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JOS0010.1177/1440783320946859Journal of SociologyCannizzo and James

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Journal of Sociology

Meaningful work in late

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DOI: 10.1177/1440783320946859
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Fabian Cannizzo and Sara James

La Trobe University, Australia

Late modern work as an historical construct

In this introduction to a special section of the Journal of Sociology, on Meaningful Work
in Late Modernity, we will explore the implications of late modern reflexivity for how
work is experienced and conducted. The transformation in intellectual debates about the
progress of human history, which has been described as the emergence of ‘late moder-
nity’, is a reflection of the cultural and material circumstances of scholarship. Scholarship
is not beyond either society or capital in its commodification as labour. In the humanities
and social sciences, those ideas that can be valorised, transmitted to enrich and entice
each node along the academic supply chain, become reified as ‘classics’ and something
like ‘normal science’ (Kuhn, 1962). In theorising the whole of society, scholarship
attempts to become a self-gazing eye. But it was not until the debates and concepts which
are here described as ‘late modern’ (and elsewhere described as postmodern) that the
observer was put on equal footing with the observed. From within the contemporary
pantheon of ‘classics’, Pierre Bourdieu famously described sociology as a ‘martial art’
– not as a neutral observer of social life, but as a tactical discipline that becomes mean-
ingful to the extent that it is political. This characterisation of sociology is reflected in
Zygmunt Bauman’s characterisation of modernity generally: ‘the life of modern men and
women is a task, not a given, and a task as yet uncompleted and relentlessly calling for
more care and new effort’ (2000: 134). Progress, for modern persons as for sociologists,
will not come about as a consequence of living, but through living a life dedicated to
seeking out the meaning of progress. As scholars, working from within the realm of
experiences that we are describing, we are not neutral conveyors of history’s produce,
but are engaging in acts of cultivation.
Rather than arguing that there are distinctly late modern forms of work and thus com-
mitting the fallacy of periodising late modernity, we will describe how work situations
are formed through social norms recognised by contemporary scholarship as late modern

Corresponding author:
Fabian Cannizzo, La Trobe University, Bundoora, Australia.
Email: f.cannizzo@latrobe.edu.au
2 Journal of Sociology 00(0)

or beyond the high modern. These social norms develop within historically specific cul-
tural and material conditions, but are usefully treated as ‘ideal-types’ rather than sui
generis (Weber, 2017 [1949]: 90). For example, Bauman (2000: 139) writes that, in what
he terms ‘light’ capitalism or ‘liquid’ modernity:

Stripped of its eschatological trappings and cut off from its metaphysical roots, work has lost
the centrality which it was assigned in the galaxy of values dominant in the era of solid
modernity and heavy capitalism. Work can no longer offer the secure axis around which to
wrap and fix self-definitions, identities and life-projects. Neither can it be easily conceived of
as the ethical foundation of society, or as the ethical axis of individual life. Instead, work has
acquired – alongside other life activities – a mainly aesthetic significance. It is expected to be
gratifying by and in itself, rather than be measured by the genuine or putative effects it brings
to one’s brothers and sisters in humanity or to the might of the nation and country, let alone the
bliss of future generations.

The prominence of the ‘aesthetic significance’ of work that Bauman identifies in the
above passage is characteristic of late modern work as an ideal-type. It is work moti-
vated by the desire for a transformation of the worker herself: to be imbued with the
pleasure, experience, social status and grace that are promised to manifest through
engagement with work. To identify an ideal-type of late modern work is not to claim
that an aesthetic significance has never motivated work outside of a late modern era
(again, this is the periodising fallacy). Rather, it is to construct a heuristic device to
allow us to explore something peculiar to how work organisation and motivations are
patterned within a period of history – namely, in a time of multiplying, complexifying,
re-organising social norms and institutions. Echoing Weber, Sennett argues that the
‘hardened shell of bureaucracy in corporations’ has been ‘cracked apart’ (2006: 19),
fracturing career expectations and trajectories along with it. In Bauman’s words, liquid
modernity makes the workplace feel:

like a camping site which one visits for just a few days, and may leave at any moment if the
comforts on offer are not delivered or found unsatisfactory when delivered – rather than like a
shared domicile where one is inclined to take trouble and patiently work out the acceptable
rules of cohabitation. (2000: 149)

