Meaning

Work and Society

That the meaning of work could be seen as problematic was occasioned by the regularly occurring incidences of collective worker discontent, raising the question of whether this was a transient phenomenon, which could be rectified, or a permanent characteristic of industrial work. In the early 19th century, Karl Marx claimed that work under capitalism could have no intrinsic meaning for the workers, as the employment exchange alienated them from not only the products of their labor but also themselves as creative beings: for Marx, the worker only became human outside the workplace, and work was undertaken purely for the means of subsistence. Later in the century, Émile Durkheim felt that worker discontent was a symptom of “anomie,” or normlessness, which could be remedied by the creation of a new social order within both the workplace and wider society, in which shared goals and values would offer a renewed meaning to work.

This debate has recurred under different guises up to the present day. It has at various times been argued that, although it was true that work under capitalism was alienating and lacking in intrinsic meaning, society and economy have been changing. The changed society has been variously labeled postindustrialism, post-Fordism, the information society, or the knowledge economy, and the claimed arrival of each postcapitalist model was usually accompanied by the hypothesis that, under this societal paradigm, work would now be experienced as creative and self-fulfilling.

What is Work?

Work in its wider sense could be defined as the activities by which humans build, maintain, and transform their physical and social environment. These activities carry with them a set of values and socially constructed meanings: it is the physical and/or mental activity plus its associated values that constitute work. However, the same activity or task can have different meanings in different social contexts. We can perform the same task, for example garment making, as a hobby, as unpaid domestic work, or as a paid employee [Page 577]in the garment trade, and each of these will carry a different package of meanings for the garment maker. It is clear therefore that when we usually speak of the meaning of work, we are in reality talking about the meaning of “employment.”

If employment is the social and economic context in which work is undertaken, its meaning to the employee will be determined by the nature of the employment relationship. First, the work, as an expenditure of mental and physical effort, will be done for money. Second, the work will be subject to varying degrees of control and direction by others. Research shows that it is the degree to which the worker or someone else controls the performance of the work task that significantly affects the meanings attached to that task: the more control or autonomy the worker has over the job (for example, in skilled craft work), the more the work will have meaning over and above its monetary reward.

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