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We demonstrate why meaningful work, i.e. job-related activities that individuals view as purposeful and worthwhile, matters to labour economists. Building on self-determination theory, which specifies the roles of autonomy, competence, and relatedness as preconditions for motivation, we are the first to explore the determinants of work meaningfulness. Specifically, using three waves of the European Working Conditions Survey, we show that autonomy, competence, and relatedness explain about 60% of the variation in work meaningfulness perceptions. Meanwhile, extrinsic factors, such as income, benefits, and performance pay, are relatively unimportant. Meaningful work also predicts absenteeism, skills training, and retirement intentions, which highlights the concept's economic significance. We provide new insights that could help organise the future of work in a meaningful and dignifying way and propose concrete avenues for future research on meaningful work in economics.

Chapter 11 Introduction "There's never been a better time to be a worker with special skills or the right education, because these people can use technology to create and capture value. However, there's never been a worse time to be a worker with only 'ordinary' skills and abilities to offer, because computers, robots, and other digital technologies are acquiring these skills and abilities at an extraordinary rate" (Brynjolfsson and McAfee, 2014, p.11). Setting the Scene Technology, tasks and labour marketsThis dissertation starts out from the literature on job polarisation. This literature focuses on the changing distribution of wages and employment on labour markets, and how that relates to technological progress and globalisation. 1 Job polarisation is 1 In this dissertation, I specifically focus on technology, and mostly those of the so-called 'third revolution': communication and information technologies -or computers (Brynjolfsson and McAfee, 2014). However, besides technology, globalisation has also greatly impacted labour markets over the past decades. Increased import competition following international trade (Autor, Dorn, and Hanson, 2013), and offshoring possibilities of jobs to other countries (Goos, Manning, and Salomons, 2014; Reijnders and de Vries, 2017; Terzidis and Ortega-Argilés, 2021) have reduced the demand for offshorable occupations