Experiencing Meaningful Work through Corporate Volunteering: The Other as a Source of Meaning

Abstract

Global social, ecological and economic crises are contributing to the need for meaningfulness in different spheres of life, including work, as an increasing concern to employees. However, the current understanding of meaningfulness is bound by its normativity and thus does not meet the uncertainty present in today’s work. We utilize the Levinasian concept of “the Other” to provide a non-normative conceptualization of meaningfulness in the context of corporate volunteering (CV) and empirically explore work meaningfulness in CV projects in Poland and Finland. We find work meaningfulness to arise from proximity to the Other and the otherness of the Other. Our study contributes to the discussion on meaningful work in the fields of business ethics and management studies through a non-normative reconceptualization of meaningfulness.