I'm Jeff Trexler, Wilson Professor of Social Entrepreneurship at Pace University, where I study law and personal identity. It's good to be here at JustMeans. Uncivil Society is a blog I maintain about values, design and corporate identity, with a particular focus on social enterprise. The Blingdom of God is where I write about spirituality and material culture....
"Looking for a meaningful job"
There have been any number of social enterprise issues that have caught my eye this week, but when I sat down to write this post I couldn't get my mind off of this simple profile update here at JustMeans:
The desire to blend our need to make a living with our drive to live a life is at the base of much of what we see in social enterprise. It sounds so basic, but it's incredibly complex--Kant famously spoke of it in terms of the distinction between viewing people as means to ends versus ends in themselves, yet over two hundred years later we don't seem to have become any better at guaranteeing that everyone gets to work in ways that treat them as fully human.
One way to rise above this tension is, of course, to hang out at this site, which offers access to a range of jobs with a socially beneficial purpose. Still, even if you manage to snag one, that's only one step on the quest--meaning isn't something you get so much as create, and that's a lifelong process.
Another way to find meaning in a career is to look for meaning in unexpected places. At base, every enterprise is a social enterprise, or should be--as Ellen Dissanayake memorably observed, "making special" is the art of being human; our innate aesthetic is to make more from the mundane.
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