Abstract
This study, based on in-depth interviews with 45 practitioners in the emerging field of environmental sustainability, argues for a more nuanced approach to studying the meaningfulness of work. Drawing from the tension-centered approach, we posit that sustainability practitioners derived meaningfulness in tensional ways from circumstances and factors that were both enabling and constraining, stemming from various organizational, professional and political structures. This occurs through ongoing negotiation that spans everyday work processes, the perceived impact of such work, and participants’ career positioning. In addition to examining meaningfulness as a dynamic and contested negotiation, rather than a purely positive outcome, the political implications of such meaning-making are traced. We close by discussing some implications for future research on meaningfulness of work.
The notion of what work ‘means’ has attracted scholarly attention from various fields, including organizational communication, sociology, vocational psychology and management (Beadle and Knight, 2012; Clair et al., 2008; Cheney et al., 2008; May et al., 2004; Michaelson et al., 2014; Sverko and Vizek-Vidovic, 1995). This line of research continues to have major implications, given the ongoing personalization of work roles and contexts, and the increased import of interpersonal relations for making sense of/at work. Nevertheless, the concept of meaningful work may be critiqued for viewing it as primarily positive, with less attention paid to temporal shifts in meaning-making and to the political implications at stake. While recent scholarship has argued for a more situated and nuanced understanding of why and how work becomes meaningful (Berkelaar and Buzzanell, 2015; Buzzanell and D’Enbeau, 2013), most studies assume static interpretations of meaningfulness, which fulfils some ‘good’ parameters along the way, such as passion for social issues, greater work–life balance or creativity.
In contrast, we propose a tensional approach to finding work meaningful, whereby the meaning-making of work, or the social construction of work through communication across both macro/societal and micro/interactional levels, is foregrounded. As Broadfoot et al. (2008: 158) aver,
Holding macromoments and micromoments of discourse in dialogue and productive tension with each other allows scholars to explore the communicative and organizing practices through which meaningful work comes into and out of being, and is always subject to shifts in discursive and material conditions.
This tensional approach centers the dynamic and contested nature of meaningfulness, so that we note how workers’ meaning-making shifts over time, as professional and organizational contexts change, and workers renegotiate what it is (in fact) about their work that they find meaningful. In doing so, it problematizes distinctions between extrinsic factors and intrinsic factors that drive meaning-making of work, noting the overlaps between constructs such as ‘meaning of work’ (extrinsic) and ‘meaningfulness of work’ (intrinsic) (Lair et al., 2008) – so that we may recognize ‘meaning/ful work’ (Zorn and Townsley, 2008; see the 2008 special forum in Management Communication Quarterly on Meaning/ful Work) as transcending both micro and macro sites of social experience. Moreover, this approach highlights that meaningfulness depends not merely on the positive aspects of a job, but may be derived from moral dilemmas, and harrowing or dejecting circumstances – such as less pay, unbalanced work/life situations and little scope for creativity (Bunderson and Thompson, 2009; Steger et al., 2013). We thus note the slippages and complications that arise for practitioners, recognizing that organizational life necessarily involves ‘living with tensions’ (Trethewey and Ashcraft, 2004), instead of assuming a steady state of satisfaction or jubilation.
We situate this study in the emerging field of environmental sustainability, drawing from in-depth interviews with 45 self-identified sustainability practitioners working in various sectors, such as oil-and-gas, architecture, automotive and advocacy. This context highlights an additional contribution to extant research – tracing how meaningfulness is closely tied to the political structures and discourses at stake (Lair et al., 2008), as the contours of a field’s work evolve gradually. While scholars have argued that finding work ‘meaningful’ is profoundly agentic, even as this moniker of meaningfulness may be used against workers’ best interests (Dempsey and Sanders, 2010), we trace how the politico-economic constitution of work shapes practitioners’ meaning-making. For sustainability practitioners, there is the struggle to both prove their emerging field’s legitimacy vis-a-vis other established professions (e.g. accounting, public relations), and to maintain sustainability’s agenda of systemic transformation while working within dominant capitalist structures (Prasad and Elmes, 2005; Wright and Nyberg, 2012). Deriving meaningfulness is thus fraught with political tensions for such workers.
In the remainder of this article, we first review relevant research on the meaningfulness of work and the emerging profession of environmental sustainability. Next, we outline our data collection and analysis methods. We then describe three tensions that sustainability practitioners communicatively negotiated in our study – work processes, impacts and career positioning – enabling them to find work meaningful. We conclude by discussing some implications for future research, related to the dynamic tensions characterizing meaningfulness, the role of politics and shaping policy on sustainability work.
Literature review
Meaningfulness of work
Reviewing the literature across multiple disciplines, Cheney et al. (2008: 144) defined meaningful work as ‘work that contributes to a personally significant purpose, [which] can be differentiated from work that simply makes us feel good or work that enables us to hone our talents.’ They concluded that meaningfulness extends beyond formal paid labor, to any ‘coherent set of tasks, or any endeavor requiring mental and/or physical exertion that an individual interprets as having a purpose’ (p. 144). For some, this purpose could be interpreted in terms of self-realization and self-growth as a worker; for instance, Schwartz (1982: 642) argued that for industrial employment to be ‘meaningfully structured,’ it had to be ‘arranged so that all persons’ jobs allow them to act as autonomous individuals and thus foster instead of stunt their autonomous development’. Broadly speaking, finding work ‘meaningful’ has implied a sort of ‘best fit’ among worker and work (Michaelson et al., 2014), so that such work is particularly significant and holds ‘positive meaning for individuals’ (Rosso et al., 2010). Empirical research indicates that meaningfulness is positively related to worker self-identity, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, psychological well-being, institutional citizenship and resilience against burnout (Cheney et al., 2010; Hackman and Oldham, 1980; May et al., 2004; Pratt and Ashforth, 2003), thereby making it a crucial topic for organization studies.