Late modern work is labour beyond the negotiated solidarity of unionism, coordination
without bureaucratic order, productivity without the ceiling of market capacity, the
beginning of projects with uncertain ends, a vocation without a god to glorify. Late mod-
ern work is not found in the socially inclusive ‘fat bureaucracy’ (Sennett, 2006: 30) of
Bismarck’s Germany, which Weber admired, but rather in the ‘network sociality’ (Wittel,
2001) that allows for work groups to develop flexibly and informally.
Forms of work in late modernity are not on a trajectory towards uniformity (Findlay
and Thompson, 2017). Work motivations, work’s place in chains of accumulation and the
stratification of workers’ status associated with different forms of work are ongoing pat-
terns in how work is differentiated (Sengupta et al., 2009). To claim that all forms of
work move in a similar direction is to reify the late modern and confuse conceptual con-
structs with observations. Rather, there are common structural factors that are shaping
Cannizzo and James 3

the life chances of workers and the choices that they have to create and sustain lifestyles
(or ‘styles of life’) (Giddens, 1991: 80ff; Weber, 1946: 193). Modernity produces une-
qual access to resources and forms of self-actualisation, including lifestyles (Giddens,
1991: 6). The ideal-type of late modern work hence becomes more relevant as an analytic
concept in our contemporary era because we can observe the presence of structural forces
shaping how individuals organise their work lives and future planning. For example,
Giddens (1991: 7) notes that ‘reskilling’ becomes ‘a pervasive reaction to the expropriat-
ing effects of abstract systems’, as changing expert knowledge and changing perceptions
of ‘risk’ in late modern societies encourage perpetual engagement with the custodians of
practical knowledge. A satisfying and secure future in the world of work cannot be
assured by taking a prefigured path through an education and training system, because
the system itself is in flux and the practical knowledge expected in workplaces trans-
forms with changing expertise. Uncertainty about one’s future produced by structural
changes to global economies has been felt through the world of work, described by
Sennett (1998) as the feeling of ‘drift’.

Why ‘meaningful’ work?

This special section focuses on case studies that explore the meaning that is attributed to
work both by workers and among broader publics to explore how experiences and expec-
tations of work are shaped by culture. An exploration of the culture of work is not limited
to surveying the experiences and values of workers at work, but also explores societal
norms, socialisation rituals and signs that communicate about work as a life-shaping
activity. This is achieved by asking to what extent work is considered to be part of both
lifestyles and life-planning. Giddens (1991: 81) helpfully describes a lifestyle as ‘a more
or less integrated set of practices which an individual embraces . . . because they give
material form to a particular narrative of self-identity’. The choice of work and the cul-
tural environment that surrounds working choices is hence a central component of life-
style orientations (Giddens, 1991: 82). When a variety of lifestyle options are available
(or seem possible), Giddens argues that ‘life-planning’ becomes important to reconcile
future actions with one’s own biography. The tools available to workers to imagine the
place of their work and work milieu in their own biographies are hence important for
understanding the emergence of patterns of life-planning and commonalities across the
lifestyles of workers.
Understanding how work is meaningful for workers was a key concern of canonical
social theory: for Marx as alienation from or connection to our species-being as creative
animals, for Weber as a work ethic, and for Durkheim as forming bonds of interdepend-
ence and mutual experience between members of a society. The advent of post-industrial
societies with large service sectors and information/communication infrastructures has
supported the emergence of new patterns of meaning-making in the workplace. Drawing
on Bauman’s speculation that a work ethic would be more frequently displaced by an
‘aesthetic of consumption’ (Bauman, 2000: 158), Warren (2014: 176) analyses the ‘aes-
theticization’ of workplaces by employers seeking to create appealing working environ-
ments and pleasurable experiences for workers to choose and thus enrich their sense of
lifestyle through work. The ideal ‘liquid employee’, who is imagined as choosing their
4 Journal of Sociology 00(0)

workplace based on a desire to feel a sensuous connection to work, is difficult to stand-

