'Meaningful Work': What it is and Why it's Growing

LONDON, May 6/PRNewswire/ --

The Work Foundation today publishes a new essay that asks what is
'meaningful work', why more people seem to be seeking it, and what employers
can do to make work more meaningful?

The paper argues that while thinkers and writers have long wondered at
the value of work to human beings beyond providing a living, the notion of
'meaningful work' is a relatively new phenomenon that would have made little
sense to our forbears of a couple of centuries ago.

Author Stephen Overell says: 'The way people talk about 'fulfilling their
potential' in a job could only happen in the modern world of work - it is
simply not something that would have been said a few generations ago.
Meaningful work rests on the rise of individualism and identity as pressing
concerns for large numbers of people. It speaks of huge and perhaps excessive
expectations of working life - the historically unusual sense that fulfilment
occurs, or should occur, in the everyday, ordinary business of going to
work.'

'People are very different - what is meaningful to one person may not be
meaningful to another, and what someone finds meaningful at the age of 23 may
not be how they feel at 43. Nevertheless, meaning is unmistakably in the air
of the 21st century culture of work; this essay marks an attempt to describe
what is going on. The raising and dashing of hopes around meaning has become
one of the major psychological forces within working life. What goes on
inside workers' hearts and minds about work has become profoundly important
to what they produce and how they do it.'

The essay argues that the discovery of meaning in work relies on
balancing three sets of motives. They are moral motives - the idea that the
'ends' of work are worthwhile; compensation motives - including money, but
also including status, authority, responsibility and the appropriate use of
skills and abilities; and craft motives - the desire to do a good job for its
own sake.

Meanwhile, the work that people do today has changed in such ways as to
prompt more questions about meaning, fulfilment and rewarding work -relatively well-paying, highly skilled professional and managerial jobs now
account for over a third of all jobs in many advanced democracies. Work is
more about intellectual problem-solving and how people communicate and relate
to each other than it used to be. This does not make work more meaningful,
but it helps create the conditions in which issues of meaning and identity
arise.

The paper argues:

- Employers have a role in enabling the search for meaningful work by
providing high quality jobs for people - jobs with autonomy, security,
variety, a reasonable balance between effort and reward, and between skill
level and demand. But employers cannot create meaning and should not try to.
It is up to individuals to find work that is meaningful for them. However,
employers are capable of destroying meaning through exploitation, disrespect,
and poor organisation of work.

- Social values that affect work have changed: a basic psychological
orientation towards maximising income and status is today being balanced by a
stress upon self-expression, diversity of view, aesthetic concerns and issues
of self-fulfilment.

- Meaning, identity and individualism at work have risen at the same time
as traditional collective institutions such as trade unions, communities and
corporate hierarchies are seen has having declined.

- Doing excellent work for no other reason than its own sake is intrinsic
to the notion of meaningful work. However, increasing bureaucracy and market
forces may undermine the search for meaning.

- Having a sense of vocation is very similar to the idea of doing
meaningful work. The difference is that meaning is more self-conscious than
vocation: the service of others as a personal experience rather than a
'calling'.

Notes to editors

1) 'Inwardness: The Rise of Meaningful Work' is available from
The Work Foundation.

2) The Work Foundation is a research and consultancy organisation.

3) Publications in the Provocations series reflect the views of the
author but not necessarily those of The Work Foundation.

Source: The Work Foundation

Stephen Overell is available on +44(0)20-7-976-3507 or +44(0)7970-765251.

2008-05-05 19:03:22 0353175 PRNEWSWIRE