Let’s get theoretical for a moment: What is work? It’s a bit of a feminist trope to call someone out if they say that a stay at home mom (or dad) “doesn’t work”. Of course that statement is incorrect. Stay at home spouses work in the home making significant contributions to the welfare of the family. They are often stay at home because of children, so they are engaged in childcare. They also typically do significant amounts of domestic labor (i.e., housework), like cooking and cleaning. What they do is clearly work.
The distinction comes from economists who only regard work done in the formal labor sector where one earns a wage as work. The basic macroeconomic models we learn in economics about labor participation divide a person’s day between work sold for wages in the formal labor market and leisure. Leisure was time not spent selling your labor for wages. It’s annoying because it includes the time you spend sleeping, taking a shower, making your meals, cleaning your house, mowing the lawn, shopping, etc. Also watching Netflix or going out to dinner. When I think of leisure, I tend to think of things I do for fun, but in a hardcore econ model, watching Netflix is the same as washing the dishes - it’s all leisure - because you aren’t selling your labor to the market. When the government calculates gross domestic product (GDP), only work done in the formal labor market is counted. All the housework you do after you come home from your office job does not count because you didn’t get paid to do it.
In thinking about work for the sake of thinking about meaningful work, and in the context of a meaningful life, I personally don’t draw a bright line at the receipt of compensation, but I’m not trying to create some sort of national accounting of productivity. So for me, housework (in-home production) counts as work. So does volunteering at your church or your kids’ school. So does serious leisure, like going to jiu-jitsu class. I’m interested in the concept of meaningful work because I think work is what gives our lives meaning. We don’t get meaning from leisure activities (not in the awful economist sense, but in the sense of being entertained or relaxing). Work gives our lives structure, purpose, and goals, and in that way imbues our lives with meaning.
Let’s start by splitting some hairs: meaning vs. meaningful. I’m drawing heavily on an excellent paper by Rosso, Dekas, and Wrzesniewski (2010) this week. RDW say that meaning by itself is a neutral term, though usually associated with a positive valence in the meaningful work literature:
Meaning, according to Pratt and Ashforth (2003), is the output of having made sense of something, or what it signifies; as in an individual interpreting what her work means, or the role her work plays, in the context of her life (e.g., work is a paycheck, a higher calling, something to do, an oppression).
On the other hand, meaningfulness “refers to the amount of significance something holds for an individual.” There is a significant stream of literature in social psychology around “sense making”. The world comes at us in a chaotic way. We organize our experiences and make sense of the world in order to find meaning. We try to find causal chains - this happened because this other thing happened first - and in that sense we create stories to make sense. Once we understand what has happened and why, we can decide what it means in the context of our lives, giving it meaning, and determining if it is meaningful.
One stream of meaningful work literature that speaks to me is related to self-efficacy. Albert Bandura (1982) wrote about the importance of self-efficacy and our feelings of agency - our beliefs about our ability to affect outcomes in the world. People who believe they have high levels of agency - the ability to affect the outcomes of their lives - are generally more satisfied. To me, being able to take control of your life is the key difference between being a child and being a fully functioning adult. When we take away a person’s agency, we infantilize them. If we have high levels of self-efficacy, we believe we have agency, and we act like we have the ability to affect the outcomes we care about.
Work that gives people autonomy and the ability to actually affect outcomes through their effort and creativity gives us a sense of self-efficacy when we succeed. When we are given the autonomy to solve problems in our roles, we engage in sense-making to find the solutions. We use our reasoning and our creativity to follow the chains of cause and effect, and look for a solution. When we find that right solution through our creativity, in whatever field of endeavor that might be, we have a sense of empowerment. A doctor making a difficult diagnosis, but then figuring out the right medication for a patient and seeing that patient begin to heal is deeply gratifying and empowering. The doctor will go forward to work on her next patient with even more self-efficacy and a belief in her agency. A carpenter listening to a client and then designing a set of cabinets or stairs or opening up a wall and the client being delighted by the ingenuity and quality of the product will leave the carpenter with a greater sense of self-efficacy. The list goes on. Success begets greater confidence. The doctor and carpenter go home feeling that they have exercised agency in their lives, affecting outcomes.
It is through our work that we know we have had an impact on the world. Again, that work might not be the thing we are paid to do. Our true work may be something we are paid to do. I took great meaning from my work as a soldier, and I continue to take it now as a professor. I also take meaning from my home life, as a father and as a husband. Those roles entail work, too, but of a different kind. Work to me is any purposeful, goal oriented behavior. I laugh a lot and get a lot of joy from my time in the office with my colleagues and in the classroom with my students. Just because I call it work doesn’t mean it isn’t fun (at least some of the time). I also get a lot of joy, but there is a lot of work, in being a husband and father. I was talking with my students last week about being married for almost 32 years and I told them it’s a lot of work (especially for my wife). You have to pay attention to your spouse’s needs as they change over time, and make sense of what s/he needs, and solve that need just like you would in the workplace for a customer. It’s work.
Work becomes meaningful when we can engage our gifts, when we have the ability to affect the outcomes, and those outcomes matter. Meaningless jobs limit our autonomy and ability to contribute. Meaningless jobs have no outcomes that we care about. Our life’s Work (capital intentional) is what we choose to pour ourselves into, not necessarily what we are paid to do. It is through our Work that we find meaning, an ordering principle for our lives. It’s through our work that, although we will die and be forgotten, it will have mattered that we were once here.
Citations:
Bandura, A. (1982). Self-efficacy mechanism in human agency. American psychologist, 37(2), 122.
Pratt, M. G., & Ashforth, B. E. (2003). Fostering meaningfulness in working and at work. In K. S. Cameron, J. E. Dutton, & R. E. Quinn (Eds.), Positive organizational scholarship (pp. 309–327). San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
Rosso, B. D., Dekas, K. H., & Wrzesniewski, A. (2010). On the meaning of work: A theoretical integration and review. Research in organizational behavior, 30, 91-127.