A Meaningful Life at Work addresses a range of issues impacting experiences in the workplace and restricting personal growth in a professional setting. The authors explore employee wellbeing from a Malaysian perspective as a developing country, as well as the broader Asian and wider global context.

L.J. Davis’s 1971 novel, A Meaningful Life, is a blistering black comedy about the American quest for redemption through real estate and a gritty picture of New York City in collapse. Just out of college, Lowell Lake, the Western-born hero of Davis’s novel, heads to New York, where he plans to make it big as a writer. Instead he finds a job as a technical editor, at which he toils away while passion leaks out of his marriage to a nice Jewish girl. Then Lowell discovers a beautiful crumbling mansion in a crime-ridden section of Brooklyn, and against all advice, not to mention his wife’s will, sinks his every penny into buying it. He quits his job, moves in, and spends day and night on demolition and construction. At last he has a mission: he will dig up the lost history of his house; he will restore it to its past grandeur. He will make good on everything that’s gone wrong with his life, and he will even murder to do it.

This book examines the importance of work in human well-being, addressing several related philosophical questions about work and arguing on the whole that meaningful work is central in human flourishing. Work impacts flourishing not only in developing and exercising human capabilities but also in instilling and reflecting virtues such as honor, pride, dignity, self-discipline and self-respect. Work also attaches to a sense of purposefulness and personal identity, and meaningful work can promote both personal autonomy and a sense of personal satisfaction that issues from making oneself useful. Further still, work bears a formative influence on character and intelligence and provides a primary avenue for exercising complex skills and garnering esteem and recognition from others. The author defends a pluralistic account of meaningful work, arguing that work can be meaningful in virtue of developing capabilities, supporting virtues, providing a purpose, or integrating elements of a worker's life. In light of the impact of meaningful work on living well, the author argues that well-ordered societies provide opportunities for meaningful work, that individuals would be well advised to pursue these opportunities, and that the philosophical view of value pluralism, which casts work as having no special significance in an individual's life, is false. The book also addresses oppressive work that undermines human flourishing, examining potential solutions to mitigate the impact of bad work on those who perform it. Finally, a guiding argument of the book is that promoting meaningful work is a matter of ethics, more so than a matter of politics. Prioritizing people over profit, treating workers with respect, respecting the intelligence of working people, and creating opportunities for people to contribute developed skills are basic ethical principles for employing organizations and for communities at large.

Toward a Meaningful Life is a spiritual road map for living based on the teachings of one of the foremost religious leaders of our time: Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson. Head of the Lubavitcher movement for forty-four years and recognized throughout the world simply as “the Rebbe,” Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who passed away in June 1994, was a sage and a visionary of the highest order. Toward a Meaningful Life gives people of all backgrounds fresh perspectives on every aspect of their lives—from birth to death, youth to old age; marriage, love, intimacy, and family; the persistent issues of career, health, pain, and suffering; and education, faith, science, and government. We learn to bridge the divisions between accelerated technology and decelerated morality, between unprecedented worldwide unity and unparalleled personal disunity. Although the Rebbe’s teachings are firmly anchored in more than three thousand years of scholarship, the urgent relevance of these old-age truths to contemporary life has never been more manifest. At the threshold of a new world where matter and spirit converge, the Rebbe proposes spiritual principles that unite people as opposed to the materialism that divides them. In doing so, he continues to lead us toward personal and universal redemption, toward a meaningful life, and toward God.

A Meaningful Life at Work addresses a range of issues impacting experiences in the workplace and restricting personal growth in a professional setting. The authors explore employee wellbeing from a Malaysian perspective as a developing country, as well as the broader Asian and wider global context.

The founder and CEO of Askinosie Chocolate, an award-winning craft chocolate factory, shows readers how he discovered the secret to purposeful work and business − and how we can too, no matter what work we do. Askinosie Chocolate is a small-batch, award winning chocolate company widely considered to be a vanguard in the industry. Known for sourcing 100% of his cocoa beans directly from farmers across the globe, Shawn Askinosie has pioneered direct trade and profit sharing in the craft chocolate industry with farmers in Tanzania, Ecuador, and the Philippines. In addition to developing relationships with smallholder farmers, the company also partners with schools in their origin communities to provide lunch to 1,600 children every day with no outside donations. Twenty-five years ago, Shawn Askinosie was a successful criminal defense lawyer trying his first murder death penalty case that would later go on to become a Dateline special. For many years he found law satisfying, but after several high profile trials he reached a breaking point and found solace in the search for a new career. In this inspiring guide to discovering a vocation that feeds your heart and soul, Askinosie describes his quest to discover more meaningful work – a search that led him to volunteering in the palliative care wing of a hospital, to a Trappist monastery where he became inspired by the monks focus on “being” rather than “doing,” and eventually traipsing through jungles across the globe in search of excellent cocoa bean farmers to make award winning chocolate. Askinosie shares his hard-won insights into doing work that reflects one’s values and purpose in life. He shares with readers visioning tools that can be used in any industry or field to create a work life that is inspired and fulfilling. Askinosie shows us that everyone has the capacity to find meaning in their work and be a positive force for good in the world.

Happiness at work.......your quality of life and sometimes your life depends on it. Work is an important part of the life of the modern man, as it always has been, but work has become more complicated that before. Today what we do is often done as a part of a large organisation. The work is often abstract manipulation of matter or information, and the value created by the single member of the organisation has become increasingly difficult to measure. Organisations have become increasingly responsible for not only the physical work environment, but also for the mental working environment, and factors like stress and sexual harassment are becoming more and more regulated by company rules and culture. The health of the employees has become a major financial interest of the company as only healthy employees and leaders can perform optimally. Often the companies have health insurance for their people. Today employees and leaders also expect work to provide their life with meaning and stimulating experiences and developing challenges. Scholarly knowledge is substituted with experiential learning in a developing and dynamic environment. Society is developing fast and only companies with modern, well-oriented and culturally integrated employees can win the competition by offering costumers, clients or patients the best products and services. A strong association between quality of life, development of personal character, self-realisation, development of talents and skills, physical and mental health, meaning of life, sense of coherence and similar core concepts of modern medical and psychosocial sciences have in many studies now been strongly associated with work satisfaction, joy on the job and similar concepts. The scientific challenge we have taken upon our shoulders is to put the whole messy and chaotic area in order, and create a formula according to which the actual integrated status of worker can be calculated. We have decided to call the integrated concept of all above mentioned dimensions for working life quality, similar to the well-known global quality of life concept in medicine and social sciences. We are proud to present, in the present book, a mathematical formula from which the created value of an employee or leader can be known, if only the working life quality is known. We also provide a questionnaire for measuring the quality of working life, based on a theory of quality of working life. We have in a study on a random sample of the Danish population found a strong statistical association between the measured quality of working life and health. We started the research in quality of working life in 1994, and the first version of the QWL-theory was ready in 1996. In 1997 it was empirically tested in a study involving 1,500 persons and 30 companies. After adjusting the questionnaire and analysis of the data we further improved our understanding to the level that we are happy to present in this book, based on a number of published scientific papers.