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Call for Papers EGOS2023_Organizing for Meaningful Work: Implications for the Good Life

  • 1.  Call for Papers EGOS2023_Organizing for Meaningful Work: Implications for the Good Life

    Posted 01-06-2023 05:21

    Dear colleagues, 

    Please consider submitting your work to our Hybrid Sub-theme 54 "Organizing for Meaningful Work: Implications for the Good Life" we are hosting at the 39th EGOS Colloquium, July 6-8, 2023, in Cagliari, Italy. The deadline of Tuesday, January 10th, 2023 (23:59:59 CET) is approaching.

    Convenors:

    Evgenia I. Lysova  (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands)

    Christopher Michaelson (University of St. Thomas, USA)

    Catherine Bailey (King's College London, United Kingdom)

    Call for Papers

    Meaningful work can be a critical component of the good life for human beings. This claim finds support in the work of Frankl (1988), who argues that meaning is a universal human motivation, in Terkel (1974), who describes working as a search "for daily meaning as well as daily bread", and more recently in the work of Yeoman (2014), who argues that meaningful work is a "fundamental human need". The past two decades have seen growing consideration of the notion of meaningfulness in the context of organizations (e.g., Bailey et al., 2019; Lepisto & Pratt, 2017; Lysova et al., 2019; Michaelson et al., 2014; Rosso et al., 2010). Meaningful work has been found to have important benefits for individuals (e.g. job satisfaction, work engagement, etc.) and organizations (e.g. employee performance, creativity, etc.), and much research attention has been focused on understanding sources of meaningful work (for review, see Bailey et al., 2019; Lysova et al., 2019; Rosso et al., 2010). In empirical scholarship, meaningful work has been conceptualized from a realization perspective centered on the experience of self-actualization, and from a justification perspective centered on developing an account of or rationale for why one's work is worthy or valuable (Lepisto & Pratt, 2017).
     
    The experience of meaningfulness is often associated with participating in something larger than oneself (e.g., Rosso et al., 2010; Metz, 2013; Wolf, 2010). However, despite the volume of research that argues for the role of organizations in fostering meaningful work, the focus of research efforts thus far has been on the employee perspective (e.g., how employees draw a sense of meaning from their job design, leader behavior, or relationships at work). Surprisingly, the organizational perspective with regard to experiences that might enable or constrain meaningful work has received relatively little attention in organizational and management studies (Michaelson et al., 2014). One possible explanation may be that meaningful work is often perceived as an individual aspiration rather than an organizational responsibility. Philosophical scholarship has held organizations morally responsible for providing employees with the freedom and autonomy to pursue meaningful work (Bowie, 1998; Schwartz, 1982) but has said less about the organization's responsibility to provide work that is intrinsically meaningful. Another explanation may have to do with organizations being less concerned with the authentic creation of opportunities for employees to experience meaningful work, but rather with the "management of meaning" in which the perception of work meaningfulness is exploited to serve instrumental goals (Bailey et al., 2017; Bunderson & Thompson, 2009; Lips-Wiersma & Morris, 2009; Michaelson et al., 2014; Toraldo et al., 2019). Philosophical scholarship has conversely challenged the view that meaningful work is solely "in the eye of the beholder" (Michaelson et al., 2014), suggesting that meaningfulness is "where subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness" (Wolf, 2013, p. 26).
     
    Drawing on a philosophical understanding of the role of the organization in cultivating meaningful work could provide fruitful opportunities to connect organizational studies and philosophy to better understand how meaningful work enables the notion of a good life in an organizational context. With this call for papers, we therefore invite scholars to contribute to a discussion about the role of organizations in cultivating meaningful work and, in turn, enabling the good life for employees and others. Connecting empirical and philosophical scholarship is particularly relevant given that contemporary organizations are increasingly expected to engage in responsible ways of doing business and managing their employees to support the good life for a variety of stakeholders. Designing workplaces and implementing policies that provide opportunities for individuals to experience meaningful work that makes a societal contribution can be one way to satisfy these expectations. In this way, studying meaningfulness in an organizational context can link business ethics and organizational studies (Michaelson et al., 2014), organizational corporate social responsibility and meaningful work (e.g., Aguinis & Glavas, 2019), and explore the alignment between meaningful work and organizational purpose (Michaelson et al., 2020).
     
    Some possible topics for papers in the subtheme include, but are not limited to:

    • What are the processes by which individuals derive a sense of meaning in the wider context of their organization?
    • What responsibility do organizations have in enabling meaningful work?
    • How can organizations support employees to derive a sense of meaning in their work or to connect to a wider sense of societal meaning?
    • How can a sense of meaning be experienced at different levels of an organization?
    • How does organizational purpose relate to the individual experience of meaningful work? How can they be aligned?
    • When do organizational efforts in relation to meaningful work lead to exploitation? How can this be prevented?
    • What creates experiences of meaninglessness in organizations?
    • Can meaningfulness be found in contexts of organizations that pursue unethical paths, or operate in societally questionable sectors (e.g., tobacco, oil, social media, etc.), and if so, how?


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    Kind regards,

    Dr. Evgenia Lysova
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    Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
    Department of Management & Organisation | School of Business and Economics
    E-mail: e.lysova@vu.nl
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