On skilled freelancers’ work and relations : meaningfulness, compensations, and cultural differences in contracting

Freelancers are professional, skilled, self-employed workers who are dependent on intermittent projects from various clients to generate income. The growing popularity of freelancing has raised several organisational and sociological issues. First, the exemption from managerial authority distinguishing freelancers from permanent organisational employees is associated with autonomy and flexibility, which in principle should be conducive to meaningful work experience. While the work meaningfulness literature shows how employees craft jobs and change work boundaries to make work meaningful, this thesis investigates how freelancing leads to meaningful experience in the absence of those work boundaries. The narrative of autonomy has been contested by the argument that freelance work is subject to market imbalances making it exploitative. Labour process analysis regards freelancers as exploited workers, but this analysis risks neglecting the subjective level of experience. From the perspective of moral economists, exploitation is subjective, which raises the second question: do freelancers perceive their work to be exploitative or non-exploitative? The third question addresses differences in cultural norms. Freelance relations are contractual; without collective representation, freelancers are responsible for negotiating terms of work with clients. Because interactions between contracting parties occur in a cultural context, these interactions may differ. To explore the three questions above, interviews with freelancers from various professions in England and Taiwan were conducted and analysed. The findings demonstrate that 1) despite the constraint of stabilising income, freelancing affords the freedom of exploring and maintaining meaningful experience; 2) freelancers refer to clients’ bargaining power and other moral considerations to assess whether they feel exploited; 3) England and Taiwan differ in contract negotiation and freelancers’ reactions to contract violations. Collectively, this thesis contributes to the understanding of freelancing as a means to achieving meaningful experience, and of freelance relations as socially embedded interactions influenced by cultural norms

Family recognition of work as a source of meaningful work:Examining the roles of self-esteem and parental status

Research on meaningful work has highlighted social context as an important source of meaningful work but has primarily focused on the social context at work. This is surprising, given that much of the work-family research showed that family can enrich work experiences. To address this noticeable gap, this paper introduces the concept of ‘family recognition of work’ – a perception of family recognizing and appreciating one's work – as a critical, non-work-related social context contributing to meaningful work. Drawing on interpersonal sense-making theory, we argue that family recognition of work positively enhances meaningful work via increased self-esteem. Acknowledging shifts in life priorities and values when entering parenthood, we also argue that the indirect effect of family recognition of work on meaningful work via self-esteem is moderated by parental status. To test these hypotheses, we conducted two studies. In Study 1, a five-item scale for family recognition of work was developed and validated, utilizing two UK-based samples (N = 196 and N = 210). In Study 2, a cross-lagged panel analysis was conducted with the three-wave survey data from the UK (N = 466) to test the hypothesized model. The results of Study 2 confirmed a positive relationship between family recognition of work and work meaningfulness, and that this relationship was mediated by self-esteem. Additionally, parents, compared to non-parents, exhibited a stronger indirect effect of family recognition of work on work meaningfulness via self-esteem. The paper extends the literature on social context as a source of meaningful work by demonstrating the importance of family recognition of work.</p