It should be noted that the bulk of this literature, usually adhering to a ‘best fit’ approach to meaningfulness of work, treats the concept of meaningfulness through a ‘components lens,’ whereby specific factors (e.g. autonomy, job satisfaction) are deemed to distinguish something as meaningful work, as opposed to something else as ‘meaning-less.’ For instance, Bowie (1998) drew from the writings of Kant on personhood and ethics to suggest six main aspects of meaningful work – work that individuals freely agree to do, allows workers to exercise autonomy, enables development of their rational capacities, provides sufficient wages, supports moral development, and does not interfere with workers’ pursuit of happiness. Cheney et al.’s review (2008) also concluded that meaningfulness of work depended on enabling agency, enhancing belonging or relationships, creating opportunities for influence, developing one’s talents, contributing to a greater good, and providing income for a decent living. Missing from this operationally ‘neat’ lens is the ‘messiness’ of meaningful work, as described through countless anecdotes and situational case studies (e.g. Buzzanell and D’Enbeau, 2013). These studies indicate that, while the role of worker agency to name particular work as meaningful (or not) is crucial, also key are the organizational, professional, political and economic constraints that both enable and restrain worker agency in different contexts (Buzzanell and Lucas, 2013).
The tendency to ascribe overtly positive valence to meaningfulness, associating it with favorable factors and outcomes, ‘rather than just looking at how we understand work more broadly (i.e. what work means)’ (Michaelson et al., 2014: 79), might explain the adoption of this components lens. Scholarship on work as ‘calling’ especially tends to reify this positive bias, privileging some work as spiritual (or even secular) calling, whereas others are not. For instance, Scott’s (2007) research on how Christian liberal arts college students saw missionary work as their calling emphasizes intense dedication to work, while neglecting how ongoing experiences might mitigate this dedication or change its direction. Nevertheless, scholars such as Bunderson and Thompson (2009: 40) point out that deeply meaningful work constitute ‘a double-edged sword’ for some workers, who may put up with inadequate pay, physically demanding work, unsafe working conditions and strain on personal relationships beyond the workplace, because the epithet of meaningfulness ‘infuses even the most trivial and unpleasant tasks with transcendent meaning and significance.’ For their part, Lair et al. (2008: 172) aver that ‘built into the construct meaningful work is an inherent elitism, privileging certain types of work for their assumed potential to promote (a particular version of) human development.’ Thus, defining meaningfulness of work as positive significance to the individual risks marginalizing broader and hidden meanings of work, the complex negotiations of meaning-making that workers engage in for different kinds of work, and the socio-political contexts that shape such processes.
Tensions and meaningfulness
Accordingly, our study draws from what interpretive and post-structural scholars of organization studies have recognized as the ‘tension-centered’ approach, whereby ironies, paradoxes, dialectics and contradictions play a key role in both ordering and dis-ordering social reality for organizational members (Kärreman and Alvesson, 2009; Putnam, 1986; Stohl and Cheney, 2001; Trethewey and Ashcraft, 2004; see 2004 special issue of Journal of Applied Communication Research on ‘living with tension’). For such scholars, tensions are abiding dualisms that shape organizational experience, in constructive and destructive ways, so that workers must negotiate both poles of the tension constantly to make meaning of their everyday work. Examples may be found in constant exhortations for practitioners to be ‘flexible’ to changing work and social environments, while adhering to ‘established’ norms and formats of work (Putnam, 1986), or – in the case of sustainability workers – to be focused on viability and profitability for the organization, but still implementing programs that ascribe to social responsibility rather than profitmaking (Sonenshein, 2006).
This approach recasts meaningfulness of work from a ‘components lens’ to tracing how meaning-making is perpetual and deeply tensional. Far from being a static emotional outcome, meaningfulness becomes an ongoing process, grounded in communication, whereby organizational actors negotiate with others what work means, in different temporal and spatial contexts, drawing on broader socio-historical-cultural discourses. We thus foreground ‘communicative work,’ noting ‘the diverse ways in which people communicatively create and organize meaning about, through, and for their work and working lives’ (Broadfoot et al., 2008: 153). While organization studies research has often sought to distinguish between meaningful work and meaning of work – so that ‘meaningfulness’ is derived from (positive) intrinsic factors of the work itself, and ‘meaning’ indicates the extrinsic, multiple significances of work in general (Lair et al., 2008; Rosso et al., 2010) – the tension-centered approach would take meaning-making and meaningfulness to be irrevocably linked with each other. That is, deriving meaningfulness from work necessitates engaging (via communication) with the various meanings at stake, ascribing both positive and negative valences according to one’s social and temporal context, and constantly shifting across these tensional poles. Zorn and Townsley (2008) thus fittingly coin the term ‘meaning/ful work’ to describe this tensional process of deriving meaningfulness, which depends on both macro and micro-level signifiers of work.
Three key takeaways follow for our study. First, the tension-centered approach allows us to interrogate traditional facets of meaningfulness – such as autonomy, innovation and self-actualization – since both positive drivers and negative constraints must be co-negotiated by practitioners through everyday communication (Berkelaar and Buzzanell, 2015). Tensions between personal values and organizational (or professional) ethics, individual codes of conduct and societally preferred discourses, and resistance and control, are thereby centered. Thus, the tension-centered approach helps account for the positive biases of meaningfulness, so that work might be meaningful not because of practitioners’ eventual settling on either pole of these tensions but owing to their constant shifting across them.
Second, the tension-centered approach recognizes that meaningfulness is dynamic, negotiated retrospectively by practitioners, sometimes over the length of their careers (see also Dobrow, 2006). This requires a focus on practitioners’ career narratives, not just their accounts of the here-and-now, to trace how they derive meaning from fragmented past and present events, often connecting them retrospectively – and, in turn, shaping their orientation to the future. For instance, Tams and Marshall (2011) found that corporate social responsibility (CSR) managers engaged in six main career practices influencing their meaning-making of work – expressing their authentic selves, connecting with others, articulating how their expertise was a constructive contribution, institutionalizing responsible practices, attempting to shape the field strategically, and using their expertise to examine systematic change possibilities.
Finally, the tension-centered approach foregrounds the political implications of deriving meaningfulness. Scholars have long argued that organizational and professional practices are grounded in dominant political structures, drawing from and perpetuating discourses that are raced, gendered and classed in ways that favor status quo identities (Cheney and Ashcraft, 2007; Mumby, 2005). For instance, Trethewey et al. (2006) have noted how societal pressures help commodify worker selves, engendering a ‘preferred self’ that workers internalize, which is then pressed into service to meet the organization’s goals. The tension-centered approach highlights how workers engage in such identity negotiation practices that seek to control their meaning-making of work, yet simultaneously resist dominant structures and discourses, deriving meaningfulness from their ongoing tussles with political interests. While the politics of meaningful work play out in various contexts, they become particularly salient for environmental sustainability practitioners.
