Editorial: From Meaning of Working to Meaningful Lives: The Challenges of Expanding Decent Work

This Research Topic explores issues that are central to the continued relevance of organizational and vocational psychology, and equally central to the well-being of individuals and communities. The cohering theme of this publication revolves around the question of how people can establish meaningful lives and meaningful work experiences in light of the many challenges that are reducing access to decent work. Numerous interrelated trends are reshaping access to work, especially stable, dignified jobs. These trends include the continued fallout from the Great Recession, which has had a profound impact on many regions of the world (International Labour Organization, 2016). Simultaneously, the rapid growth in information technology is reducing the number and quality of jobs for people across the occupational spectrum (Brynjolfsson and McAfee, 2014; Standing, 2014). Another essential contextual factor that is explored in this volume is the Decent Work Agenda (International Labour Organization, 2008), which represents an initiative by the International Labour Organization. In this book, we hope to enrich the Decent Work Agenda by infusing the knowledge and perspectives of psychology into contemporary discourses about work, and well-being. During this period when work is changing so rapidly, leaving people yearning for a sense of connection and meaning, we believe that scholarship is needed to foster new developments in understanding how people construct meaning about their lives and work. This new era calls for an innovative perspective in constructing decent work and decent lives: the passage from the paradigm of motivation to the paradigm of meaning, where the sustainability of the decent life project is anchored to a meaningful construction. Another inspiration for this project emerged from the UNESCO Chair in Lifelong guidance and counseling, recently established in Poland in 2013 under the leadership of Jean Guichard, which has focused on advancing research and policy advocacy about decent work. After the inaugural Conference in November 2013 in Wroclaw (Poland), the following Conference was in Florence in 2015 on the topic " How can career and life designing interventions contribute to a fair and sustainable development and to the implementation of decent work over the world? " In the section that follows, we summarize the articles that are included in this volume, highlighting their connections to the main themes of this project. The 1st article by Blustein et al. summarized existing scholarship on decent work; using the psychology of working framework (Blustein, 2006, 2013), the authors created a framework for …