5 - Approaching the Meaning of Waged Work through Its Meaninglessness

Summary

The thought of the meaning of work in the capitalist labour process has been a central pillar in many discussions of work, employment and organisational life in the social sciences. Meaningful work, however, is, if anything, an undercurrent in the modern classics of working life research, where the spotlight is on the struggle that is at the heart of workers’ attempts to derive meaning from paid work. In this chapter we discuss understandings of meaningful work that emerge between the nexus of the meaningfulness and the meaninglessness of wage labour in some of the most noted of this literature in the post–World War II period. From this discourse we crystallise six tendencies in discussions of the possibility to solve the problem of the lack of meaning of waged work. We derive from this discussion implications for approaching an understanding of the politics of meaningful and meaningless waged work.