Camus is often classified as an existentialist writer, and it is easy to see why. Affinities with Kierkegaard and Sartre are patent. He shares with these philosophers (and with the other major writers in the existentialist tradition, from Augustine and Pascal to Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche) an habitual and intense interest in the active human psyche, in the life of conscience or spirit as it is actually experienced and lived. Like these writers, he aims at nothing less than a thorough, candid exegesis of the human condition, and like them he exhibits not just a philosophical attraction but also a personal commitment to such values as individualism, free choice, inner strength, authenticity, personal responsibility, and self-determination. However, one troublesome fact remains: throughout his career Camus repeatedly denied that he was an existentialist. Was this an accurate and honest self-assessment? On the one hand, some critics have questioned this “denial” (using the term almost in its modern clinical sense), attributing it to the celebrated Sartre-Camus political “feud” or to a certain stubbornness or even contrariness on Camus’s part. In their view, Camus qualifies as, at minimum, a closet existentialist, and in certain respects (e.g., in his unconditional and passionate concern for the individual) as an even truer specimen of the type than Sartre. On the other hand, besides his personal rejection of the label, there appear to be solid reasons for challenging the claim that Camus is an existentialist. For one thing, it is noteworthy that he never showed much interest in (indeed he largely avoided) metaphysical and ontological questions (the philosophical raison d’etre of Heidegger and Sartre). Of course there is no rule that says an existentialist must be a metaphysician. However, Camus’s seeming aversion to technical philosophical discussion does suggest one way in which he distanced himself from contemporary existentialist thought. Another point of divergence is that Camus seems to have regarded existentialism as a complete and systematic world-view, that is, a fully articulated doctrine. In his view, to be a true existentialist one had to commit to the entire doctrine (and not merely to bits and pieces of it), and this was apparently something he was unwilling to do. A further point of separation, and possibly a decisive one, is that Camus actively challenged and set himself apart from the existentialist motto that being precedes essence. Ultimately, against Sartre in particular and existentialists in general, he clings to his instinctive belief in a common human nature. In his view human existence necessarily includes an essential core element of dignity and value, and in this respect he seems surprisingly closer to the humanist tradition from Aristotle to Kant than to the modern tradition of skepticism and relativism from Nietzsche to Derrida (the latter his fellow-countryman and, at least in his commitment to human rights and opposition to the death penalty, his spiritual successor and descendant).

HICS, Peirce has said, depends onaesthetics, i.e., judgments of oughtdepend on the delineation of anideal, of what is admirable and what isnot.' Existentialism has given to the ad-mirable a new location-and hence byimplication has relocated judgments ofmoral value. What the existentialist ad-mires is not the happiness of a man's life,the goodness of his disposition, or therightness of his acts but the authenticityof his existence. This is, I think, theunique contribution of existentialism toethical theory. There are, of course, otherethical principles involved in existentialphilosophy, but they are principles whichit has in common with other ethical sys-tems. For example, the existentialistdenies the practical supremacy of reason,he denies the universality of moralvalues, he asserts the all-importance,ethically, of the historic individual in hisunique situation-all these tenets theexistentialist shares with numerous othermoralists, past and present. They aretenets which will appear obvious truthsto those who believe them and obviousfalsehoods to those who disbelieve them;in either event they are not unique. Butthe stress on authenticity is, I think, aunique existentialist emphasis-and animportant one.There are, in contemporary existen-tialism, two principal versions of thisnew ethical concept. For Heidegger,genuine existence is existence whichdares to face death: rising from the dis-sipating and deceptive consolations of to-day's concerns to the inner realizationthat its own past must take shape and sig-nificance in relation to its inevitable lasttomorrow. Contrasted with such genuineexistence is Verfallen, the distraction orscattering of one's freedom in the cares ofeveryday, where not the