The significance of donkey droppings: how materiality mediates meaningful experiences

This article examines how meaningful experiences of work are shaped through materiality by bringing meaningful work and dirty work scholarship into dialogue. Focusing on meaningful experiences, it introduces the concept of events of significance: occurrences in which the meaningfulness of work is negotiated as it unfolds. Analyzing two such events at a Dutch donkey sanctuary, the article shows that materiality is integral to how meaningfulness is experienced through work. Drawing on these findings, I suggest that materiality mediates meaningful experience through a two-stage reciprocal process. First, material conditions make alignments or misalignments between values and practice perceptible. Second, these alignments or misalignments elicit affective responses that, in turn, shape participants’ engagement with the material conditions themselves. The article extends meaningful work research by clarifying how material conditions participate in both the enactment and erosion of meaningfulness and contributes to dirty work scholarship by foregrounding heterogeneous lived experiences beyond stigma coping.