When Public Institutions Lack Means: HRM and the Production of Meaningful Work in Chilean Education

This article examines how meaningful work is produced through fragile public HRM systems in reform-driven public education contexts. While often treated as a positive individual experience, meaningful work is conceptualised here as a socially and institutionally embedded process shaped by employment regimes and reform pressures. Drawing on 48 interviews with managers, professionals, and administrative staff across four public education providers, the analysis identifies four interrelated dynamics: HRM structures that institutionalise precarity; commitment to vulnerable communities; self-recognition in the absence of formal validation; and the normalisation of sacrifice as dedication. The article advances public HRM scholarship in three ways. First, it shows that ambivalence in meaningful work is institutionally produced under conditions of fragility. Second, it specifies how HRM configurations mediate between reform-driven instability and employees’ meaning-making. Third, it situates meaningful work within debates on decent work (SDG 8) by demonstrating how moral commitment sustains service delivery while compensating for deficits in security, recognition and institutional care.