Abstract
This contribution, which serves as the lead article for the Research Topic entitled “From Meaning of Working to Meaningful Lives: The Challenges of Expanding Decent Work,” explores current challenges in the development and operationalization of decent work. Based on an initiative from the International Labor Organization [ILO] (1999) decent work represents an aspirational statement about the quality of work that should be available to all people who seek to work around the globe. Within recent years, several critiques have been raised about decent work from various disciplines, highlighting concerns about a retreat from the social justice ethos that had initially defined the concept. In addition, other scholars have observed that decent work has not included a focus on the role of meaning and purpose at work. To address these concerns, we propose that a psychological perspective can help to revitalize the decent work agenda by infusing a more specific focus on individual experiences and by reconnecting decent work to its social justice origins. As an illustration of the advantages of a psychological perspective, we explore the rise of precarious work and also connect the decent work agenda to the Psychology-of-Working Framework and Theory (Blustein, 2006; Duffy et al., 2016).
Highlights
The two specialties of industrial/organizational (I/O) and vocational psychology have been exploring work as a context for human experience and development for more than a century, producing substantive bodies of scholarship and practices that have positively impacted the lives of people, organizations, and communities (Savickas and Baker, 2005; Blustein, 2006; Guichard, 2009; Landy and Conte, 2010; Schleicher et al, 2011; Di Fabio and Maree, 2012; Di Fabio, 2014)
Amidst the radical changes in the world of work, international leaders from government, labor, and other public policy domains have provided needed guidelines about the quality of work that people should be able to access in contemporary society (International Labor Organization [ILO], 2008a,b, 2014, 2015; Standing, 2008)
As a means of understanding these changes and creating a knowledge base that will help to foster relevant research, we have developed this special Research Topic for Frontiers in Psychology entitled “From Meaning of Working to Meaningful Lives: The Challenges of Expanding Decent Work,” This article serves as an introduction to this special section and provides a needed psychological examination of the concept of decent work, which is a key element of this project
Summary
The two specialties of industrial/organizational (I/O) and vocational psychology have been exploring work as a context for human experience and development for more than a century, producing substantive bodies of scholarship and practices that have positively impacted the lives of people, organizations, and communities (Savickas and Baker, 2005; Blustein, 2006; Guichard, 2009; Landy and Conte, 2010; Schleicher et al, 2011; Di Fabio and Maree, 2012; Di Fabio, 2014). Working conditions are increasingly governed by market forces that are currently creating growing levels of instability and insecurity, thereby evoking greater levels of stress and anguish for people around the globe (Kalleberg, 2009; Paul and Moser, 2009; Richardson, 2012; Stiglitz, 2012, 2015; Guichard, 2013; Piketty, 2014; Standing, 2014). Their guidance has yielded an aspirational statement about the sort of work that ought to define the lives of all who work and who want to work—decent work
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