Doing sustainability work
Initially defined in terms of economic development that does not impinge on the social, environmental and financial prospects of future generations, sustainability has since morphed into a vast industry encompassing different vocational backgrounds, driving contemporary organizational practice (Peterson and Norton, 2007; White et al., 2012). This industry includes nonprofits focused on policymaking, activist organizations like Greenpeace, communication and management strategy consultancy firms, power utility firms in both the private and public sector, manufacturing companies that employ less polluting and more resource-effective mechanisms, and clean energy (e.g. wind, solar, hydro) generation firms, to mention but a few examples. There is a vast body of research on the communicative practices and dilemmas of organizations that pursue environmental sustainability. For instance, scholars have examined the rhetorical strategies adopted by multinational companies in response to climate change (Ihlen, 2009), analyzed industry trends of adopting environmental CSR (O’Connor and Gronewold, 2013), and critiqued global discourses that privilege dominant political and capital interests (Ganesh, 2007) and inauthentic ‘greenwashing’ campaigns that merely adopt window-dressing rather than implement effective change programs in key operations (Munshi and Kurian, 2005).
Lacking, however, are empirical studies probing the communicative dynamics and tensions of practitioners who ‘do the work’ of sustainability, or the meaning of sustainable organizing to the very people engaged in its implementation (Mitra and Buzzanell, 2015). This lacunae is magnified given that sustainability remains an emerging field, with practitioners engaged in legitimacy struggles both within their organizations and in broader society (Prasad and Elmes, 2005; Starik and Marcus, 2000). Even as sustainability discourse is split across ‘hard’ versions that favor environmental conservation, and ‘soft’ versions that align it with socioeconomic development, sustainability practitioners must reach out to a variety of corporate, governmental, media and public stakeholders to persuasively make their case (Banerjee, 2011). None of this is easy, given persistent public opposition to reduction of fossil fuels and economic decisions to mitigate climate change (e.g. implementing a global carbon tax).
Although some industry bodies (e.g. Toronto Sustainability Speaker Series) have tried to draft guidelines for sustainability practitioners (TSSS, 2012), they mostly identify broad skills without considering contextual exigencies or practitioners’ internalized meaning-making. In fact, Sonenshein (2006) found that sustainability practitioners engage in complex valuations of internal and external (or perceived societal) ethics, so that communicative practices of translating private values for public audiences become key. Managers working in sustainability-related jobs routinely embellish the economic aspects (or the ‘business case’) of such issues, subtract the normative or altruistic implications rather than stress them, and reframe supervisors’ social views (rather than uncritically adopt them), while being acutely aware of these issue-crafting practices. In a study of sustainability entrepreneurs, Shepherd et al. (2013) found they were more likely to disengage from personal pro-environmental values while assessing business opportunities that might cause harm when their perceived self-efficacy was high, and industry munificence was seen as low – highlighting the role of policy structures and external valuations in shaping meaning-making.
On the one hand, sustainability practitioners evince deep dedication to environmental causes, so that work was a calling that constituted their sense of self and impelled them to urgent action – to ‘transform’ the world (Conklin, 2012). However, Wright and Nyberg (2012) note that, despite frequent invocations of ‘passion,’ practitioners tempered their ideals when dealing with supervisors or external stakeholders. In tracing the imperative to thus be ‘tempered radicals’ (Meyerson and Scully, 1995), Wright and Nyberg underlined the institutional difficulties faced by such workers, even in organizations that ostensibly champion sustainability. While ‘it’s not easy being green’ for corporate managers, Sonenshein et al. (2014) found that ongoing negotiation with such doubts regarding sustainability work vis-a-vis the dominant capitalist paradigm helped practitioners better position their values and experiences within their organizations. Their research corroborated Tams and Marshall’s (2011: 110) conclusion that practitioners in ‘responsible careers,’ where ‘people seek to have an impact on societal challenges such as environmental sustainability and social justice through their employment and role choices, strategic approaches to work and other actions,’ must constantly engage in reflexive positioning to make sense of their place in the broader capitalist system.
Thus, our guiding research question may be stated: what tensions of meaningfulness do sustainability practitioners negotiate? Rather than a ‘best fit’ or ‘components’ approach to meaningfulness, we are attuned to how practitioners draw from both positive and negative experiences, transformative possibilities and potential restraints, to derive meaning.
Method
We used qualitative methods (specifically, in-depth interviews) to examine sustainability practitioners’ personal stories about work, given our focus on the tensions at stake (Lindlof and Taylor, 2011).
Data collection
Participants were recruited using LinkedIn.com™, a prominent professional networking website with more than 100 million members (DeKay, 2009). The site enabled us to contact participants worldwide, who self-identified as sustainability practitioners, by virtue of membership in specific online groups (e.g. ‘Sustainability Professionals’). Participants were also asked to refer 1–2 contacts for the study. In all such cases of snowball sampling, referees turned out to be members of the LinkedIn groups initially targeted.
In all, we recruited 45 participants, of whom 23 were male and 22 female. While 23 of the participants were in the USA, the others were in the UK (six participants), Canada (six participants), China (four participants), Australia (three participants), Hungary (two participants) and Argentina (one participant). Most respondents worked at for-profit consultancy firms (21 participants), while 13 worked for ‘general’ or manufacturing corporations, five for nonprofits, and six noted ‘other’ employment situations. Participants were highly educated, with 25 having a Masters degree, 14 possessing an undergraduate degree, and three having doctorates; only one participant listed high school as the highest level of education, and two chose to answer ‘other.’ Participants were mainly in the upper (25) and mid-levels (11) of administration, with only two at junior/entry level and seven preferred ‘not applicable’ (e.g. part-timers, unemployed, sole actor). Finally, they worked in different areas, like carbon pricing, manufacturing, energy, branding, food processing and certification – reflecting the rapid spread of sustainability across traditional sectors (White et al., 2012).
