When Ikigai Fails to Converge: An Ethics of Incompleteness in Late-Capitalist Working Life
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Abstract
This theoretical article analyzes the moral tensions that emerge when ikigai—long understood in Japanese culture as the quiet sense that one's existence remains worth living—fails to align with the material conditions of work, organizational life, and economic survival under late capitalism. I argue that ikigai's migration from its ethical and communal moorings in Japanese thought into the discourse of neoliberal management has not been a simple act of cross-cultural translation. It has been a process of technologization, in which the meaning of life is reconfigured as an organizational resource. Drawing on Weberian account of vocational ethics (Calling), Durkheim's diagnosis of anomie, and Foucault's analysis of governmentality. This article synthesizes two new theoretical frameworks: the Non-Convergent Ikigai Framework, which explains lives where meaning, work, and survival move in a state of enduring tension; and the Organizational Ikigai Trap, which critiques the ethical limits of purpose-driven management. The theoretical proposal of the article is to reclaim ikigai as a humanistic ethic—not through demands for harmonious alignment of life, but through the acceptance of incompleteness, vulnerability, and values that lie beyond the logic of the market, positioning these as fundamental components of dignity in contemporary working life.
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