‘I Want Your Shower Time!’: Drowning in Work and the Erosion of Life

Abstract

Meaningful work is an unspoken theme of informal discussions and formal scholarship about business ethics. However, playful metaphors and earnest truisms about shower time, corporate social responsibility, and employee values are not often translated into serious scholarship about meaningful work. This paper seeks to demonstrate the need for a theory of meaningful work in hopes of motivating more work on meaningful work by outlining connections between meaningful work theory and work motivation theory, corporate social responsibility, and other, more established areas of business ethics and management inquiry. One conventionally pessimistic line of argument it examines is that preoccupation with work might erode our capacity to experience other good things in life. More optimistically, the paper seeks to erode the barriers between meaningful work and meaningful life because work can be integral to meaningful life and human flourishing.