Participants were interviewed for 45–90 minutes via Skype™, phone, or email. Although our first preference was Skype and phone interviews, five participants (11%) – all of whom lived outside the USA – indicated their busy work schedules would permit them to participate only via email. Subsequently, the Skype and phone interviews were our primary data, and the emailed interviews served to validate the results of our data analysis. We found the need to conduct a follow-up email interview with one participant only. Skype and phone interviews were semi-structured and fairly informal (Lindlof and Taylor, 2011), while the emailed interviews contained key questions from the protocol. The interview protocol began with ‘grand tour’ questions, like ‘Tell me the story of your career,’ to encourage free participation. Subsequently, participants were asked about their daily work experiences, pleasurable and unsettling aspects of their work, what they found meaningful, and their organization’s reputation in the field. They were asked to elaborate on their answers, providing specific examples from everyday life or representative exemplars, so that we might be able to tease out how tensions related meaningfulness intersected through particular episodes. At the end of the interview, participants were asked for parting comments or additional information that the protocol might have missed. Transcribed interviews (including the emailed data) amounted to 585 pages of single-spaced text, in 12 font size.
Data analysis
We drew from Charmaz’s (2004, 2006) constructivist version of grounded theory to analyze the data, with overlapping phases of open coding and focused coding. Atlas.tiTM qualitative analysis software was used to sort through the data.
During open coding, first-order themes were identified on the basis of repetition, forcefulness, salience and recurrence. Our unit of analysis was a cluster of sentences that expressed a particular theme (e.g. connecting with stakeholders as positive for meaningfulness), and we constantly compared these clusters to the broader incidents and job experiences participants described. Charmaz (2006: 54) notes that such constant comparison among data codes, as well as between data and the researchers’ accumulated sensibilities, helps refine the emerging codes. During the stage of focused coding, relationships among these first-order themes were identified, and they were further categorized under second-order themes (e.g. direct stakeholder interactions comprising both positive and negative valences) and third-order areas (e.g. stakeholder interaction classified under sustainability work processes). Thematic saturation occurred while analyzing the 22nd interview; subsequent interview data reiterated previously unearthed codes, providing further examples and contexts of application that proved helpful in refining these codes further. The coauthors analyzed an initial portion of the data separately, and then compared their notes to ensure agreement on the analytic procedure. Several such stages of coding-then-discussion followed in an iterative fashion, so that we were able to deliberate what the codes meant, how they fit together, and how particular tensions of meaningful work came to the foreground. The next section describes our findings.
Findings
Sustainability practitioners saw their work as being meaningful along three tension-laden areas: underlying work processes, perceived impacts of sustainability work and career positioning. Each of these areas was a site of ongoing contestation, so that participants’ meaning-making was situated in the complex policy and economic context of sustainability.
Work processes
Most commonly, participants described how they found the ongoing procedures of sustainability work meaningful – both uplifting and unsettling. This was especially through enlightening business, direct interactions with stakeholders and negotiating political cultures.
Enlightening business
While we expected sustainability practitioners to derive meaningfulness from their role in enlightening mainstream business (Conklin, 2012), our participants emphasized that this was a process-based theme, rather than focused solely on the final outcomes. For instance, Della noted that being a ‘bridge-builder’ was really meaningful:
. . . helping [clients] understand – for example, the carbon market stuff – that some of the concerns actually were worth taking into consideration, and looking at different ways of pursuing a project, so that these considerations might be taken into account, which in the long run is good for the company, because they’re going to have lower risk.
She highlighted how bridge-building enabled her to provoke transformation in underlying organizational practices and procedures, which then began to take ‘into consideration’ issues related to the environment, instead of dismissing them as unrelated. Similarly, Yusuf found that
. . . teaching social entrepreneurship has been very, very exciting . . . The work I’m presently involved in looks at how we can use that mesh of business understandings of [human relations] and social side of things, trying to develop organizations that are really resilient.
Participants were not blind, though, to the challenges of enlightening business (Banerjee, 2011), as Sunil pointed out: ‘Clients continue to focus on profit maximization, rather than sustainable development. Do I speak with my heart or my brain; this is a conundrum.’ His dilemma reflects the double binds at stake (Wright and Nyberg, 2012), so that sustainability practitioners must negotiate their emotions and commitment to enlightenment with profit-oriented demands from clients and employers. Danielle observed:
The low pay is stressful; I have modest habits, but is it so much to ask to be able to live alone at 37? . . . I don’t feel bad about it, but sometimes I wish I did. There’s a constant tension between taking money from corporations that are not always doing right by people and the environment, and keeping the lights on. I’m not always confident that we’re doing enough or the right things to create the change we seek; that lack of optimism is a drag, but I don’t think that thinking positive actually changes anything, while my sense of concern keeps me sharp.
In this excerpt, although Danielle reiterated the profit complications associated with enlightenment, these complexities do not so much detract from making sustainability work meaningful for her, as they ‘keep [her] sharp.’ In another example, Rebecca pondered over the dilemma of freely distributing her business plan to other sustainability start-ups (to help grow the emerging field), or guard her proprietary secrets closely:
I think the whole business planning, that’s not obvious to me. When I’m faced with questions like, should I totally give away this prototype to anybody and everybody, or should I sell it to raise money to build out the rest? Under what terms would I agree to be in a partnership with another entity?
Enlightening business took a personal turn in this example, because it involved the viability of her own firm. Eventually, she decided on a meaningful compromise that allowed her to begin with universal access for other start-ups, but charged them money for more advanced knowledge.
Thus, even as enlightening business allowed sustainability practitioners to emphasize positive facets such as bridge-building, socially beneficial work, and creating a viable and creative start-up on the ground, they noted the underlying need to temper their passion and enthusiasm, the ongoing stress that served to heighten self-awareness, and recognized that self-interest might trump altruism.
Stakeholder interaction
Direct interaction with stakeholders enabled practitioners to find work meaningful – ranging from idealized instances of dialogue, to getting the message across via effective translation. Hannibal provided a great example:
I get to collaborate with people beyond my industry to achieve an outcome that we’re all driving toward. That synergy of effort is something that I find very pleasing. Both internally, within my organization, and broad-based cohesion, and the unity of purpose that sustainability and environment brings to people is very worthwhile and exciting to work with.
For Hannibal, then, ongoing dialogue with various stakeholders to discover mutual goals and ‘synergy,’ in line with a ‘unity of purpose,’ made sustainability work meaningful.
Nevertheless, participants noted that stakeholder interaction posed significant challenges, such as inadequate media tools, marketing models and even business models, which in turn shaped their meaning-making. Stewart, working at a sustainability recruitment firm, described these interactions as both exciting and unsettling:
I enjoy the challenge of finding the best people for environmental roles. It’s always good to get a new client on board and find candidates they want to interview.
