CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Jengibarjan, Ruben Mate |
|---|---|
| Title | On The Violation Intrinsic To Meaningless, Non-Contributing Work |
| Summary | This thesis contributes to the literature on meaningful and meaningless work. The thesis defines meaningful work as an activity that contributes to society beyond the agent doing the action. The thesis defines meaningless work as a paid position that does not contribute to society, in other words that does not create social value. The thesis gives structural reasons for the existence of meaningless work. Building on existing literature on the harms of meaningless work, and utilising empirical literature from psychology, this thesis advances a novel conceptualisation of energy innate to people. Building this notion of innate energy, the thesis argues that meaningless work harms a person's innate energy because it treats the energy and the person as a mean, and does not possess any content that could be a valuable goal for a person's energy to flow towards. Further, I argue that imposing meaningless work can be a violation of the worker, and I explore the conditions under which such work can be imposed. |
| Supervisor | Zoltán Miklósi |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/jengibarjan_ruben.pdf |
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