Proliferating Meaningful Work: Meaning-Making and an Ethic of Care

Abstract

Serious political attention to the organisation and content, of work is lacking. To remedy this neglect, my objective is to outline the normative content of a political and social agenda which aims at proliferating the experience of meaningfulness in all kinds of work, where meaning- fulness is structured by the bipartite value of meaningfulness. To that end, I identify the importance of each person being able to engage in the creation and maintenance of a repertoire of positive meanings, from which they draw to create the practical identities giving them a sense that their lives are worth living. Widespread participation in positive value generation requires an opportunity structure which fosters the relevant capability formation and status equality7 through institutional arrangements for democratic participation. Furthermore, positive value generation depends upon our being able to distinguish between more or less meaningful work, for which we require a critical conception of meaningful work constituted by a standpoint from where we can reflect and make judgements between different kinds of meanings and values. In order to provide the tools for evaluative meaning-making in the content of work, 1 draw upon critical social theory to specify a positive critical conception of meaningful work which distinguishes between meaningful and non-meaningful work from the standpoint of an ethic of care.