What are some aspects of your work you find unsettling?
I have to make ‘cold’ sales calls to potential clients that aren’t always well received. Also I can work on a job for a long time and find some great candidates only for the client to cancel their requirement for someone. Terminating temp candidate contracts and giving negative feedback is also a rather unpleasant aspect to the role.
Here, he noted the positive outcomes of helping a recruit find a suitable job, but through the lens of a challenge to be overcome. Such stakeholder complexities enabled participants like Stewart to decide what practices were most dear to them, how to refine their professional brand, or to learn new skills of stakeholder outreach. For Lina, ‘I love that there’s always a challenge – from water issues to carbon issues, to biodiversity. I also get to learn from other people and solve problems which I love to do.’ She noted, ‘When people don’t like to change that’s always difficult and sometimes I wonder whether this is all worth it.’ In another instance, Matt described how a difficult conversation with a corporate executive about fiduciary responsibilities to shareholders forced him to see beyond targeting ‘evil corporations,’ and consider transforming entire educational systems:
Understanding that just totally hit me to the core and made me rethink [everything]. I was very emotional for a long time about evil corporations, and then I had this sort of very logical conversation that made me go, wow, that’s stunning.
Thus, stakeholder interaction helped sustainability participants derive meaningfulness from their work, by helping them discover synergy across various contexts, and learn new skills and/or perspectives; but this interaction was often emotionally taxing, both because of the ever-present possibility of rejection, and having one’s belief system fundamentally shaken.
Political culture
Practitioners also found the negotiation of political cultures an unlikely site of meaningfulness. While most downplayed partisan politics related to the emerging profession of environmental sustainability, others recognized how these politics shaped their field. In either case, they sought to transcend politics for the sake of professional legitimacy. When asked about the conflicts faced at work, Robert responded in a very haphazard, reticent fashion, first talking about the conventional ‘blue state, red state’ divide (in the USA) that made adopting environmental management difficult, but then blaming more general anti-regulation discourse and overly complex technical language: ‘Cuz some of the environmental and social impacts, they aren’t immediate where you recognize them; or they’re hard to understand, they’re very scientific, like that – cultural and political, mainly.’ Here, the political culture framing sustainability becomes meaningful as a negative, rather than positive force. This did not make it meaningless however, since it strongly influenced his work, provoking meaning-making in an uncomfortable way. In contrast, Sandra acknowledged both the political constitution of sustainability work as well as her own political commitments, and connected her motivation to the political structures at stake:
Well, I thought, there’s so many things wrong with the world, why don’t I just try to fix one of them and work on it? For a long time I decided that nuclear weapons are evil, and needed to be eradicated, and got myself a job going to Geneva . . . So, basically I think there’s a new cause – new theme for my career, and a number of the people, interestingly, who were working on the nuclear issue did actually migrate over to environmental issues. A number of the top Democratic Party [US] political appointees in the environmental area had previously worked on nuclear issues, so it seemed natural to use the science, policy or legal expertise they had, because it really was looking at the impact humans were having on their environment.
Nevertheless, like Robert, she decried the political machinery that produces ambiguous policy for sustainability work, noting that being driven by her cause ‘increases your tolerance level to put up with some of the crap . . . stupid politics and meaningless uses of your time and all the rest, because you’re motivated by some central theme.’ Political culture may thus be recognized as shaping one’s orientation toward work, even enhancing one’s work ethic, but still sought to be diluted. Nor was this restricted to US practitioners alone; when asked what she found troubling about her work, Roxanne in Hungary noted the surplus of ‘legal requirements concerning environmental protection changing continually. You have to follow them, of course, because if you don’t meet these requirements, then you are not able to work.’
Thus, even as the political nature of sustainability work was (hesitantly) acknowledged to dampen enthusiasm, it shaped practitioners’ work ethics, honed motivation and allowed them to be more nimble in negotiating political discourse and structures.
Impact
Together with process, sustainability practitioners constituted meaningfulness of work according to the perceived impacts achieved; specifically, in terms of deliverable outcomes, and providing a solution to complex problems.
Deliverables
Concrete and deliverable impacts were valorized, so that practitioners could point toward tangible outcomes to make the practical case for sustainability (Prasad and Elmes, 2005). These were defined in several ways – a coherent manual for changed organizational practices, or directly measurable results, or monetary value. Melvin (at a green agro firm) highlighted the deliverables generated by his Market Transformations Initiative:
The thing that I find meaningful is that I do think that we’re actually making progress on addressing these issues. Within the next couple of months, we’re going public with some of the work that we’ve done with [Company] because we helped them identify their top five priorities, and then we’re continuing to work with them on developing a sustainability platform for their company. For us to be helping and push a company that has 30,000 sites globally that can help spread the message, while also trying to reduce the impacts this company has, I think is meaningful and real.
However, he also admitted the tensions of proving deliverables, noting that the Initiative’s work was far from done (‘continuing to work with them’), and no precise measure was stipulated on how to ‘spread the message.’ For Yusuf, the deliverable was creating viable grassroots organizations focused on environmental and social sustainability, so that stakeholders could ‘take it from just an idea to something that was real, and that was a strategy that other marketers in business could use, thereby growing an industry and also achieving some social good.’
Systemic transformation was the deliverable for Don, who sought to merge this change with mainstream bottom-line targets. For him, work was meaningful because, ‘I’m beginning to see companies change their business model, and some of them already have changed their model based on what we’ve been able to do with them. That’s pretty cool.’ Creating a deliverable impact also meant enabling cost savings and brand differentiation. When asked to provide a specific example, Don recalled working with a company ‘that builds playgrounds for a living’:
All of a sudden, they had a competitive difference, because we built tools so that their buyers could look at the structure they were selling and their carbon footprint from a complete supply-chain perspective. None of their competitors could do that. The second thing they did was begin to actually change their sales model from ‘we’ll sell you a net view and come knock on your door every 3–5 years,’ to ‘we just want to sell you 10 years of service.’ So, they took everything back, rebuilt it all, which basically means they closed their supply-chain. They realized that the metal they used to build the structures was where their footprint and cost was. So, I created more modular types of structures. They could take back a lot of the pieces and reuse them, decrease their footprint, [have] more stable revenues, [so] all these things began to happen. That’s pretty exciting!
