How to avoid burnout when you follow your passion in your career choice

Insights for employees and employers to ensure that meaningful work doesn’t turn from soul-stirring to soul-crushing - by Kira Schabram and Sally Maitli

Bringing my selves to work: a revisionist history of an academic career

In this essay I share a decision I made early in my career, and repeatedly since then, to develop and segment different facets of myself, and I reflect on how my work and life might have differed had I made other choices. The preference to segment or integrate identities is a prominent part of the work-family literature (Dumas & Sanchez-Burks, 2015; Kossek et al., 2023), and while I also managed that boundary through much of my career, the boundary that I found more complicated was between two other identities: an organizational behavior (OB) professor, and a student and subsequently practitioner of counselling psychology and psychotherapy. At a glance, these may seem quite compatible activities, both social scientific endeavors fundamentally concerned with human behavior. Yet I experienced them as very different worlds and lived them quite separately. I also maintained a fairly impermeable boundary in my relationships with others in each world, speaking little about my academic experience and identity in the counselling psychology community, and even less about my psychotherapeutic interests in my academic life. Over time, and despite efforts to keep these worlds and identities apart, and even periodic thoughts of jettisoning one or the other, I found myself inadvertently integrating them – in my research, and to some extent in my emerging clinical practice. But I held back from fully owning or sharing my growing commitment to counselling psychology. In this revisionist reflection, I consider the consequences of this set of choices and what might have been different had I made others

Intersectionality in intractable dirty work: how Mumbai ragpickers make meaning of their work and lives

Recent dirty work research has begun to explore intersectionality, attending to how meaning is made at the intersection of multiple sources of taint. This research has shown that individuals often construct both positive and negative meanings, which can be challenging to manage because the meanings people construct require a certain coherence to provide a foundation for action. This challenge is intensified when dirty work is intractable—when it is difficult, if not impossible, for a person to avoid doing this work. Our study of meaning making in the face of intractable dirty work examines ragpickers in Mumbai, India, who handle and dispose of garbage, and are further tainted by belonging to the lowest caste in Indian society, and living in slums. These ragpickers constructed both an overarching sense of helplessness rooted in the intractability of their situation, and a set of positive meanings—survival, destiny, and hope—rooted in specific facets of their lives and enacted through distinct temporal frames. By holding and combining these disparate meanings, they achieved “functional ambivalence”—the simultaneous experience of opposing orientations toward their work and lives that facilitated both acceptance and a sense of agency, and enabled them to carry on in their lives

On the way to Ithaka [1] : Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the publication of Karl E. Weick’s The Social Psychology of Organizing

Karl E. Weick’s The Social Psychology of Organizing has been one of the most influential books in organization studies, providing the theoretical underpinnings of several research programs. Importantly, the book is widely credited with initiating the process turn in the field, leading to the ‘gerundizing’ of management and organization studies: the persistent effort to understand organizational phenomena as ongoing accomplishments. The emphasis of the book on organizing (rather than on organizations) and its links with sensemaking have made it the most influential treatise on organizational epistemology. In this introduction, we review Weick’s magnum opus, underline and assess its key themes, and suggest ways in which several of them may be taken forward