For the last few weeks, I’ve been thinking about work—specifically, the nature of meaningful work—and hitting a brick wall. It feels like thinking about a koan, and I suspect that it secretly is one.

The crux of it seems to reduce to one question: “What do you mean by ‘meaningful’?”  Purposeful?  Satisfying?  Does it need to benefit society?  Would actually doing meaningful work benefit it anyway, by default?  I decided to settle for “satisfying,” which seems like it would be close enough, since if I was satisfied with my work, by definition I wouldn’t care too much about the rest of it.  And when I tried to think of what kind of work could be satisfying, I couldn’t think of anything.

So I thought I’d try consulting the blogosphere.  What else are people thinking about the idea of “meaningful work?”  Well, it turns out that most of what Technorati finds are management blogs.  “How can we increase employee engagement?  Make them feel like their work is meaningful.”

The only place that really touched on the question I was thinking of was the ever-excellent 37signals blog.  To quote their quote:

Meaningful work is work that is autonomous. Work that is complex, that occupies your mind. And work where there is a relationship between effort and reward — for everything you put in, you get something out…

This actually injects a touch of humour into the material from the management blogs, because if we go back and look at the history of management, the trend since at least Wealth of Nations has been to ever more rigorously remove these elements from all jobs.  In that masterful bit of work, Adam Smith described how to take the incredibly rewarding job of making pins and make it twenty times as productive by making it one twentieth as interesting: instead of making entire pins, workers would make pin heads, or pin shafts, or they’d sharpen the pins, or they’d attach the heads to the shafts.  In the years following that, management developed into a “scientific discipline,” eventually hitting Taylorism where people were deliberately confused with machines.  Since this is giving me flashbacks of a wonderful Sociology class, and since it’s directly relevant, I’d suggest reading Harry Braverman’s Labour and Monopoly Capital: The Degredation of Work in the Twentieth Century, if you haven’t and are interested in the history of jobs getting shittier.

That practice continues to this day, with performance reviews purely in terms of work units per time period, with workflows broken down to the tiniest tasks, and even “knowledge workers” reduced to doing short, repetitive tasks.  Interestingly, the job of management—extracting as much as you can from the people under you without getting caught breaking the law—hasn’t changed much at all, and they still get to do this rewarding task from beginning to end without any division whatsoever.

This really leaves me no closer to an idea of what would constitute meaningful or satisfying work, but at least it was interesting to think about why it’s so hard to find.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 26th, 2009 at 10:09 am and is filed under Smart-Sounding Babble, Society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.