true individual,but das man, the indifferent "they," issovereign. In Sartre, on the other hand,genuine existence is conceived of as free,not in facing death so much as in facingthe meaningless ground of its own tran-scendence; that is, the fact that thevalues by which I live depend not ondivine fiat or metaphysical necessity buton myself alone. Contrasted with suchawareness is bad faith, the stultificationof freedom in the enslavement to an "ob-jective" truth or a consuming passion.In both versions, the concept ofauthenticity is rooted in the existentialinterpretation of freedom. We live frombirth to death under the compulsion ofbrute fact; yet out of the mere givennessof situation it is we ourselves who shapeourselves and our world. And in thisshaping we succeed or fail. To succeed isnot to escape compulsion but to tran-scend it-to give it significance andmeaning by our own projection of the ab-surdly given past into a directed future.But such shaping of contingency, suchimposition of meaning on the meaning-less, is possible only through the veryrecognition of meaninglessness-of thenothingness that underlies our lives.Such recognition means, for Sartre, theawareness, in dread, that the values bywhich I live are totally, absurdly mine;the contingency, the compulsion I mustface is the irrevocable givenness of myown creation. In the more radical concep-266AUTHENTICITY: AN EXISTENTIAL VIRTUE 267tion of Heidegger it is not the absurdity,the nothingness, of life which must befaced but the ultimate nothingness, thelast and total contingency of death,which must inwardly determine as it out-wardly delimits my existence. Thus forSartre it is a peculiar attitude towardfreedom in its relation to value that de-fines authentic existence; for Heideggerit is the orientation to the end of life, theresolve to death, that is essential toauthenticity. In both cases authenticityis a kind of honesty or a kind of courage;the authentic individual faces somethingwhich the unauthentic individual isafraid to face.If, in authentic existence, freedom caninform necessity and give meaning to themeaningless, it may also fail of its tran-scendence, it may succumb to the mul-tiplicity and absurdity of fact, it mayseek escape in the fiction of a supportingcosmic morality or in the domination ofa blind passion or in the nagging distrac-tions of its everyday concerns. In otherwords, freedom is not an abstraction tobe generically applied to "man" as such,but a risk, a venture, a demand. In asense we are all free, but we are free toachieve our freedom or to lose it. Thereare no natural slaves, but most of us haveenslaved ourselves. Existentialism is, inthis, a kind of inverse Spinozism. LikeSpinoza, it sees man as bond or free; only,unlike Spinoza, it finds in reason not aliberator but one of the possible enslaversand in imagination of a sort the sourcenot of enslavement but of emancipationfrom it.It should be noticed, however, that inHeidegger's conception the sphere of thenonauthentic, of Verfallen, is always withus. There is no easy distinction betweenthose who, leaving the fraudulent behindthem, achieve the level of genuine exist-ence and those who do not. We are all,always, a prey to the cares of here andnow; of a thousand and one trivialitiesall our days are made. Yet there is an es-sential, qualitative, recognizable differ-ence, a total difference, morally, betweenthe existence for which the trivialitiesare the whole and the existence for whichthe manifold of experience is transcendedin a unity not, like the Kantian, abstractand universal but intensely personal andconcrete.What does it mean to say, as Heideg-ger does, that what constitutes this unityis a "resolve to death," that it is "beingto death" or "freedom to death" whichemancipates the individual from bondageto the "they"? The arguments by whichHeidegger develops this thesis cannot betaken seriously as arguments. Like mostof his arguments they consist principallyin inversions of ground and consequentand in the kind of word play in whichGerman philosophy from Hegel onabounds. For example, if empirically it isfound that various peoples and individu-als face death in various ways, he can de-fine personal existence as "being todeath" and say that it is not the case thatdeath is essential to existence becausepeople die and face the fact of dying but,much more profoundly, people die andface the fact of dying because existenceis being to death. In other words, a pos-terioris are turned into a prioris: and,presto, there is the philosopher possessedof a foresight far finer than the hindsightof the ordinary man. Or, for instance, hecan play, much as Aristotle does withtelos in the Politics, with the meaning of"end": death is the end of life, and there-fore the end of life, etc.Yet, although Sein und Zeit