The Politics of Working Life and Meaningful Waged Work

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).

• 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.

'Sociologists have a love–hate relationship with waged work. On the one hand, they love researching it; on the other hand, they too readily claim that this work is hateful because it lacks meaning. In this ground-breaking new book, Knut Laaser and Jan Ch. Karlsson seek to redress this imbalance, arguing, with supportive evidence, that meaning ought to be a central tenet in any theory of waged work.' Chris Warhurst, Warwick Institute for Employment Research