ILPC 2026

Meaningful work research is widely observed and constantly growing across disciplines and offers conceptually rich and promising directions. At the same time, a critical evaluation of the concepts, sites, and practices of the scholarship is needed because significant challenges mark the literature. It appears that meaningful work research is particularly fractured. Differences in conceptions, definitions, and the valuation of these obstruct productive cross-disciplinary engagement. One of the most significant problems is that the research inherently centralizes a specific type of work (paid employment), mainly grounded in neoliberal notions of capitalism. The paper demonstrates the lack of alignment between meaningful work research and contemporary conditions of work. This belies the incumbent precarity of work and its detrimental consequences for project and temporary workers, among others. Instead, the paper emphasizes traditional work and measurement of performance. Thus, unpaid activities and tasks are unrecognized, despite their productive capacity and necessity for society. This oversight is regrettable because it fails to include industries (e.g., culture industries) that are marked by instability and looming precarity. Yet, the relevance of the nonprofit and cultural industries, both with regard to precarity as well as economic contribution, is evident in two aspects. For one, their characteristics include personal sacrifices in the form of unpaid internships, low wages, and volunteering. Secondly, in 2010, the nonprofit sector in the U.S. employed over 10 million people, making it the third largest sector in the country. Yet, they do not seem to warrant investigations of how people makes sense of forms of work in the absence of monetary incentives. A phronetic analysis of 50 articles in 35 journals yields questions that exceed the functionality of a concept and centralize concerns of meaning and power instead. This includes the consideration of where meaningful work is present, who has access (or lacks access) to meaningful work, and how it is examined. This review argues for theoretical reconsiderations that give way to reflexivity and sensitivity of the research contexts and methodologies.. Improvements are necessary to examine (precarious) occupations and geographical regions – mainly western industrialized societies – identified in the literature.