Management Control and Meaningful Work

This thesis explores how management control practices influence meaningful work. Based on aged care workers’ audio diaries and interviews, this thesis reveals workers’ irreducible autonomy and intelligence in wrestling with difficulties at work. Autonomously overcoming these difficulties and getting work done well is what makes work particularly meaningful to workers. Yet, workers’ autonomy mobilisation is vulnerable to management control practices that impose domination. Under domination, workers are paralysed by their intense fear, losing capabilities for autonomous actions – the essential element for meaningful work. In addition, symbolic recognition is also crucial to meaningful work. A lack of symbolic recognition causes workers to detach and de-identify with their employers, ultimately leading to feelings of apathy and meaninglessness.