is a tissueof this sort of pseudo-definition and re-definition, there is in its central thesis aserious truth. For the individual de-prived of supernatural support, cast268 ETHICSalone into his world, the dread of deathis a haunting if suppressed theme thatruns through life. What is more, if at alltimes communication between men istattered and fragile, it is in the face ofdeath that each man stands most strik-ingly and irrevocably alone. For thisEveryman there is after all no guide inhis most need to go by his side; and there-fore, more intensely than for his medievalcounterpart, his relation to death marksas nothing else does the integrity and in-dependence of his life. Thus, if authen-ticity is rare, authenticity in youth onemay expect to find extremely rare, for itis a virtue that flowers only in andthrough dread, in the living presence ofits own mortality.Yet whether "being to death" is thesole content and meaning of existentialauthenticity, as Heidegger makes it, isanother question. That the awareness ofdeath is a significant factor in any con-scious life is certain-and to have shownthis is an extremely important service ofSein und Zeit to contemporary thought.For this is, so far as I know, the first timesince Plato that death has been givencentral philosophic significance in the in-terpretation of life. In the case of Lucre-tius, for example, the fear of death and inthat of Hobbes the fear of violent deathare hinges, so to speak, on which theirphilosophic systems are hung; but theyare not, like Heidegger's "resolve todeath," internal to the analysis of life it-self. Whatever moralists wish to do here-after with this concept, they must cer-tainly reckon with it.On the other hand, in the fashion inwhich Heidegger presents it, the empha-sis on death involves an inescapable nar-rowness which warps the total concep-tion of the authentic individual. It isonly a man's death, Heidegger says,which is irreplaceably his own, which isnot interchangeable with the experienceof others; and therefore it is only in "be-ing to death" that he escapes the claimsof the public and corrupting "they" andis genuinely himself, genuinely free. His"freedom to death," the confrontationwith this one fact which is really his own,is the whole content and meaning of hisfreedom, and the existence of otherselves as of the world is for him only ameans to the achievement of this grimand lonely triumph. But this is not onlyemancipation from the bewildering dis-traction of the anonymous "they"; it isemancipation from all that might, by ourown creation, be made meaningful. It isindeed a transcendence of the meaning-less manifold, but a transcendence toodearly bought, for the very oneness andintensity of the achievement make it it-self almost empty of meaning. This isagain the Nullpunktsexistenz of Kierke-gaard, from which even God himself hasvanished. Personal authenticity is a sig-nificant ethical concept, and the relationof the individual to death is an essentialaspect of it, but it is not an aspect whichcan stand alone as Heidegger makes itdo. If nothing else, some relation toothers in their authenticity, some livingcommunication or the attempt at it,must play a part. But Heidegger'sauthentic individual wanders his solitary"wood paths," and they are not after allvery admirable roads to follow nor is it avery admirable sort of man who followsthem.If, then, Heidegger's definition ofauthentic existence is inadequate, that ofSartre may at first glance appear morefruitful. For Sartre, again, the honesty ofthe authentic person consists in his facingthe nature of his own freedom. This de-scription, since it is tied to life ratherthan to its cessation, does not seem, es-sentially, to entail the same narrownessAUTHENTICITY: AN EXISTENTIAL VIRTUE 269as does Heidegger's version. Yet as theFrench existentialists have developedtheir theory they have, I think, impover-ished as much as they have enriched theconcept of authenticity.For one thing, instead of amplifyingthe concept of das Sein zum Tode or pro-ceeding from it, Sartre has, in his theo-retical statements, dismissed it rathercavalierly. My death, he says, since itcan never become part of my own experi-ence, is more real to others than to me. Itis true, of course, that the death ofothers, of those near to me in particular,forms an essential part of my experiencein a fashion which Heidegger ought tobut does not recognize. But my own rela-tion to my own death does also, in itsparadoxical fashion, constitute an essen-tial element in my experience. Sartrehimself has given a brilliant account ofthe most dramatic and visible kind of"being to death" in his moving tributeto the Resistance, The Republic ofSilence:Exile, captivity and especially death (whichwe usually shrink from facing at all in happiertimes) became for