In this chapter, we explore this possibility when it comes to the three most known exploitative work forms slavery, serfdom and wage labour. It turns out that they all have an attached ideology, explaining why respective way of organising work is the only morally good and therefore meaningful one. Each work form is portrayed as the single one being beneficial to all involved and thereby meaningful to all. Slavery is good for slave owners as well as slaves, serfdom for feudal lords as well as serfs, wage labour for capitalists as well as wage labourers. Each ideology also says that all other work forms are morally reprehensible and therefore meaningless. The aim of the chapter is to illustrate that the theorisation of the concept of work in the way we suggest opens up the possibility of comparative studies of the meaning of different work forms.

The previous chapter conceptualises the objective and subjective dimensions of autonomy, dignity and recognition with the aim of building a comprehensive meaningful wage labour theory that is informed by the interplay between human agency and structural conditions at the societal, workplace and agential level of analysis. This chapter follows this premise and identifies the parameters of theorising in the tradition of Critical Realism by first outlining the concepts of mechanisms and tendencies, before presenting the theorising technique of property spaces. Against this backdrop, the chapter moves on to analyse how the six meaningful work dimensions function as mechanisms whose interplay produce four hypothetical tendencies along the meaningful–meaningless work continuum. These hypothetical tendencies are matched with five empirical workplace studies from five different countries. The in-depth workplace studies illustrate the explanatory power of the framework along the continuum of meaningful-meaningless work. The analysis casts light on the benefits of the theory for illuminating the connections between work, employment and society through the lens of meaningful work.

There are a number of theoretical problems in the growing field of ‘meaningful work’: a lack of precision in the basic concept of work, leading to dearth of comparative research. A disregard of worker agency, leading to an impression that meaningful wage labour is a gift from employers to employees. A dichotomisation into meaningful work being either a subjective or an objective phenomenon, leading to unnecessary simplification. And, finally, another dichotomisation into waged work or types of jobs being either meaningful or meaningless, leading to a lack of variation. In this concluding chapter, we suggest solutions to these problems that we have dealt with at several places in the book, before we take up the new framework for analysing meaningful and meaningless wage labour.