Here, a concrete deliverable meant making a ‘real’ impact in the organization’s way of doing business and its bottom line, while being attuned to the complexities of changed supply chains and political commitments.
Nevertheless, deliverables competed with ‘thought leadership,’ a term used liberally by participants, as when Gilbert argued that despite his firm’s failure, the work had still been meaningful:
We got a lot of traction as far as thought leadership. The white papers that we published were very popular, I distributed over 1600 copies of my Top 7 Sustainability Practices white paper, and we got an invite to speak at Sustainable Brands, and we had our blogs published in a variety of places.
Communication becomes key in his meaning-making, as he noted ‘part of our challenge was defining what we were, what we wanted to provide, and define that value proposition, but toward the end we had done that pretty well.’ Defining value was reframed here as a concrete deliverable in its own right, making the deliverable impact perhaps less tangible, but no less meaningful.
To summarize, sustainability practitioners found their work meaningful because it produced concrete deliverables; nevertheless, ‘deliverable’ was interpreted widely, in often competing ways, ranging from actually creating a product or service, to forming a grassroots organization or movement, to adopting a tangible process, to simply articulating a provocative idea for thought leadership.
Solutions
While finding meaningfulness in the solutions offered by their work, sustainability practitioners negotiated the ongoing uncertainty of both broader politico-economic policy and rapid climate change. Participants contrasted their work and preferred impacts with fuzzy, uncertain outcomes; Lina averred, when quizzed about what made her work meaningful,
I’m a person with a very idealistic vision of the world, but I was raised to think pragmatically about solutions. I always wanted to make a difference and thought that nature is an important part of human survival and that no one was accounting for it, so I just got into it.
Similarly, Rebecca said,
I don’t think that sitting back and petitioning God or the universe is going to bring about my ideals. I don’t know that I’ll even live to see them come to fruition, but you’ve got to do something. You can’t just sit around.
Like Lina, she focused on proactive pragmatism, and the expected results to ‘come to fruition,’ disavowing uncertainty or simply waiting.
Nevertheless, uncertainty constituted an opportunity for participants to enhance their expertise and re-engage stakeholders, as in the case of Benji who observed, ‘It’s been a great experience seeing how this process takes shape, and it’s messy – and I mean that in a good way, because there is no set process. It really is about building relationships, trust, and leadership.’ In another example, Ross, working with healthcare companies on sustainable waste management, recalled a memorable client: ‘This was a company in transition, and what they needed was someone to just be able to say, here’s what we’re going to do, here’s a plan.’ However, a number of procedural uncertainties obstructed his plans and forced him to change tack: ‘It takes a while in the hospital world, but two months later, everything was moved off, and now they have been up and running for a year and a half . . . we’re getting the business and moving forward.’ That is, ‘moving forward’ was a rhetorical necessity in this parable to define impact. Ross concluded:
I’m really proud of that I basically took things from zero, I had a blank board, and did this – working with my company and with them. So, it’s a dual win for me because of all the good people I’ve been engaged with and built these programs for.
The delays and uncertainty thus provided Ross’ team the ‘blank board,’ an opportunity to work closely and engage with each other and the goal at hand, and derive meaningfulness from the ‘final’ output.
From these examples, it is evident that sustainability practitioners found work meaningful because it allowed them to mitigate environmental and policy uncertainty, but they also acknowledged that these actions were often open-ended, with little guarantees of adoption or actual environmental impact. Nevertheless, this uncertainty was productive because it allowed practitioners to ‘move forward’ on a blank slate.
Career
Finally, participants noted that meaningfulness of work spanned their careers through the ongoing valuation of sustainability vis-a-vis internal/external standards, perpetual tussles concerning commitment, and autonomy. This set of themes emerged from deep introspection of their career stories during the interview process, in ways that were somewhat disconcerting to them as they reflected on their experiences with us.
Valuation
Meaningfulness was based not on discursively stable understandings of work, but a complex negotiation of external and internal value. For Sally, what was ‘vexing’ was:
I think it’s the constant having to make the case that what you’re doing is beneficial, and why, and the rationale behind it. Nobody questions somebody if they want to go get a Bachelor’s degree in Finance, but oh, what do you want to do that [sustainability] for? . . . There’s an additional piece, since the regular person – the typical person – doesn’t even understand what that [sustainability] is or what it means to them.
Sally thus reported having to justify to her social circle why sustainability work was valuable – vis-a-vis a career in finance, for example. But she also noted how the emergent nature of the field added a new dimension to this external valuation or legitimacy dilemma, namely, that ‘regular’ people were unsure what exactly sustainability meant. When I inquired how she explained her work to others, she replied,
I let them know that companies are now looking at the kind of impact they’re having on the environment and the community in terms of their operations, and they’re looking at ways to lessen the negative and increase the positive.
On further probing, she said,
Why I do what I do? Because I’ve always been looking for a job where I can advance, have challenges, make a decent living, but also make an impact on society, and this allows me to do all of that.
Thus, she blended ‘external’ goals (‘can advance,’ ‘make a decent living’) with more internally oriented values (‘have challenges,’ ‘make an impact on society’). The precise answer, however, is less certain; when I asked, ‘Is that the truth, or what you say when people ask?’ she laughed, ‘Maybe, yeah, I’m not sure.’
In another example, Kevin derived meaningfulness from both being externally valued as a thought leader, and his internal sense of fulfillment being involved in a social movement: ‘The influence, being part of something really new, and really doing something that you want and not boxed in by an organization, by constraints . . . those are what I enjoy.’ In this example, his perception of the external valuation of his work is markedly more favorable, compared with Sally’s – probably because he saw himself filling a ‘niche’ segment. He narrated how he was contacted to write for a prominent architectural design publication, which then led to a high-profile speaking engagement – so that external valuation served as crucial networking for him. As he told the story, he became more reflexive and even discounted his much-vaunted thought leader status: ‘So, probably it’s not so much – while I consider myself and others describe me as a thought leader – I think it’s more just the niche topics I cover – not because I’m like this big thought leader.’
Thus, participants’ ongoing valuation of intrinsic and extrinsic understandings of sustainability work blurs conventional distinctions of meaningfulness and meaning of work, respectively, and foregrounds instead the ongoing tensions at stake. Valuation occurred retrospectively, whereby practitioners considered multiple episodes throughout their career, during work engagements and with friends/family; even as they emphasized finding their ‘niche’ in sustainability, they acknowledged this niche was fluid and deeply contested.
