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"What makes waged work meaningful and what makes it meaningless? Promoting a political understanding of waged work, the authors develop a novel theory that presents different scenarios of meaningful-meaningless work, illustrated with the help of workplace case studies from Norway, Britain, India, Germany and Sweden"--
List of contents
Preface; 1. Meaningful work; Part I. Problems in Analyses of Meaningful Work: 2. Contradictions in the concept of work; 3. The ideological meaning of exploitative work forms; 4. The politics of working life; Part II. Theoretical Traditions in Analysing Meaningful Waged Work: 5. Approaching the meaning of waged work through its meaninglessness; 6. Designing, organising and managing meaningful waged work; 7. Meaningful wage labour as a human condition: humanist accounts of meaningful waged work; 8. The political philosophy of meaningful wage labour; Part III. Meaningful and Meaningless Waged Work: 9. Objective and subjective dimensions of meaningful waged work: towards a new meaningful work framework; 10. Theorizing meaningful and meaningless waged work; 11. Conclusion: meaningful waged work and its implications for the critical analysis of work and employment; References; Index.
About the author
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).
Summary
What makes waged work meaningful and what makes it meaningless? Promoting a political understanding of waged work, the authors develop a novel theory that presents different scenarios of meaningful-meaningless work, illustrated with the help of workplace case studies from Norway, Britain, India, Germany and Sweden.
Foreword
A new theory exploring what makes modern waged work either meaningful or meaningless.
