Morgan Hamlin (2024)

New Zealand Sociology, 39(1), pp. 22-38

Abstract. Utilising the pragmatic sociology of critique, this article qualitatively analyses how middle-class housing activists publicly oppose or support higher-density housing or intensification in the Auckland Unitary Plan. With growing concerns about inter-generational housing inequalities and the impacts of intensification, there has been a rise in resident opposition groups and pro-development activists who clash in public debates. While these groups are often in conflict with each other, this article seeks to understand how they both invoke public justifications to go beyond their personal interests in housing and to also reveal the broader political and economic drivers of the housing crisis, which are not widely discussed by these activists. Exposing the broader issues underlying intensification and the housing crisis, such as middle-class decline, helps contribute to a less divisive public discourse that highlights the shared concerns of housing activists while going beyond polarising generational narratives.

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Catherine Bailey, Adrian Madden, Marjolein Lips-Wiersma (2024)

Human Relations, Online first, open access

Abstract. Why do individuals find their work meaningful and what is the role of worthwhile contributions in this experience? We undertake an analysis of accounts related by individuals working as nurses, creative artists and lawyers in which they explain why they find their work meaningful. Drawing on the traditions of critical discourse and narrative analysis, and informed by French pragmatic sociology, we move beyond a focus on what is said to consider how accounts are structured in explanations of meaningfulness. We find meaningfulness to be discursively constituted in the judgement that work makes a worthwhile contribution to others or wider society. We add theoretically to the literature on meaningful work, first, by revealing worthwhile contributions to be a complex, three-fold evaluation comprising the value attached by the individual to their contribution, validation from others that aligns with the individual’s own evaluation concerning the worth of the contribution and the individual’s self-efficacy belief that they are able to make the contribution. Second, we build bridges between hitherto disconnected branches of the meaningful work literature grounded in positive psychology on the one hand and moral worth on the other by showing how judgements of worth are fundamental to the experience of meaningfulness.

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