Commitment
Participants emphasized how, instead of single-minded devotion to sustainability work (Valocchi, 2012) or a sense of inevitability (Bunderson and Thompson, 2009), they constantly tussled with their commitment and/or ‘passion.’ Greenwashing and public suspicion were cited as severely testing their commitment, and participants avowed they found it meaningful to overcome these challenges. For instance, Sunil said that while he was ‘dedicated,’ newer entrants might find it particularly rough; meanwhile Robert noted that he toyed now and again with leaving the business, when he saw how firms that engaged in greenwashing often got away with their window-dressing:
So far, I’ve had success at it, I haven’t gone too long in between successes; there hasn’t been a dry period, I guess. If something else comes along, or I find another opportunity then maybe I’ll leave. And also this does seem to be a trend, I see more people moving this way than I do not moving this way, so . . . I believe in it, I guess.
His commitment to the work, or his ‘belief,’ is thus tensional, shaped by ongoing successes and failures as his career progresses, rather than dependent on a sole intrinsic drive.
Even where ‘passion’ existed unequivocally – as in the case of Steve, who repeated the word throughout our interview – practitioners must negotiate underlying insecurities over time. For Steve,
Some days I bang my head against the wall. There’s the financial aspect in my motivation as well. I want to make a living doing this and do very well. That’s seriously important. I’ve got bills to pay, but I also want to be doing something that I’m really passionate about.
These struggles with commitment are related to the tensions of enlightening business (noted earlier), and Steve was clearly aware of this. He underlined the fact that negotiating commitment was an everyday meaning-making activity for him, with no end in sight: ‘I’m motivated to make a difference, to be a good example for my kid. So, I just go with that every day, or I try to.’ In a final example, Karoly (working for a Hungarian petroleum company) used the native expression ‘Úszni az árral szemben,’ or ‘swimming against the stream,’ to describe his commitment to sustainability work. He talked about his job causing significant stress, forcing him to take some time off – a development reported by several other participants. He rationalized his eventual decision to rejoin the field, despite being offered a higher-paying job in a different sector, in terms of his desire to ‘work for nice ideas,’ although he did not see himself as ‘the green guy’ focused on environmental activism. Interestingly, this negotiation of commitment was still continuing during our interview: ‘I could work as an HR man or a business developer or whatever; after some years I would be bored of that position as well, but for sure within 10 years, I won’t be a sustainability manager.’
To summarize, participants acknowledged their commitment to sustainability work was tested often, even where they avowed passion to their jobs, rather than seeing themselves as entirely defined by their work. Paradoxically, this tumultuous negotiation of commitment became the basis for deriving meaningfulness.
Autonomy
Finally, participants highlighted autonomy when they considered how their work was meaningful. Della valued the freedom of organizing afforded by her work:
I only do work I’m interested in. I’m a passionate high risk taker! Not many Swiss bankers would have left the cushiest profession on the planet to go pursue environmental economics . . . I’m a pioneer. I don’t like hanging around once it’s kind of been refined and there’s a fleet of MBAs doing it. I like setting it up.
Here, she explicitly adopted the label ‘pioneer’ to define herself – a term commonly used by other participants as well – and emphasized how she loved that her work entailed ‘high risk[s]’. Key in her meaning-making of work was autonomy, signifying the ability to set a new agenda, rather than following the herd. Several other participants reiterated this theme of innovation and creating ‘new designs;’ for example, Kirk often asked himself if his work was still meaningful:
I asked myself what the point of buying and selling buildings is for me, and I realized it is to one day build buildings. Then I asked myself what that means . . . So I started coming up with creative ways to flip that paradigm on its head, which led me to develop one of the most creative projects I have looked at, to build an eco-resort with an extremely unique financial mechanism that generated huge cash flows that would be plowed back into an entity that would actually preserve forests . . . So use real estate to save land.
For Kirk, autonomy was manifested in the ability to independently think of ‘creative ways to flip that paradigm on its head,’ which was central to the emerging practice of sustainable organizing (Mitra and Buzzanell, 2015). He also noted the active and intentional reflexivity that allowed him to make this connection between meaningfulness and creativity.
Participants were also aware about tensions related to autonomy. For instance, they noted the broader collective that enabled autonomous work, rather than see it as purely rooted in the individual. Describing sustainable practices at a large food processing company, Hannibal noted,
If you look at our organizational chart, it’s a one-man show, but that’s not really the way it is in the organization. All the regional environmental guys report to me through some dotted-line reporting structures. I’m not their line manager, but they’re responsible to me for producing the deliverables in the environmental space.
Later during the interview, he wished for more ‘dotted-line’ ties with his reports, to enhance direct stakeholder interactions, but recognized that it might ironically be mistaken as a desire for greater autonomy and personal ‘power.’
Moreover, autonomy was acknowledged to pose particular dangers. Although Kevin observed how meaningful it was to not be ‘boxed in by an organization, by constraints,’ he commented that being a social media ‘thought leader’ could be ‘isolating,’ lacking interaction with other practitioners, and missing out on job leads:
Like, this week it’s frustrating, because I just got a bunch of writing assignments, and I need to do it, I need the income, but it’s preventing me from reaching out, trying to set up coffee meetings, maybe trying to go to some events here in Silicon Valley. But when I go to these events, I don’t get paid, I’m not doing any work. So, it’s like this feast or famine. The isolation, the unsteady income, and the overall uncertainty is a huge risk that I took.
Kevin summed up his dilemma as a case of ‘feast or famine,’ with or without autonomy at work. Autonomy allowed him to write his ‘thought leadership’ pieces, but also robbed him of potentially larger, more profitable contracts, leading to a ‘huge risk’ that he negotiated on an ongoing basis. Similarly, Marissa observed that working autonomously led to ‘too much work, not enough time to do it all,’ and being pulled into work she did not find ‘intellectually rewarding, for example, editing documents, working on permit applications.’
Thus, while practitioners embraced the positives associated with autonomy and flexibility, which allowed them to use innovative techniques across multiple projects and take ‘pioneering’ risks to further their careers, they noted the tensions characterizing their autonomy. Specifically, they highlighted the collective performance, ties and efforts that shaped the extent (and limits) of work autonomy, and admitted that autonomy could also be isolating and detract from positive emotions experienced through work.
