How Callings Are Expressed in the Workplace
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2014-06-26
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Abstract
“How Callings Are Expressed in the Workplace,” addresses the lives, experiences, and objectives of individuals pursuing their calling. Callings are purposeful and meaningful types of work of which many personal and organizational benefits have been attributed to. This research, drawing from phenomenology and hermeneutic philosophy, follows a constructivist epistemology exploring how people- following-their-callings engage their environments. A life history methodology, a methodology sitting at the nexus between phenomenology and sociology, was most appropriate for capturing the interplay between a person’s subjectivity and their context. Five participants from for-profit oil and gas organizations and three participants from not-for-profit organizations were selected using professionally developed surveys to identify individuals who have high levels of calling orientation. A holistic understanding of what callings express and how they are being expressed was developed by understanding the participants’ past, their present worldviews, and future goals. What has been discerned is that people must overcome environmental, self imposed, or socially and institutionally imposed thresholds in order to pursue a calling. A calling is found here to be a way-of-being towards a unity-of-being, expressed as pursuits towards perfection, equality, self/other acceptance, and responsibility for another. Pursuing a calling is what allows people to transform themselves and their perspectives of the world as objects into the possibilities of becoming a force, thus embodying the epigram: ‘Because I am, can we become, therefore a force.’
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Cohen, M. (2014). How Callings Are Expressed in the Workplace (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/26385