Securing meaningfulness in corporate social responsibility: Exploring meaning-making mechanisms via economies of worth

The current literature on meaningful work has attempted to capture the dynamic interplay between individuals’ subjective perception of the meaningfulness of their work and the broader societal and cultural context, employing tensional and temporal approaches. Yet, understanding of how individuals develop their justifications for the worthiness of their work by transcending subjective and social accounts of meaningful work remains limited. To enrich the justification approach to individuals’ tensional and dynamic experiences of meaningful work, we rely on the economies of worth (EW) framework to explore how individuals engage in meaning-making within their work when its worthiness is challenged. Focusing on the experiences and meaning-making of 46 practitioners working in the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) field in Vietnam, we identified three meaning-making mechanisms (prospective deferring, localizing, and diverging) enacted in three morally challenging situations experienced by CSR practitioners (self vs belonging, self vs societal perceptions, and self vs external stakeholders’ changing interests). The study makes three contributes: (1) it enriches the meaning-making literature by advancing a justification approach via the EW framework; (2) it clarifies the micro-dynamics of compromise-building mechanisms at different career stages within organizational studies of the EW framework; and (3) it expands micro-CSR research by unpacking the relational tensions and meaning-making experiences of CSR practitioners.