The thought of the meaning of work in the capitalist labour process has been a central pillar in many discussions of work, employment and organisational life in the social sciences. Meaningful work, however, is, if anything, an undercurrent in the modern classics of working life research, where the spotlight is on the struggle that is at the heart of workers’ attempts to derive meaning from paid work. In this chapter we discuss understandings of meaningful work that emerge between the nexus of the meaningfulness and the meaninglessness of wage labour in some of the most noted of this literature in the post–World War II period. From this discourse we crystallise six tendencies in discussions of the possibility to solve the problem of the lack of meaning of waged work. We derive from this discussion implications for approaching an understanding of the politics of meaningful and meaningless waged work.

This chapter examines how aspects of post-capitalism have been imagined by speculative fiction, with some emphasis on utopian and dystopian fiction. There are some methodological issues around the best way to read speculative fiction in relation to post-capitalism. One influential distinction is between “blueprint” utopias and “critical” utopias. Blueprint utopias, such as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), are held to offer rigidly instrumental plans for reorganizing society. Critical utopias, such as Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), supposedly destabilize deeply-rooted assumptions, freeing readers to explore possible economic forms that appear neither in reality nor fiction. However, this chapter emphasises that the distinction between blueprint and critical utopias is a blurred one. It further suggests that instrumentalizing interpretations of speculative fiction are part of its status as culture, rather than a mere misuse of speculative fiction. Reading speculative fiction critically and creatively, including attention to its instrumentalities, may help to transform what constitutes the field of “the economic” in the first place, and enrich our understanding both of capitalism and its alternatives. However, already existing practices of the more-than-capitalist world often far exceed what speculative fiction has been capable of imagining.

This chapter examines calls to end work, contextualising contemporary understandings of sex work in light of recent developments in labour studies. Using texts from gender and sexuality studies, sex worker activism, and materialist feminism, we insist upon the importance of factoring sex work into postwork perspectives, whilst critiquing the stakes involved in feminist drives to abolish sex work. We examine sex worker demands for improved working conditions; the dangers criminalisation and abolitionism pose to sex worker rights, health and safety; the role of helping professions in displacing sex workers into ‘reputable’ forms of labour; and their focus upon abolishing sex work in particular rather than the interrogation of work in general. We argue that sex worker activists, who advocate for decriminalisation and destigmatisation, display a more sophisticated and critical approach to work than sex work abolitionists. The goal of sex worker advocacy is not to reify work, but rather to make visible under-recognised labour as part of a longer-term project to resist it. The recognition that sex work is work demands to be seen, not as an endpoint, but as a lever.