The Roots of Our Labour

Where does meaning and purpose come from in our work?

If we rely solely on the social sciences (or worse, management studies) to provide an answer, it’s unlikely we’d make it past the latest studies. No, there’s nothing wrong with a good meta-analysis, but one of the pillars of good science is identifying limitations. Sometimes we need to think about problems in a different way, and for that philosophy invites us in.

One of the most frustrating things about reading the latest paper on Behavior X at Company Y correlating with Problem Z is the desire for a neatness we don’t usually encounter with humans. Or work spaces. Adding to the noise and confusion, the latest research paper identifying Problem Z is used by StartUp ABC who is here, incidentally, to sell you solutions. This must be done in the language of economics. In this process of observing, questioning, collecting, analysing, and offering - what’s missing?

So much.

Our collective and individual relationships to work are so complex, they require an interdisciplinary approach if we ever hope to get a better handle on understanding them.

Some of the challenges we face are contemporary, but not as many as you’d think. Writing about factory workers in the mid 1930s, Simone Weil noticed how disconnected the workers were from their actions. To her, the method of completing a task was dependent on efficiency and a rate of repetition that prevented the human from considering the method of the task at hand.

From the moment when the mind which has worked out a method of action has no need to take part in the job of execution, this can be handed over to pieces of metal just as well as and better than to living members; and one is thus presented with the strange spectacle of machines in which the method has become so perfectly crystallized in metal that it seems as though it is they which do the thinking, and it is the men who serve them who are reduced to the condition of automata. [1]

I am comforted and dismayed by how applicable her reflections remain today. In recent studies, employees have reported feeling the very same way. For example, one study found train drivers in the UK felt pressured by management expectations to keep pace with ‘smart’ machines. They also worried about being replaced by automated options in the future, which in turn made the drivers behave more like machines in the present to remain employable [2].

Another study looked at the impact of AI use on critical thinking in professional and educational contexts. Researchers found participants were delegating cognitive tasks to AI tools in an effort to reduce their cognitive load, potentially leading to fewer opportunities for critical analysis. The same study also reported participants' use of AI tools in decision-making based on their perception that the output was reliable and convenient [3].

These studies are excellent examples of observing and relating the experience of workers facing contemporary (ish) issues. But then what? There will be recommendations provided in some cases, but how do we attend to this as a broader, societal experience of many? And how do we come to decide what we ought to be doing insofar as work is shaped?

I’m comforted that this is not exactly a new problem, but more of an update on a classic issue at work. When problems are old, it follows that plenty of people have had plenty of time to come up with good solutions. If a solution has not yet been found, that suggests there are obstacles. Again, given the age of this human-plays-machine problem there is no lack of explanation on what those obstacles are, and how they are firmly kept in place.

One obstacle in particular revolves around a story industry leads like to tell. You’ll recognise it once I get going…

Once upon a time in a horrible factory far away, labour was arduous, repetitive, and dirty. It hurt the workers and made them sad. Along came Mechanization and slayed the nasty labour with its mighty power! All the workers enjoyed their new jobs/tasks/industries that were overflowing with dignity and purpose. They used their newfound free time to get self-actualised, and lived happily ever after as robots obsequiously folded clean laundry. The end.

It’s a nice enough story, but there are some parts missing - particularly on the point of the need for dignity at work. And the need for a narrative to be connected to a past.

Weil wrote about dignity as something we can find in our roots. She insisted that “there is no true dignity without a spiritual root and consequently one of a supernatural order.” [4] While Weil wasn’t keen on attaching herself to specific dogma or church, she wrote at length about religion, spirituality, and mysticism [5]. On the matter of dignity, she points to the importance of seeing the purpose in one’s endeavour. A part of understanding purpose is to identify its connectedness - to the person engaged in the work, to their community, to nature, to what it is they are producing, to outcomes. What are the spiritual roots? What shared intangible essence of humanness is growing down into the soil of society in which the work happens, and holding steady when storms blow through? How do your roots form a network with other roots, and how do they experience a natural life cycle of birth, growth, maturing, and death?

Perhaps these are slightly harder questions to answer than demands for an ROI breakdown during a consultancy phase. Maybe that’s why business schools don’t bother much with philosophy. More’s the pity.

It’s interesting to consider Weil’s insistence that industrialisation prevents roots from growing as the design creates an individual who becomes separated from their community and the purpose of their work. To think about how a systematised approach to prioritising profit results in making an abstraction of the work you do each quarter [6] is to be reminded once again of how degrowth has been on our minds for some time now. And that now’s a good time to create a community level of dignity at work.

She argued later in the same book that we ought to “give more dignity to work by infusing it with thought, and not to make of the workingman a thing divided up into compartments which sometimes works and sometimes thinks.” [4] This reads a lot like some of the language currently used in academic research that investigates work engagement, motivation, meaningfulness, etc. Interestingly, despite conceptual frameworks on meaningful work including ‘societal context’, [7] it doesn’t appear much once its practical application shows up in a company. This may be a reflection of the bloat and sludge we find around us as experts and consultants stream through the revolving doors constantly to ‘fix’ a ‘problem’ in an organisation they have a limited engagement with. It sounds like the work of consultants is similarly unrooted.

Simone Weil’s offering to a world in the midst of a galvanising shift was the concept of spirituality of work [8]. Her book The Need for Roots is painfully applicable in our current industrial revolution full of AI offers. The concept has much to offer us in assessing how our approach to work continues to alienate and how, crucially, we can do things differently. Under the pressure to be more machine-like at work than ever, now is as good a time as any to demand something different, something that allows us to grow the roots of our labour.

Works Cited

[1] Weil, S. (1958). Oppression and liberty (A. Wills & J. Petrie, Trans.). Routledge & Kegan Paul. Quote from section: Theoretical picture of a free society.

[2] Fisher, D., & Fleming, P. (2026). Competing With Smart Machines: The dark side of ‘conjoined agency’ in contemporary organizations. Organization Studies, 47(5), 713-737.

[3] Gerlich, M. (2025) AI Tools in Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking. Societies, 15, 6. https:// doi.org/10.3390/soc15010006

[4] Weil, S. (1952). The need for roots: Prelude to a declaration of duties toward mankind (A. Wills, Trans.). Putnam, p. 90.

[5] Rozelle-Stone, A. R. (2024). Simone Weil: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.

[6] Radzins, I. (2017), Simone Weil on Labor and Spirit. Jour. of Relig. Eth., 45: 291-308. https://doi.org/10.1111/jore.12178

[7] Blustein, D. L., Lysova, E. I., & Duffy, R. D. (2023). Understanding decent work and meaningful work. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 10(1), 303–328.

[8] Rees, R. (1966). Simone Weil: A Sketch for a Portrait. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-211163-9.

[9] The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind (French: L'Enracinement, prélude à une déclaration des devoirs envers l'être humain)