Brazilian White-Collar Employees’ Discourses of Meaningful Work and Calling

Abstract

The search for meaningfulness in work is considered a human need, resulting in growing communication and interdisciplinary scholarship. However, most studies are quantitative and situated in Western, developed nations with different discourses and materialities based on whether studies focus on economically mainstream or marginal, but symbolically significant, occupations. Our study explores Brazilian white-collar employees' accounts of meaningful work. Three themes emerged from interview data: being competent, being an explorer, and being a builder of a better world. Participants cast meaningful work as tensional processes within and across themes, reflecting characteristics of Brazilian middle classes and globalized discourses. As participants aspired to meaningful work, they experienced dysfunctional and corrupt work cultures, toxic workplace relationships, and shifts in their worldviews that deflated their sense of meaningfulness, resulting in reported psychological distancing, emotional distress, and turnover intentions. We encourage organizational communication researchers to take up the 2009 MCQ call for further studies in Brazil.

Migrant worker well-being as a struggle for meaningful work: Evidence from Bangladeshi migrants in a developing country

“…Definitions of wellness and well-being, however, are dominated by Western assumptions and embraced by mostly individualistic cultures such as Europe and North America (Dale and Burrell, 2014; Mahali et al, 2018; Oishi and Gilbert, 2016). Similarly, research on meaningful work has tended to rely on Western-orientated values, which often promote individualistic goals, ignoring collectivist or spiritual values beyond the workplace, and cultures where work is more likely a pathway to family and community fulfilment rather than personal well-being (Barreto et al, 2022; Lysova et al, 2019; Rosso et al, 2010). For all migrants, simple dichotomies of well-being as either present or not are inappropriate (Boccagni, 2016) but especially so in southern cultures.…”

“…Studies of global North migrants, equally, do not capture southern realities, such as layers of inequality related to historical legacies, ethnicity and gender (see Varaden et al (2020) on Mauritius). Exploring the culturally-embedded lived experience of migrants in developing countries informs holistic models of worker well-being and interrogates the relevance of globalized discourses of MW (Barreto et al, 2022), redressing the imbalance of knowledge produced largely in the global North (Mahali et al, 2018).…”