The Five Paradoxes of Meaningful Work: Introduction to the special Issue ‘Meaningful Work: Prospects for the 21st Century’

• Author: Catherine Bailey,Ruth Yeoman,Adrian Madden,Neal Chalofsky,Marc Thompson,Marjolein Lips‐Wiersma
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12422
• Date: 01 May 2019
• Published date: 01 May 2019

© 2018 John Wiley & Sons Lt d and Society for the Adva ncement of Management Stud ies

The Five Paradoxes of Meaningful Work: Introduction

to the special Issue ‘Meaningful Work: Prospects for

the 21st Century’

Catherine Baileya, Marjolein Lips-Wiersmab,

Adrian Maddenc, Ruth Yeomand, Marc Thompsond and

Neal Chalofskye

aKing’s College L ondon; bAuckla nd University of Technolog y; cUniversity of Greenwich ; dUniversity of

Oxford; eThe George Washington Uni versity

ABST RACT In this int roduction to the Journal of Management Stud ies Special Iss ue on

Meaningf ul Work, we explain t he imperative for a deeper understanding of mean ingfulness

within t he context of the current sociopol itical environment, coupled with the g rowing use

of organizationa l strategies aimed at ‘manag ing the soul’. Meaningful work remain s a con-

tested topic that has been t he subject of attention in a wide ra nge of disciplines. The focus of

this Specia l Issue is the advancement of theory and ev idence about the nature, causes, con se-

quences, and processes of meani ngful work. We summarize the cont ributions of each of the

seven articles t hat comprise the Special Issue and, i n particular, note their methodological a nd

theoretical plura lity. In conclusion, we set forth a future research agend a based on five funda-

mental paradoxes of meani ngful work.

Keywo rds: employee engagement, mean ingful work, paradox, temporal ity, volunteers,

worthy work

INTRODUCTION

The impetus for this specia l issue on meaningf ul work arose from an awareness that,

despite the level of interest in meaningfu l work that has emerged in recent years, there

are still i mportant gaps in our knowledge of how a sense of meaning fulness ar ises, per-

sists, or is challenged. T his is of particular concern in light of the far-reach ing changes

that are tak ing place to the nature of work, and the sites where work takes place. We

are witnessing t he growing precarity of employment under neoliberal regimes in many

Journal of Man agement Studi es 56:3 May 2019

doi: 10. 1111/j om s. 124 22

Address for repr ints: Catheri ne Bailey, Professor of Work and Employment, King’s Busi ness School, Ki ng’s

College London, Bu sh House, 30 Aldwych, London WC2B 4 BG (Catherine.bailey@ kcl.ac.uk).

482 C. Bailey et al.

© 2018 John Wiley & Sons Lt d and Society for the Adva ncement of Management Stud ies

Western democracies, with the onus shift ing onto the individual to ma nage their work

and careers in many cases without the safety-net of a stable contract of employment.

Human–machine interact ions and technological sur veillance are g rowing, with un-

known consequences for meaningful work (Barratt, 20 03). Organizations themselves

are under pressure from globalizat ion, new technologies and new modes of organizing,

creating interconnected systems of dy namic complexity. There is rising demand t hat

organizations pay attention to their extended social and environmental res ponsibilities,

generating the need for new types of inter-organizational part nerships and representa-

tive bodies (L ips-Wiersma, 2019). In these changing circ umstances, how can individuals

satisfy their i nnate ‘will to mea ning’ (Fra nkl, 1959), and how can organizations create

the necessary conditions for meani ngfulness so t hat workers can avoid the tedium of ‘a

Monday through Friday sort of dying’ ( Terkel, 1975, p. 1).

The extant research base on meaningful work has recently been subject to critical scru-

tiny (Bailey et al., 2018; Both-Nwabuwe et al., 2017; Chalofsky, 2003; Lepisto and Pratt,

2017; Lysova et al., 2018; Rosso et al., 2010). What emerges from these varied reviews

is that meaningfulness is a multi-level construct. It has garnered attention across many

academic fields including management studies, psychology, social psychology, human

resource management/development, political theory, theology, philosophy, ethics, and

sociology, but with little consensus emerging over what meaningfulness means, theoret-

ically or empirically. While meaningfulness will always be an ‘essentially contested con-

cept’ (Gallie, 1956), nonetheless there seems to be agreement that it signifies a ‘positive,

subjective, individual experience’ in relation to work (Bailey et al., 2018). That said, it is

important to note that the majority of literature on meaningfulness defines it as multi-

dimensional; for example, Lips-Wiersma and Wright (2012) argue that meaningful work

arises along two dimensions: ‘being’ (e.g., belonging) versus ‘doing’ (e.g., making a con-

tribution) and ‘self ’ (e.g., self-actualization) versus ‘other’ (e.g., serving others’ needs).

According to this perspective, work is meaningful when the various dimensions are held

in balance yet, at the same time, this balancing leads to inevitable tensions that may be

hard to resolve.

Despite the controversy over what meaningfulness actually signifies, the weight of

evidence tends towards unitarist conceptualizations of meaningfulness within positive

psychological models and frameworks (Seligman and Czikszentmihalyi, 2000) as an ex-

perience that is amenable to influence by job design, leadership and management styles,

work cultures and workplace relationships, and that is associated with a range of pos-

itive individual and organizational outcomes (Bailey et al., 2018; Lysova et al., 2018).

Questions have, though, been raised about the multiplicity of ways in which meaning-

fulness has been operationalized and measured within these studies; for instance, in a

synthesis of the empirical evidence, Bailey et al. (2018) uncovered 28 different measure-

ment scales that have been utilized, many of which contain non-specific items or items

that conflate meaningfulness with other constructs such as callings. There is therefore no

clear agreement about the best way to evaluate people’s subjective experience of mean-

ingfulness (Both-Nwabuwe et al., 2017) and, in consequence, it is uncertain whether all

studies purporting to describe meaningful work actually do so. A further consideration is

that, as Lepisto and Pratt (2017) note, many workers in ostensibly fulfilling occupations