ardise, as demonstrated in Warren’s study. Many of the technology sector workers that
Warren interviewed found the creation of ‘fun’, ‘social’ and ‘loud’ workplace environ-
ments irritating and distracting, ultimately detracting from their ability to engage in deep,
focused work – a conflict of ideals about what pleasure or satisfaction workers may
obtain from their work. That is, both working in a highly interactive environment and
working in focused solitude can be considered valuable to workers for the experiences of
pleasure and satisfaction that may be derived from each (Warren, 2014: 191).
The contentious question – often posed as a qualification by those drawing on
Bauman’s sociology to analyse work – remaining here is: How far does Bauman’s specu-
lation extend? What can the presence of workplace aestheticisation in some settings lend
to other studies of work cultures? Poder (2007) posed this question in his critical exami-
nation of Bauman’s speculation. For Poder, the study of how work becomes meaningful
in empirical studies raises important counter-evidence to the idea that work more gener-
ally is becoming hyper-individualised, insecure, consumerised and ‘liquid’. Poder points
to the informal ties produced in teamwork environments (2007: 141–2), emotionally
engaged manager–employee relationships (2007: 143), and the inclusion of employees’
community-building desires in the production of organisational integration (2007: 147)
as important examples of the ongoing place of community and trust in organisational
life. For Poder, social integration depends significantly on management structures, where
the inclusion of employees in organisational decision-making (which Poder describes as
‘communicative leadership’) can encourage worker participation in legitimising leader-
ship and re-socialising the worker within an organisation. Folowing the critique that
Poder levels at Bauman, we might ask whether the trends that Poder identifies form a
common technique that organisations may use to manage the transformation of work-
places and something that workers feel that they can rely upon to engage in life-planning.
In the creative industries, where sole-contracting and project-based work is dominant,
Alacovska (2019) notes that ‘hope’ becomes an existential affective stance for imagining
a future amid precarity. While both information/communication and creative industry
workforces exist as late modern work practices, cultural norms may produce different
working subjects and practices for assembling work lifestyles.
Other fields of inquiry around how meaningful work is achieved have emerged that
bring the scope of this concept into focus. Bailey and Madden (2017) have identified the
study of meaningful work as spanning scholarly disciplines because it helps shape the
rhythms and routines of other aspects of life. Drawing on a sociology of temporality, they
identify how the control of ordering, frequency, synchronicity and pace of work and non-
work life can make work a meaningful experience, or, contrarily, encourage feelings of
meaninglessness where control is lacking. The way that work cultures come to socialise
a sense of work’s progress and career progress has a large role to play in the experience
of demotivating ‘meaningless work’, where a worker may feel ‘stuck in the moment’
(Bailey and Madden, 2017: 11). Working in a different context, Patulny et al. (2019)
draw on AUSSA survey data to assess what kinds of social bonds help job-seekers find
meaningful work. Their research supported past findings that closer friendship ties are
more important types of social connection in the search for meaningful work and that
emotional support from friends correlates with lower chances of being unemployed/
Cannizzo and James 5

discouraged (Patulny et al., 2019: 14). Their studies open up interesting questions about
what role informal social networks may play, not just in searching for work that job-
seekers might already consider to be meaningful (and hence desirable), but whether these
same networks play a causal role in making work meaningful for job-seekers. As a con-
cept that has been operationalised through many conceptual lenses, ‘meaningful work’
presents an opportunity for researchers to explore how work cultures shape the value of
work for workers and society more broadly.

Working in a culture of authenticity

The forms of work explored in this special section are meaningful in at least one of the
senses described above, but they are also forms of work that exist among a cultural
milieu that social theorists have described as late modern. In reflecting on how individu-
als produce meaningful lives, Giddens identified an often-cited trope that haunts the
study of work cultures: that the most satisfying forms of work are experienced as ‘authen-
tic’ activities. In Modernity and Self-Identity, he claims:

Personal meaninglessness – the feeling that life has nothing worthwhile to offer – becomes a
fundamental psychic problem in circumstances of late modernity. We should understand this
phenomenon in terms of a repression of moral questions which day-to-day life poses, but which
are denied answers. ‘Existential isolation’ is not so much a separation of individuals from
others as a separation from the moral resources necessary to live a full and satisfying existence.
The reflexive project of the self generates programmes of actualisation and mastery. But as long
as these possibilities are understood largely as a matter of the extension of the control systems
of modernity to the self, they lack moral meaning. ‘Authenticity’ becomes both a pre-eminent
value and a framework for self-actualisation, but represents a morally stunted process.
(Giddens, 1991: 9, emphasis added)

