The Politics of Working Life and Meaningful Waged Work

Can waged work under capitalism be meaningful? How does this meaningfulness express itself in the politics of working life? More fundamentally, how should work be socially and economically valued, rewarded, organised and regulated to become more meaningful? Knut Laaser and Jan Ch. Karlsson address these questions and provide a novel theory of meaningful work that is deeply ingrained in Critical Social Science approaches. The authors conceptualise meaningful work as a continuum between meaningful–meaningless work that rests on objective and subjective dimensions of autonomy, dignity and recognition, all pushed and pulled by the multi-layered control and power dynamics of waged work. They challenge the tendency to promote unpolitical concepts in the scholarship of meaningful work. The explanatory power of the meaningful work framework is illustrated by the analysis of empirical case studies on Norwegian industry operators, British bank employees, Indian security guards, German university academics and Swedish cabin crew members.

Knut Laaser is a Senior Researcher at the Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus– Senftenberg and a Lecturer at the University of Stirling. He has published on the moral economy of work and employment and more recently on meaningful work in international and world-leading journals.

Jan Ch. Karlsson is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the Department of Working Life Science, Karlstad University, Sweden. He is the author of Organizational Misbehaviour in the Workplace: Narratives of Dignity and Resistance (2012), Collective Mobilization in Changing Conditions: Worker Collectivity in a Turbulent Age (2019) and Explaining Society: Critical Realism in the Social Sciences (2019).