us the habitual objects of ourconcern. We learned that they were neitherinevitable accidents, nor even constant and exte-rior dangers, but that they must be consideredas our lot itself, our destiny, the profound sourceof our reality as men.. . . Thus the basicquestion of liberty was posed, and we werebrought to the verge of the deepest knowledgethat man can have of himself. For the secretof a man is not his Oedipus complex or his in-feriority complex: it is the limit of his ownliberty, his capacity for resisting torture anddeath.2And he has, though perhaps less success-fully, dealt with similar themes in suchworks as The Wall or The Unburied Dead.But theoretically, it seems, he is toomuch interested in what is called the"open future"-or perhaps the indefiniteextent of open futures which the existen-tial revolutionary needs to envisage-tobe much concerned, philosophically, withthe individual's awareness of death. Yetthe concept of authenticity needs thissharp edge to mark it. Genuine existenceis revealed for what it is in relation towhat Jaspers called Grenzsituationen, andthe dreadful awareness of my own crea-tion of myself in indeed such a situation.But my death is the most dramatic ofsuch boundary situations-and in fact itis more than that; it is the essential anddetermining boundary situation. If it isterrible that I am responsible for what Ihave become, it is always hopeful to re-flect that tomorrow I may do better. Butwhat is most terrible is that I cannot doso forever, that in fact if I have bungledand cheated and generally made a fool ofmyself, there is only a little while, per-haps not all of today even, in which to doit all over. Kierkegaard's favorite maxim,"over 70,000 fathoms, miles and milesfrom all human help, to be glad," is anessential constituent of existentialism,and in particular of the concept of theauthentic individual.And perhaps one may call on Kierke-gaard to support a second criticism ofSartre's conception of authenticity. Thistime it is the "knight of infinite resigna-tion" whom I should like to recall. It isnot necessary here to attempt to under-stand this character, let alone to endorsehim, so to speak, as a moral model, butthere is this about him which is impor-tant-though he is extremely differentfrom the ordinary sort of person, he may,Kierkegaard says, look and act just likehim. That, we have noticed, is true alsoof Heidegger's authentic person. In thecase of Sartre, however, those who liveby mauvaise foi are marked off from anelusive but admirable sort of individualwho presumably has left bad faith behindand lives entirely in the separate and dis-270 ETHICStinct area of authenticity. Now the con-cept of bad faith has in fact served as akey for some brilliant portraits of varioussorts of depravity as, for example, in thePortrait of the Anti-Semite. Yet if onelooks, for instance, at the masterly pic-ture of life by mauvaisefoi painted in theopening episode of The Room, one getsthe feeling that the life of bad faith is theconventional one and, by implication,that of good faith unconventional. Infact this is, implicitly at least, the themeof the whole story-the story of a youngwoman who chooses to share the life ofher mad husband, even to try earnestlyand tragically to share his hallucina-tions, rather than to return to the va-cantly respectable existence of her horri-fied bourgeois parents. And here again, ifone equates convention with bourgeoisconvention, the interest of the existentialrevolutionary demands such a view. Lib-eration is the existential keynote allalong the line. It is the shackles of con-vention, of beliefs imposed from outside,that bind us personally, just as the eco-nomic interests of those who foster theconventions bind us socially. To cast offthe expressions of false privilege in ourprivate lives is to become authentic, tobecome ourselves, just as political revo-lution will, in this view, cast off for us theshackes that bind us in our economic andpolitical lives.Now of course it is true that theauthentic person is seldom a convention-al person. The concept of authenticity isnot a concept of adjustment-in factwith respect to the current ideal of thewell-adjusted member of society it istruly and deeply a heresy. One can evensay that some societies almost demandrebellion of a sort as the price of authen-ticity. Yet there may be authentic indi-viduals who live all their lives, like theknight of infinite resignation, as highlyrespectable members of highly respect-able societies. Elizabeth Bennett is anauthentic individual, though she neverdid anything more unconventional thanto walk three miles on a rather muddyday. Sartre's authentic existent, on theother hand, deprived of all the triviali-ties and all the substance of Verfallen andgiven only a highly mechanical un-Marxist