‘I'm farming because I'm a wife’ – An enduring navigational approach to meaningful work and vocational choice

This paper investigates how meaningful work is sustained under conditions of social and cultural constraint. Drawing on interviews with thirty-eight female farmers in Northern Vietnam, it examines how meaningfulness emerges as an ongoing navigation between unification, the moral obligation to preserve familial harmony and social continuity, and contribution, the desire to act purposefully and be valued. The findings reveal a process of enduring navigation through which meaningful work is sustained, extending Rosso et al.'s (2010) framework, by showing that unification and contribution are not necessarily complementary pathways but can remain persistently in tension. Meaningful work is sustained not through resolution but through moral endurance, enacted in three recurrent dynamics: vital yet invisible, enduring yet confining, and conforming yet reclaiming. These dynamics shape vocational trajectories by normalising farming as a moral duty, constraining alternative aspirations, and preserving a quiet openness to future vocational possibilities. Meaningful work, in this view, is a relational and moral practice, a continual navigation of tension rather its resolution, recasting endurance as a subtle form of agency that enables individuals to preserve coherence, moral worth, and possibilities within constraining structures.