This chapter develops a novel theory of meaningful work that is informed by the politics of working life perspectives and grounded in Critical Realism’s stratified theory of the human being. This combination allows us to identify the structural constraints and enablers of meaningful work as objective dimensions of meaningful work that interact with agential responses that we term subjective dimensions of meaningful work. Approaching meaningful work in this way promotes an understanding of meaningful waged work as a dynamic continuum that emerges from the interplay of its objective and subjective dimensions. The objective and subjective dimensions identify autonomy, dignity and recognition as the central pillars of meaningful waged work. The first part of this chapter recapitulates the relationship between structure and agency and establishes the key parameters of the stratified social ontology of human beings that guides our undertaking. This displays how the interplay between the structure, which is represented here as the objective dimensions of meaningful work, and the agential responses to it, encapsulated in the subjective dimensions of meaningful work, culminate in the experience of different forms of meaningful work or its absence.

In this chapter we suggest that a fundamental shortcoming of the meaningful work scholarship is the neglect or misrepresentation of employee agency. Indeed, when employee groups, teams and communities are mentioned in the literature, they are associated with the formal work organisation – not informal self-organised groups, teams and communities among workers. This position turns a blind eye to the politics of working life and the multi-layered consequences of the interplay between structure and agency. Addressing this issue, this chapter argues that employers seldom provide workers with meaningful wage labour for its own sake; to the extent meaningful work exists, workers mainly capture it with the help of informal self-organisation and trade unions. Therefore, in this chapter we stress the importance of employee agency in the politics of working life for attaining meaningful wage labour.

The chapter provides an overview of the developments in synchronic and diachronic corpus-linguistic research into World Englishes (WEs), detailing methodological concerns such as sampling frames, representativeness, corpus size, and statistical modeling on the one hand and the broadening scope of corpus-based research from ENL to ESL and EFL varieties on the other hand. It also surveys areas in which corpus evidence has been applied in the study of WEs (e.g. as a testing bed for models of WEs, for the study of language contact, typology, and change or as a source of evidence for sociolinguistic and pragmatic variation), providing ample illustration from seminal research papers and recent studies in the field.