Meaningful work
Meaningful work is often associated with purpose, fulfilment, and positive contribution. Yet, in practice, what counts as meaningful work is rarely straightforward. People may experience work as deeply worthwhile while also finding it burdensome, constraining, or morally unsettling. Understanding meaningful work today therefore requires moving beyond taken-for-granted assumptions that it is always coherent, stable, or unequivocally positive, and instead examining the tensions through which it is interpreted, negotiated, and sustained.
Our work explores how meaningfulness is shaped through relationships, cultural expectations, moral commitments, embodied practices, and organisational conditions. We are particularly interested in contexts where people experience competing demands, such as responsibility to family, community, profession, or society, and where work’s value is subject to multiple and sometimes conflicting interpretations. This includes examining how meaningful work is sustained, questioned, or repaired under conditions of inequality, marginalisation, moral contestation, and social change.
Our research broadens prevailing understandings of meaningful work by showing that it is not simply an individual psychological state, but a relational, embodied, and often contested accomplishment. We examine how people draw on philosophy, spirituality, and practices such as mindfulness to navigate attachment, uncertainty, and competing values in their working lives. In doing so, we open up new ways of thinking about work, organising, and human flourishing that are better attuned to the complexities, inequalities, and moral tensions of contemporary life.
Our researchers
Our partners
Our team collaborates with various organisations to provide recommendations on how organisations can better prepare leaders to better cope with, manage and address contemporary issues and challenges. We have worked with executive leaders in global banking, finance, accounting, hospitality, retail, and sport.
Featured publications
- Vu, M. C., & Fan, Z. (2025). Exploring Religious Practice in Crisis: A non-Western tension-centred approach to meaningful work. Organization Studies, 46(1), 89-119.
- Vu, M. C., & Shin, H. (2025). Securing Meaningfulness in Corporate Social Responsibility: Exploring meaning-making mechanisms via economies of worth.Organization Studies, 46(2), 247-273.
- Vu, M. C., & Burton, N. (2022). The influence of spiritual traditions on the interplay of subjective and normative interpretations of meaningful work. Journal of Business Ethics, 180(2), 543-566.
- Vu, M. C., & Case, P. (2025). Overcoming contemporary academic attachments: Developing even-mindedness in neoliberal cultures of excellence. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 24(2), 244-264.
Ongoing projects
- Exploring Phở (Rice Noodle) Craft Villages, meaningful work, and sustainability. In collaboration with Lan Nguyen, this project examines how traditional phở craft villages in Vietnam are being transformed by environmental and socio-economic pressures. It explores how these pressures shape the sustainability of local communities, the preservation of traditional craft practices, and the ways this work continues to be understood as culturally valuable and meaningful. The project aims to inform policymakers and development organisations seeking to support sustainable rural development and the survival of traditional craft livelihoods.