The idea that a worker or hobbyist may experience a true connection to their selves
through working and that this may cement their role in the social order has been aban-
doned in favour of understanding what Charles Taylor (1991: 17) described as ‘the ideal
of authenticity’. This is a nominalist view of authenticity that focuses on the self-concep-
tions of workers and defines self-authenticity as one’s core values and beliefs about one’s
self ‘as defined and experienced by the self, regardless of its objective conditions’
(Vannini and Burgess, 2009: 104).
This relativistic notion of self-actualisation and the experience of authenticity as
beliefs about self-knowledge play a large role in studies that explore meaning-making
in the world of work. For example, Max Weber’s concept of the scholarly ‘vocation’
(Weber, 1948) is often used to explore the motivations of academic workers (see
Cannizzo, 2018). For Weber, as for sociologists of science since, the vocation has
become a secular social practice, opening the possibility that the vocation of late mod-
ern work could itself be thought of as an aesthetic feature of scholarly work rather than
a necessary component of the work itself. This follows from Weber’s own distinction
between the ideal-typical vocation and the motivations that might drive one to take on
science as a vocation, which cannot emerge from within scientific practice itself.
Hamati-Ataya (2018: 996) suggests that Weber’s ideal-typical conceptualisation of the
6 Journal of Sociology 00(0)

vocation is limiting if used to generate ‘overarching, “universal” principles’, although

such a conceptualisation may be appealing to academics ‘not least because they contrib-
ute to the rationalisation of academics’ social identity from the inside-out, thereby pro-
viding a sense of normative autonomy’. But Weber’s approach overlooks the possibility
that the motivations to engage in a vocation shape the real practice of vocations because
Weber is only concerned with vocations as ideal-types. The presumed normative auton-
omy of professions has supported a distinction between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ motiva-
tions, the latter of which are accused of corrupting vocational practice in an age of
disciplinary governance and an ‘audit culture’ (Power, 1999; Turner, 2019: 240). In
terms of the internal/external motivation distinction, the aesthetic experience of being a
scholar and of doing scholarly work seems both internal and external, as the experience
of being a scholar (or any other professional) is formed from both the internal norms of
professional practice and from an external culture that professionals may draw on to
make sense of their work lives (James, 2015).
The concept of authenticity has come to occupy an interesting space in late modern
social theory because it is used to fill a void left by the displaced ideals of modern soci-
ety. Without trust in grand narratives, without evidence of a teleological social order,
without belief in the values of enlightenment and rationality, without a blind faith in elite
institutions – authenticity becomes employed as a device to explain ultimate ends, mean-
ingful action and reflexive life-planning (as Giddens noted). A culture of authenticity
does not imply that a large proportion of real-life people can live up to the ideal of
authenticity, but rather that there exist widespread practical tools (such as discourses)
that distinct persons and groups may employ for making sense of their lives and work
(Cannizzo, 2018: 101). This culture is not limited to workplaces themselves, but social-
ised through education systems and other social institutions that mediate exposure to
discourses for making a meaningful life (Hookway and James, 2015; James et al., 2020).

In this special section

This special section presents five articles exploring the contemporary uses of ‘meaning-
ful work’. It contains both empirical studies of work cultures and also contributions that
theorise the role that meaning-seeking plays in how work is imagined. In the first contri-
bution, John Carroll asks, ‘Is the vocation paradigm under threat?’ He explores three
realms of popular culture – television drama, sport, and media coverage of politics – to
assess the relevance of the notion of a ‘vocation’ for making sense of work in contempo-
rary Western societies. Carroll follows Weber’s (1930) formulation of the vocation as an
ideal-typical form, which may be represented in popular culture as a frame for under-
standing the portrayal of characters in television drama, of discussion of sports icons, or
of media framing of political events and persons. Carroll’s article sets the tone for how
to identify and analyse ideals about meaningful work and demonstrates that these ideals
are part of popular cultural understandings of professions.
Drawing on another set of ideals, Fairleigh Evelyn Gilmour explores the use of
‘career’ metaphors to analyse the life narratives of current and former women sex work-
ers in the Australian sex industry. Gilmour notes that sex work has been plagued by
assumptions that sex workers define their work through personal experiences of stigma,
Cannizzo and James 7

