Ms Antonia Höfer (p)

Labour markets are conventionally understood through wages, contracts and material working conditions. Yet workers' location decisions, retention behaviour and labour market participation are equally shaped by non-pecuniary dimensions of work, including meaningfulness, recognition, work relationships, learning opportunities or purpose. For economic geography, this poses a fundamental challenge: if what makes work valuable cannot be reduced to monetary compensation or classic job attributes, then standard accounts of regional labour market dynamics, spatial sorting and place-based inequality are incomplete. This paper addresses that challenge through a critical, interdisciplinary review of meaningful work scholarship across organisational psychology, sociology of work, philosophy, labour economics and economic geography.
Organisational psychology has generated rich knowledge about antecedents and consequences of meaningful work but has been critiqued for individualising meaningfulness and neglecting structural conditions and power relations. Sociological perspectives reveal that meaningful work is unequally distributed across employment regimes and occupational hierarchies. Labour process theory demonstrates that the capacity to experience work as meaningful is fundamentally shaped by managerial control and bargaining position. Economic approaches conceptualise meaningful work as a non-pecuniary job attribute but reveal troubling compensating differentials whereby workers accept inferior material conditions in exchange for perceived meaning. Philosophical contributions distinguish between meaning, meaningfulness and worth, clarifying persistent conceptual ambiguities. Economic geography occupies a distinctive position in this conversation. Drawing on labour geography, political economy and institutional approaches, it situates meaningful work within regional labour markets, sectoral cultures and place-based occupational identities. What counts as valuable work is historically and institutionally embedded, shaped by regional development trajectories, dominant industries, and local norms regarding contribution and worth. Spatial inequalities in access to meaningful work reflect not only wage differentials but uneven distributions of autonomy, recognition or occupational dignity across regions and sectors. Economic geography thereby reframes meaningful work from an individual psychological state into a geographically constituted achievement inseparable from the spatial organisation of production and social reproduction.
This review identifies three critical gaps: insufficient integration of subjective experience and structural conditions; limited attention to value pluralism and regional variation; and inadequate theorisation of negotiation, voice and relational dynamics. The paper concludes by arguing for relational, context-sensitive frameworks embedding meaningful work within broader ecologies of job quality, institutional arrangements and regional contexts, positioning economic geography as a key discipline for understanding the spatial and institutional foundations of valuable and meaningful work.

Dr. Lisa Sella (p), Elena Ragazzi, Igor Benati, Dr. Valentina Lamonica, Dr Marco Marucci, Dr Lucio Morettini

Youth employment represents a hard challenge across emerging countries, where the youngsters generally face structural, economic, and demographic barriers limiting their access to stable and decent jobs (ILO, 2025).
In Senegal, youths’ labor insertion faces a very fragile context marked by high informality, youth unemployment around 20% (ages 15–24), and an annual inflow of approximately 300,000 new entrants compared to only about 30,000 available formal job opportunities (Diallo et al., 2023). Although Senegal remains one of the most politically stable countries within West Africa, its labor market is highly segmented, with over 90% of young people working under precarious conditions and without social protection (Rodríguez‐Castelán and Vazquez, 2022). Demographic growth amplifies employment vulnerability, further exacerbated by skill mismatches and institutional weaknesses.
The objective of this contribution is to investigate the evolution and effectiveness of active labor market policies and youth employment programs implemented by the Senegalese government since 2000. The study adopts a systematic review approach of the main labor and self-employment policy initiatives, as well as more recent programs. By offering a comprehensive assessment of youth employment policies implemented by the Senegalese government over the past two decades, this study provides an interpretive framework for understanding the current policy mix in Senegal. It also classifies the Senegalese model as a “promotional-concerted” type with a strong focus on self-employment. In this light, it contributes to the theoretical debate by distinguishing African trajectories from Western paradigms. These findings support policy recommendations, advancing literature on inclusive development in informal economies.

Prof. Roberta Capello, Dr. Simona Ciappei (p), Professor Camilla Lenzi

The paper examines the implications of firms’ use of digital platforms for job quality. By shifting the focus to platform adoption by firms, rather than workers’ direct participation in platform-mediated work, the paper argues that the effects of digital platforms are not confined to jobs directly mediated by platforms, but extend more broadly across the local labour market, generating ripple effects on workers who are not directly involved with platforms. Using Italian data for the period 2018–2024, the paper provides empirical evidence of negative ripple effects on individual job quality. These effects are not uniform but vary systematically across occupations according to skill level and the cooperative atmosphere permeating local labour markets.