Exploring Young Offenders’ Conceptions of Meaningful Employment

Abstract

Experiencing meaningfulness at work is important for employee engagement, individual performance, and personal fulfilment. However, research surrounding meaningful employment has predominantly focused upon the experiences of well-educated, adult professionals. To expand theoretical understanding of this concept, this paper investigates perceptions of meaningful employment among youths from Northern England (aged 16–18) with a history of involvement in crime. Interviews demonstrate that young offenders’ criteria for ‘meaningful work’ differ from existing research and is influenced by their self-concept and inherent values as youths from chaotic and impoverished backgrounds. This highlights the subjectivity of this concept. Nonetheless, the findings also indicate that there are instances where work itself makes a broader contribution in discovering meaning, and therefore, certain organisational practices are experienced as meaningful by both young offenders and adult professionals. Thus, this study demonstrates the importance of surveying diverse populations to reach a more comprehensive understanding of meaningful employment.

The impact of employment upon young offenders’ identities

“…Overall, this article demonstrates that social inclusion through employment can aid the formation of a stronger prosocial identity among youths. This highlights the importance of young people being able to gain meaningful, rather than precarious, employment and the value of social enterprise in providing such employment for those who would otherwise struggle to obtain this in contemporary labour markets (for a more detailed discussion see Oswald (2021) and Soppitt, Oswald & Walker (2021)). While acknowledging the limitations of a small dataset, self-reports, supervisor's reports and official records at least suggest that this more coherent prosocial identity influenced a reduction in offending activities for young people.…”