The Meaning and Meaningfulness of Work: The View from Sociology

Since the mid-twentieth Century, theory and research in sociology on workers’ responses to their experience of work can be broadly divided into three overlapping phases. The immediate post-war decades from the late 1940s to the 1970s saw the pervasive influence of an ‘essentialist’ conception of the meaningfulness of work. From the 1960s, this was challenged by a ‘liberal’ view that rejected the idea that there was an inherent human nature in favour of an emphasis on the importance of individual value choice. It argued that a growth of instrumentalism in work orientations would make job quality decreasingly relevant to the meaning of work. Then in the first decades of the twenty-first century, there was a revival of theory and research on meaningfulness, premised on the notion of fundamental human needs, but emphasizing at the same time broader societal needs. These different perspectives have given a very different importance to the role of technology as a determinant of the meaning of work. Technological change was at the core of the essentialist arguments; it was marginalized by the liberal arguments and has become once more an important preoccupation of more recent work on meaningfulness.