exploitation and criminalisation – that is, individualised understandings of the sex work
as a form of victimhood. Rather than reinforcing these biases, Gilmour seeks out the
‘interpretive repertoires’ (Potter and Wetherell, 1987) that sex workers use to account for
their working lives, drawing on Inkerson’s (2004) career metaphors. In utilising a social
constructionist epistemology and a method that focuses on the accounts of sex workers,
Gilmour centres the agency of sex workers in making sense of their work and in con-
structing a meaningful life project around their experiences. While other studies have
demonstrated that interpretive repertoires may have gendered uses and can support sexist
workplace practices (see Cannizzo and Strong, 2020), Gilmour’s study demonstrates that
repertoires may also be used by workers to account for how they confront structural
disadvantage, which poses challenges to androcentric career models.
The third contribution, by the editors, Fabian Cannizzo and Sara James, presents an
analysis of the discourses used in university advertisements to frame higher education as
part of the development of a meaningful future in the world of work. This contribution
identifies patterns in assumptions made about potential students in university advertise-
ments to classify how universities attempt to market higher education to domestic stu-
dents. It is claimed here that direct-to-consumer advertisements (DTCAs) in the higher
education sector draw on widespread assumptions about the university’s role in facilitat-
ing access to meaningful work experiences and life beyond the education sector. In late
modern work cultures, where work is valued as an aesthetic experience that can be used
to construct a project of the self, Australian universities have appealed to students as
meaning-seekers. However, as this contribution highlights, not all forms of meaning and
self-projection are available to all potential students. The authors expose the classed
assumptions present in university advertisements, furthering studies of class bias present
in education systems that formally extol the virtues of egalitarianism and equity.
In the following contribution, Roger Patulny, Kathy Mills, Rebecca Olson, Alberto
Bellocchi and Jordan McKenzie compare the emotional experience of Australians in jobs
with varying degrees of security and meaningfulness for workers. Using the 2015–16
Australian Social Attitudes Survey as their data set, the authors examine the emotions
experienced by workers within combinations of various degrees of precarity and meaning-
fulness. This article offers an insightful examination of the relative impact of meaningful-
ness and precarity on the aesthetic experience of work. Their analysis raises a challenging
question for scholars who assume that meaningful work is a good in itself: Could gaining
secure work in a society characterised by precarious employment be more emotionally
positive overall than doing work that is felt to be meaningful? The authors address this
question by comparing the positive and negative emotions that different groups are likely
to experience through their work and how they manage those emotions. Their findings link
secure meaningful work to positive emotional experience, and highly precarious work to
negative emotions. Significantly, though, they emphasise that the necessity for emotional
control is shaped by class inequalities – with those working in the best jobs allowed to
display negative emotions in a way that precarious workers are not – and is more a form of
privilege than an individual habit or indicator of emotional capital.
The final contribution, by Zelmarie Cantillon and Sarah Baker, assesses the meaning
of ‘good work’ among volunteer-run, do-it-yourself (DIY) community heritage organisa-
tions. Their study of Australian Jazz Museum volunteers considers the value of work
8 Journal of Sociology 00(0)

beyond monetary remuneration, instead focusing on the symbolic costs and rewards that
volunteers experience. The dependence of DIY community heritage organisations on
volunteers makes the aesthetic experience of working in these organisations central to
their continued operation in an economic environment that has seen austerity measures
reduce funding for the heritage sector in general, as Cantillon and Baker discuss. The
privatisation of heritage collection, documentation, preservation and display on the one
hand democratises and localises the management of heritage (as community heritage),
but simultaneously de-bureaucratises heritage work, transforming the motivations avail-
able to sustain heritage work. Their exploration of experiences of ‘good work’ (that is
work as ‘involving autonomy, interest and involvement, sociality, self-esteem, self-real-
isation, work–life balance and security’) hence becomes an assessment of the motiva-
tions and aesthetic value that community heritage work holds for workers and makes
their work meaningful – a form of ‘serious leisure’. Although Cantillon and Baker depart
from the terminology of ‘meaningful work’, their approach demonstrates the ongoing
significance of meaning-making to sustain serious leisure practices that support public
services experiencing the brunt of neoliberal austerity measures.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

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Author biographies
Fabian Cannizzo is a sociologist in Melbourne, Australia and the convenor of the Sociology of
Work, Labour and Economy Thematic Group within The Australian Sociological Association. His
research interests include the study of careers in the creative and cultural industries, workplace
gender equality, and the cultural economy of work. His latest book is The Social Structures of
Global Academia (edited with Nick Osbaldiston; Routledge, 2019).
Sara James is a senior lecturer at La Trobe University. Her research focuses on the changing role
of work in people’s lives in an era of fragmented careers and precarious employment. Her recent
book, Making a Living, Making a Life: Work, Meaning and Self-identity (Routledge, 2017), draws
on in-depth interviews and cultural analysis to investigate the significance of work in contempo-
rary Australia.