Socio-Economic Impacts of Meaningless Work in Small Businesses and Regions: New Directions for Management and Psychology Research and Practice

The application of managerial policies and practices in multi-sector, multi-occupational, multi-organizational and multi-contextual environments provide significant indications of nature, scale and impacts of organizational and people-level outcomes. While some of the economic impacts of meaningless work practices have been recently researched in Management and Psychology (Bailey et al., 2016), its under exploration led to this special issue, whose aim is to examine the structural, psycho-social and economic contextual dimensions of the impacts of managerial work practices (McCann, 2020; Simandan, 2017), how they are interpreted as meaningless and their impacts on organizational productivity, employees’ psychological safety and well-being, performance, employer – employee relationships, and firm and regional-level sustainability beyond De Bustillo et al. (2011), Baldry et al. (2007) and Fleetwood (2013). Despite previous scholarships’ explorations of meaningful work (Bailey et al., 2016), and an agency-based approach to how meaningless life and work can be (Belanger et al., 2024; Bailey & Madden, 2019), a wider socio-economic approach to studying meaningless work practices within and beyond business environments is lacking. While technological advancements have facilitated faster and sometimes more efficient ways of producing goods and delivering services (Sahoo & Lo, 2022; Popkova et al., 2022) and inclusive economic policies have helped in enhancing meaningful employment in traditional small businesses (Dorasamy & Kikasu, 2024), the exploration of meaningless work practices in non-traditional, manufacturing, and geographically constrained economies is missing.

Recent calls to examine the wider impacts of meaningless work practices in multisectoral contexts (Mercurio, 2020; Martikainen et al., 2022) stop short of addressing people’s lack of performance, productivity, work disengagement and alienation in meaningless work practices contexts (Konuk et al., 2023; Duggal et al., 2023), thereby highlighting an urgent need for a multidisciplinary, multi-sectoral and multidimensional approach. Developing rigorously tested and testable approaches to appropriately conceptualize and address the wider nature, scale and impacts of meaningless work practices in multiple business and regional economies and effectively provide new directions for research, business organizations, regions and policymakers at individual, economic and societal sustainability levels is needed.

This call seeks to progress the structurally centric debates towards deeper psycho-social appreciation, critical understanding, knowledge creation and actionable insights into meaningless work practices at departmental and organizational levels and their wider socio-economic impacts at regional and global levels. Consequently, what businesses, policymakers, practitioners and researchers can do to understand and mitigate non-value-adding/purposeless work is highly needed. This exploration is particularly pertinent given the growing multi-sectoral, dynamic and complex systemic contexts where people’s perceptions of work and non-work engagements as meaninglessness and how the challenges and opportunities are theorized, conceptualized and practically managed are gaining traction (Mendy et al., 2024).

List of topic areas

1. Meaningless Work Practices in Traditional Work vs Non-Traditional Work Contexts
   • Critical analyses on managerial and psychological processes via which meaningless work practices emerge and persist in specific industries and geographic regions.
   • Small businesses and non-traditional manufacturing environments: Many SMEs struggle with cyclically outdated employment processes and managerial practices including inefficient attraction and retention of skilled labor, psychological contract violations, and redundant tasks that do not add value to business and/or employee development and progression.
   • Meaningless work practices and regional economic disparities: Certain geographic areas suffer from underemployment and non-essential/non-value enhancing job creation, leading to resource misallocation and a pervading sense of meaninglessness.
   • Gig, informal and unregulated labor markets: Managements’ creation of temporary and precarious work arrangements reproduce meaningless tasks with potentially no long-term financial security, career development and recognition for workers.
   • Government and public sector inefficiencies: Managerial and psycho-social bureaucratic excesses, unnecessary paperwork duplications in local governance environments slow regional economic progress and drain limited, valuable organizational resources.
   • Managements’ workforce skills’ underutilization: Highly skilled staff are often trapped in non-contributory, repetitive roles that fail to leverage their psychological know-how and expertise, leading to socio-economic stagnation.
2. Recognizing, Mapping and Defining Structural and Psycho-Social and Economic Drivers of Meaningless Work Practices (Bykov, 2024; Mitra & Buzzanell, 2017).
   • How managements’ inefficient labor allocation and utilization leads to economic stagnation and organizational paralysis and experiences of work as meaningless in small businesses.
   • The role of outdated management methods, competences and applications in perpetuating low-value work.
   • The paradox of managerial automation: replacing meaningful jobs while retaining low-skill, repetitive, robotized work.
3. Multi-level Geographical and Regional Perspectives on Meaningless Work (Dymitrow & Brauer, 2018).
   • How underdeveloped regions suffer from artificially created or redundant employment.
   • The impact of local managerial and economic policies on the emergence of non-value-adding jobs.
   • Case studies on geographical labor market inefficiencies, management competences and/or incompetencies and skills mismatches.
4. The Hidden psycho-social and Overt Costs of managerially driven Meaningless Work in Small Businesses and Regions (Cooke et al., 2024).
   • The financial and opportunity costs of managerially led unnecessary work in SMEs. Inefficiencies in micro-entrepreneurship and informal economies.
   • How managerially instigated meaningless work practices lead to overt and covert psycho-social costs, business stagnation and economic decline.
5. Workforce Disengagement and Productivity Losses vs Alternative Conceptualizations, Contemporary Mitigation and Future Strategies (Rastogi et al., 2018).
   • The psychological and societal impacts of management work that lacks purpose.
   • The role of managerially implemented digital transformation in maintaining, reducing or exacerbating meaningless work in organizations and regions.
   • How managements’ automation and AI implementation can optimize labor use and competence deployment without displacing meaningful work.

Submissions Information

Submissions are made using ScholarOne Manuscripts. Registration and access are available here.

Author guidelines must be strictly followed. Please see here.

Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the special issue title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e. in response to ““Please select the issue you are submitting to”.

Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review for this journal.

Key deadlines

Opening date for manuscripts submissions: 02/09/2025

Closing date for manuscripts submission: 02/03/2026

Closing date for abstract submission: 02/12/2025

Email for submissions: [email protected]

Guest editors

John Mendy; Lincoln International Business School, University of Lincoln, UK, [email protected]

Asha Thomas, Department of Operations Research and Business Intelligence, Wrocław University of Science and Technology, Poland; [email protected]

For more details refer here

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