How Meaningfulness and Professional Identity Interact in Emerging Professions: The Case of Corporate Social Responsibility Consultants
研究通过访谈39名企业社会责任顾问，揭示了意义感与职业认同之间的两种社会机制，即通过职业自我认同和职业社会化来创造意义，并解释了这些机制如何产生不同甚至矛盾的职业认同。
Although interest in meaningfulness is mounting in the growing stream of research dedicated to how professionals experience it, research has only just begun to investigate the complex relationships between the search for meaningfulness and the constitution of professional identity for emerging professional groups. This paper investigates how meaningfulness interacts with the formation and enactment of professional identity, focusing on the emerging professional group of corporate social responsibility (CSR) consultants. Relying on interviews with 39 CSR consultants, we induce two social mechanisms bridging meaningfulness and professional identity, namely ‘meaning-making through professional self-identification’ and ‘meaning-making through professional socialization’. Our results explain how these mechanisms produce distinct, and potentially contradictory, professional identities of CSR consultants, which themselves enable contrasted forms of professional identity enactment. The study advances meaningfulness research by clarifying how the self–other tension is played out through identity formation and revealing the gendered nature of meaningfulness. The research also contributes to studies on professional identity through the specification of meaning-focused mechanisms of identity formation, and ultimately to micro-CSR research by offering a nuanced approach to how CSR is involved in the production of work meaningfulness.