The role of temporality in refugees’ work-related meaningfulness-making

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study explores how refugees, i.e., people experiencing liminality due to career and life disruptions, make work-related meaningfulness, and it uncovers how they apply temporality in their meaningfulness-making. Analysing 48 interviews of 24 refugees in Germany, the findings show how, post-migration, refugees faced two types of under-institutionalized liminal experiences challenging their meaningfulness – one concerning self-focused and one pertaining to other-focused sources of meaningfulness. To navigate these liminal experiences, refugees actively made meaningfulness. This was a temporal process, as refugees connected their past, present, and future. They drew on their past and present vocational experiences when moving towards their future vocational self, built on their past and acted in the present to secure present and future social connections, amplified synergies and resolved tensions in meaningfulness sources, and compensated unavailable meaningfulness sources with available ones. Based on our findings, we propose a model on how people make meaningfulness despite missing its main ingredients (i.e., a clear sense of self and social connections) and how under-institutionalized liminality can turn from a space devoid of meaningfulness into an agentic and creative space of meaningfulness-making. We contribute to meaningfulness, temporality, and liminality research.