Study of a workshop on the meaning of life and the meaning of work
Résumé
The starting point for this research was the study of a workshop to reflect on the meaning of life and the meaning of work, from the point of view of facilitators and trainees who had experienced it. The interviews gathered revealed a wider range of life stories than just the workshop experience, including childhood episodes, ancestors' migration paths and intimate life episodes. In the course of the analysis, two main axes emerged: on the one hand, the destruction, construction and transmission of the meaning of work, which has an impact on the meaning of life; on the other, existential notions such as death, freedom, responsibility, insignificance and isolation, whose evocation as fears or as themes for reflection guides the perception of meaning. These two areas, though different, were found to be inseparable from each other in the field data. The question then arose: how could we deal with the association of these two fields through the prism of management? By going back and forth between the interviews we conducted and the literature, we came up with an answer in the form of a conjecture.