This chapter develops a novel theory of meaningful work that is informed by the politics of working life perspectives and grounded in Critical Realism’s stratified theory of the human being. This combination allows us to identify the structural constraints and enablers of meaningful work as objective dimensions of meaningful work that interact with agential responses that we term subjective dimensions of meaningful work. Approaching meaningful work in this way promotes an understanding of meaningful waged work as a dynamic continuum that emerges from the interplay of its objective and subjective dimensions. The objective and subjective dimensions identify autonomy, dignity and recognition as the central pillars of meaningful waged work. The first part of this chapter recapitulates the relationship between structure and agency and establishes the key parameters of the stratified social ontology of human beings that guides our undertaking. This displays how the interplay between the structure, which is represented here as the objective dimensions of meaningful work, and the agential responses to it, encapsulated in the subjective dimensions of meaningful work, culminate in the experience of different forms of meaningful work or its absence.

In this chapter we suggest that a fundamental shortcoming of the meaningful work scholarship is the neglect or misrepresentation of employee agency. Indeed, when employee groups, teams and communities are mentioned in the literature, they are associated with the formal work organisation – not informal self-organised groups, teams and communities among workers. This position turns a blind eye to the politics of working life and the multi-layered consequences of the interplay between structure and agency. Addressing this issue, this chapter argues that employers seldom provide workers with meaningful wage labour for its own sake; to the extent meaningful work exists, workers mainly capture it with the help of informal self-organisation and trade unions. Therefore, in this chapter we stress the importance of employee agency in the politics of working life for attaining meaningful wage labour.

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.

This chapter raises the question whether attribution of wrongful acts to the State is based on ‘objective’ causal chains or ‘subjective’ mental states. It argues that attribution of conduct to the State is not primarily causal or fault-based. First, it shows that several of the Articles on the Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts cannot be understood in terms of causation or fault. Second, it argues that causal and fault-based theories of attribution are either circular or incomplete. Instead, the chapter claims, the logic of attribution is primarily functional. The rules of attribution converge around the central principle that an act of State is an act performed in the service of a State function, such as defence or detention. Functional attribution is best understood as ‘intersubjective’: it is determined not by objective causal chains or by subjective mental states, but by shared ideas about the functions of the State and what it means to perform them. The functional character of the rules of attribution allows them to adapt to economic and technological changes, such as the growth of corporations and the development of autonomous weapons.