WORK STREAMS
My research is organized around two complementary streams that examine how cultural ideals about work affect both workers and the organizations that employ them.
Meaningful Work and Careers
I examine how people develop, pursue, and revise aspirations for meaningful work over the course of a career. This research explores meaningful work as a cultural ideal, investigates how workers negotiate changing relationships to work, and advances theory on motivation, identity, and careers.
Organizations and the Experience of Work
I investigate how organizations influence the pursuit of meaningful work. Across studies of workforce development organizations and corporate social responsibility, I explore how organizations cultivate aspirations, structure opportunities, and shape how people understand the purpose of their work.
DISSERTATION
The Cultural Politics of Meaningful Work: Ideology, Motivation, and Constraint
My dissertation investigates how the cultural ideal of meaningful work shapes individuals, organizations, and labor markets. Bringing together conceptual and ethnographic research, it examines how workers develop aspirations for meaningful work, how organizations harness those aspirations, and how labor market institutions influence which futures workers come to see as possible and worth pursuing.
The conceptual portion of the dissertation develops a theory of what I call the Meaningful Work Ideology, showing how the same cultural ideal that encourages fulfillment, purpose, and self-actualization at work can also raise expectations beyond what most jobs can satisfy, leaving workers vulnerable to disappointment and exploitation. Building on this theory, the empirical portion examines what happens when that ideal collides with labor market constraints. Drawing on a year-long ethnography of a workforce development program, I show how labor market intermediaries govern workers' aspirations by cultivating some ambitions while redirecting or deferring others in response to market demands.
PUBLICATIONS
Weinstein, M. L. & Hirsch, P. M. (2022). For Love and Money: Rethinking Motivations for the “Great Resignation.” Journal of Management Inquiry, 32 (2): 174-176.
Contrary to popular accounts that cast the Great Resignation as a referendum on the meaning of work, this commentary reinterprets it as a moment when workers gained rare leverage to pursue both love and money at once. We argue that workers’ motivations had not fundamentally changed; what changed was their ability to act on them.
MANUSCRIPTS UNDER REVIEW
Weinstein, M. L. & Finkel, E. J. A Theory of Work as a Cultural Ideal. Under review at Research in Organizational Behavior. Manuscript name altered to protect blind peer-review
This conceptual article reconciles competing perspectives on meaningful work within a unified, process-based framework, explaining why its pursuit can produce divergent outcomes across workers and contexts.
PREPARING FOR SUBMISSION
Weinstein, M. L. Pragmatic Choices, Passionate Signals: Market-Compatible Motivation in Workforce Intermediation.
Drawing on a year-long ethnography, I examine the normative influence of labor market intermediaries, showing that when labor market demand constrains which jobs are available, intermediaries do more than match workers to opportunities. Through a process I call motivational intermediation, they shape what workers come to view as realistic, responsible, and worth pursuing.
Weinstein, M. L. & King, B. G. Responsible for What? The Structural Foundations of CSR Variability.
Why do corporate social responsibility professionals, despite sharing an occupational mandate, understand and enact their work so differently across firms? Drawing on 64 interviews, we show how two features of organizational structure—formalization and discretion—give rise to four distinct approaches to CSR, each characterized by different strategic priorities, motivations, and relationships within the firm.
SELECTED WORK IN PROGRESS
Weinstein, M. L. & Rahman, H. A. Making Talent Legible: Selective Transformation and Market Alignment in Reskilling Intermediaries.
Reskilling intermediaries work to make nontraditional workers’ potential recognizable to employers. We develop the concept of selective transformation to show how, in responding to employer demand, these organizations do more than build skills: they shape which dimensions of workers’ experience and potential become visible and valuable in the labor market.
Weinstein, M. L. Called to the Career or Called to the Call? An Examination of Specificity in Narratives of Calling.
This study examines how people differ in the specificity with which they describe their callings. Drawing on interviews with professionals across career stages, it compares narratives anchored in a particular occupation with those organized around a broader pursuit of meaningful work, asking how these differences shape career commitment, flexibility, and responses to disruption.
Weinstein, M. L. Hanging Up the Call: Leaving Meaningful Work Behind.
Through a longitudinal, cross-occupational study, I explore how people navigate leaving work they once experienced as a calling. It traces how they reconstruct their professional identities and renegotiate their relationship to the cultural ideal that work should be a central source of purpose and fulfillment.