New Paper! The Experience of Meaningless Work in the Public Sector
A brief announcement!
My co-authors Samia Chreim, Silvia Bonaccio, and I have just published a new paper called “The Experience and Implications of Meaningless Work in the Public Sector” in The Journal of Business Ethics.
You can download the accepted version of the manuscript by clicking this link , and/or you can access the published and formatted version here for free: https://rdcu.be/dDJKY.
About the study
This is a qualitative research study based on interviews with 25 current public servants who self-identified as experiencing meaninglessness at work. We analyzed the nature of the experience, its implications for people, and their responses.
We found that people were harmed by these experiences, making this an issue of ethical importance. We also looked at how meaningless work relates to the notions of bullshit jobs, empty labour, and functional stupidity.
The abstract from the paper
Research suggests that the experience of meaningless work is prevalent in various occupations, and that it is destructive for organizations and individuals, making this an issue of major ethical importance. In this paper, we present the results of a qualitative study based on interviews with Canadian public servants who self-identified as experiencing meaninglessness at work. Our main goal is to better understand participants’ responses to the experience of meaningless work and the broader implications their experiences had on the rest of their lives. We surface and explore the harms inflicted on participants through their experiences with meaningless work, and suggest that these harms may have been made worse by structural features of our study’s public-sector setting. We contribute to organization studies literature by showing the intersection of meaningless work with three related concepts: bullshit jobs, empty labour, and functional stupidity, and argue that our empirical findings complement and complicate these frameworks by presenting the complex but hidden emotional experiences that can accompany outwardly observable workplace behaviours.
The links, again!
Christopher Belanger, PhD MBA
Data Scientist
Researcher
Policy Expert
My research interests include data science, marketing, and public policy, bridging the quantitative-qualitative divide.