Abstract

The contribution addresses with the tools of Max Weber’s comprehensive sociology the theme of the significance and meaning attributed by the actor to work as crucial elements for understanding both the forms of exercise of work activity and the relationships and social dynamics that are built in – and around – work. The individualism of singularity – the unprecedented and radical form of individualism that has progressively established itself in Western liberal democratic societies starting from the last decades of the twentieth century – has rewritten the significance of work and remodelled its capacity for meaning, transforming needs and self-perceptions of the individual, the relationship between the individual and society, the functions and relevance of work in individual life. The individualistic shattering of significance (the perception of the function, forms and times of working, but also the interpretation of its role and place in individual life and social reproduction) and of the meaning of work (the reasons why we work and the concrete ways in which we carry out a certain activity) has pulverized the large collective subjects into a dust of individual attitudes – hopes, expectations, interests – which are difficult to coagulate. It is primarily from this transformation of the subjective dimension of work that the extreme problematic nature of its valorisation arises in terms of the foundation of social conflict and a factor of political change