Discussion
This study adds to the growing body of literature that advocates for a more nuanced approach to meaningfulness of work – one that recognizes meaningfulness as a tension-centered process of meaning-making (Berkelaar and Buzzanell, 2015; Broadfoot et al., 2008; Bunderson and Thompson, 2009; Buzzanell and Lucas, 2013; Cheney et al., 2010; Michaelson et al., 2014; Zorn and Townsley, 2008). Rather than purely positive meaning-making, sustainability practitioners derived meaningfulness in tensional ways from circumstances and factors that were both enabling and constraining, stemming from a variety of organizational, professional and political structures. This occurs through ongoing negotiation that spans everyday work processes, the perceived impact of work, and career positioning. Underlying work processes that contributed to meaningfulness for sustainability practitioners included enlightening business through their jobs, interacting with various stakeholders and even negotiating the complex (and often unfavorable) political culture. Meanwhile, participants evaluated the impact of their work both through the perceived deliverables they could achieve, and the extent to which they could frame their work as providing a solution to socioeconomic and environmental problems. Finally, participants considered how their ongoing career trajectories shaped meaningfulness, especially the contested external/internal valuation of sustainability work, their personal commitment to sustainability and job autonomy. In each of these cases, meaningfulness was dynamic and contested, as participants considered different micromoments on the job and strung them together to consider the macro story that emerged from their career stories, especially in the broader sociopolitical context. To close, we explore some key implications for future research on the meaningfulness of work.
First, our study helps correct some of the positive bias in meaningfulness of work research, and centers a complex negotiation of meaning, stemming from both situated and broader discourses, work roles and experiences. The tension-centered approach provides the theoretical scaffolding to examine how negotiating meaningfulness is ‘messy’ and complex (Trethewey and Ashcraft, 2004), layered with meaning-making of both challenges and opportunities, accomplished by practitioners who must shape (and reshape) their selves for different audiences and work contexts – in order to still justify their work as meaningful, if only to themselves (Lair et al., 2008). Practitioners reflected on their work experiences and derived meaningfulness not merely from the pleasurable or exciting aspects of their jobs, but also from instances that unsettled them, annoyed or angered them, challenged them to think creatively, or even forced them to change preconceptions and beliefs about the status quo (Dempsey and Sanders, 2010; Dobrow, 2006) – and put these experiences in conversation with each other to find their work ‘meaningful.’ For instance, even as participants positively valued direct stakeholder interactions and concrete deliverables, they were also aware of the fissures and paradoxes at stake (e.g. the emotional toll of stakeholder interactions, the contestation of deliverables by thought leadership or other less tangible outcomes). Participants appropriated these meaning-making themes according to their personal and professional contexts (even critiquing them bitterly, at times), rather than unproblematically embrace them as providing purely positive meaning to their work.
Moreover, it was evident through our study that participants’ meaning-making of work was constantly in flux, rather than a static frame, shaped by the constraints facing them. Their prior expectations of sustainability work were constantly checked and modified by ongoing experiences (and vice versa), as practitioners adopted actions to suit different objectives at stake. Thus, even as some participants might have entered the sustainability field and derived meaning initially from the expectation that they would be engaging in something ‘different’ from the capitalist status quo (i.e. more progressive and environmentally responsible), they soon realized that the ‘reality’ of sustainability work required a more complex and tempered approach to transformation (Wright and Nyberg, 2012). However, instead of dissuading them from the meaningfulness of sustainability work, engaging with these constraints resulted in participants recalibrating their expectations and finding meaning nevertheless in the communicative negotiation of difficult structural, organizational and political situations that quelled their initial expectations. This was particularly evident in the set of negotiations around everyday work processes; for instance, in seeking to ‘enlighten’ stakeholders or managers, but finding it crucial to temper their own passion in order to accomplish long-term goals, or while negotiating potentially restrictive political cultures. But it also had implications for their ongoing commitment to sustainability (i.e. being ‘a green guy’) at large. Participants described situations wherein their faith or passion for sustainability was severely challenged, owing to rampant greenwashing in the field, negative valuation by friends or family, and lack of top management support, yet their socially imbibed expectations of what might be possible through work often bolstered this commitment at the end.
Third, our study traced the importance of political structures and discourses that influence practitioners’ meaning-making, thereby connecting the personal, professional and political realms of work. Participants actively linked meaningfulness with the ongoing tensions of political cultures, even as they sought to downplay the political nature of sustainability work (also Ganesh, 2007). A more nuanced appreciation of the politics at stake also emerged, especially in relation to the tensions inherent in enlightening mainstream business practices, engaging stakeholders with different interests, and stressing the impact of sustainability work. In these situations, politics play an important constitutive role, so that ‘the business case’ of sustainability work is privileged over moral or social enlightenment, some stakeholders emerge as dominant over others, and impact is adjudged via key (measurable) deliverables that may be traced to the business case. That is, the politics of meaningfulness transcend formal organizations to shape broader societal discourses and meaning systems, according to which participants had to align themselves (Meyerson and Scully, 1995; Mumby, 2005). This study thus helps connect the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of work practices, or the micro and macro moments of work, as Broadfoot et al. (2008) put it), so that how practitioners communicatively accomplish their work is inherently connected to the discourses, policies and emotionologies that persist socially.
Finally, our study extends recent research on sustainable organizing, which calls for newer ways of conceptualizing both sustainability and organizing, focused on resilience, innovation and policy-practice intersections (Mitra and Buzzanell, 2015; see also July 2016 special issue on sustainability in Journal of Management Studies). Our study highlighted the personal realm of sustainable organizing – largely ignored in extant empirical work (May, 2013) – to demonstrate how intersubjective negotiations of meaningfulness shape practitioner commitment to sustainable organizing, which has profound impacts on the broader implementation of such programs. Although policymakers have sought to quantify the number of ‘green jobs’ in the US and worldwide, such measures often lack context and reduce the serious constraints and drivers of the field to abstract statistics that shed little light on the actual processes at stake (White et al., 2012). Our study might provide such decision-makers greater understanding to address the human dilemmas of sustainability – how organizational and societal structures are made sense of intersubjectively by practitioners, to better enable them to transform mainstream organizing practices, and mainstream the transformative potential of sustainability.
Footnotes
Funding
This research was supported by funding from the Central States Communication Association Foundation Prize, the Purdue Research Foundation and the Purdue Center for Research on Diversity & Inclusion.