. As this chapter will showcase, contributions in this field differ in terms of what drives people’s search for meaning, what the experience of meaningfulness consists of, if essential requirements exist before meaningfulness can be experienced or if one domain of meaningfulness trumps others. Discussing further whether the experience of meaningfulness as self-realisation and transcendence is possible in relations and activities that are in part determined by others, the chapter investigates the relationship between freedom, structure and agency.