Marxianism by which to live, re-mains a mere ideal, or a ghost of a per-son. Mathieu, for example, who in TheAge of Reason is a real person, has notachieved authenticity but is constantlyand desperately seeking it. He is unableto survive the Grenzsitucation which theFrench existentialists in their own per-sons met so courageously. Absurdly anddefiantly, he is killed during the fall ofFrance in 1940. The trouble is that anauthentic existent, as Sartre conceiveshim, has no end given him except his ownauthenticity; but authenticity is not somuch an end of acts as a value which isrealized as a by-product of acts. The fail-ure to recognize this essential complexityof the ethical situation is a serious lack ofexistentialism, as it is of most other sys-tematic moralities. Moralists seek to de-scribe the end of human action, but manyvalues, and perhaps the highest, are pro-duced as Hartmann puts it "on the backof the act." The self-consciousness in-volved in seeking them makes them im-possible to find. And authenticity is sucha value. Those who attain it are doingand seeking what others are doing andseeking; the unique and in a sense time-less value their life exhibits is a qualifyof, but not an end for, that life itself.But this lack of complexity reflects adeeper lack, for the central difficultywhich underlies all these errors or omis-sions of existentialism is the narrownessof the existential view of the free act. Itis because of that narrowness that theAUTHENTICITY: AN, EXISTENTIAL VIRTUE 271existential hero has nothing to seek buthis own authentic act. The existentialisthas rightly seen that, "thrown into theworld," always already "engaged," weare nevertheless each totally responsiblefor our own destinies. But by singling outthe act alone by which a man faces hisown "condemnation to be free," theexistentialist isolates part of a complexsituation which cannot in fact be so iso-lated. It is true that it is I who have-al-ways-already-chosen the values by whichI live. But I have chosen, not createdthem; if they were not in some sensethere to be chosen, if they did not some-how compel me to choose them, theywould not be values at all. I could noteven, like Kirillov, choose suicide as thenegation of all values. Sartre says thatvalues "start up like partridges beforeour acts." That is how it looks in the re-flective moment of dread-but the aspectof total responsibility is only one aspectof a more complex situation. The choiceis my choice, yet it is also the choice ofsomething-and of something thatobliges me to choose it. For Sartre, how-ever, there is a crude and absolute dis-junction between the free act of genuineexistence and the bad faith of belief invalues as metaphysically self-existent orsupernaturally revealed. Either I myself,all alone, simply act or I enslave myselfto a falsely hypostatized being; hence thedesperate endeavor to make of the act it-self-of my freedom as such or the hones-ty to face my freedom-the whole endand object of the free man. But there areno pure acts. An act involves a referenceto values which in some way make aclaim on the agent and perhaps, at leastindirectly, bind him to other agents or tothose affected by his acts.It is probably in some such context,moreover, that the problems of the rela-tions between individuals need to betreated. And that brings me to my finalcriticism, that is, the all too familiar butnecessary objection that the authenticindividual, while facing with admirablecourage the ultimate loneliness of humanlife, is nevertheless even lonelier than cir-cumstances warrant. To be sure, Sartreand, presumably with his knowledge andassent, Beauvoir have tried in variousways to meet this common objection,but, in my opinion at least, with verylittle success.They try to relate one self to others inaccordance with two favorite maxims(each of which is the slogan for a Beau-voir novel): Hegel's "Every conscious-ness wants the death of another" andDostoevski's "We are all responsible forall." The Hegelian maxim serves as aguiding principle for Sartre's detailedanalysis of the circle of conflicts in L'Etreet le Neant, and it also serves as a basis forthe description of class-consciousness andtherefore as a bridge to his theory of revo-lution. That it is not an adequate prin-ciple for a complete or essential analysisof human relationships has been saidoften enough, and that some uneasinessis felt about it even at headquarters isevidenced by the extremely crude argu-ments with which Beauvoir has since at-tempted to dismiss it in The Ethics ofAmbiguity. The first view one takes ofanother, that the other consciousnesswants the death of mine, is naive, shesays, for one at once realizes that ofcourse, as we all know, if anyone takesanything away from me, he is really giv-ing it to me all the while. This is un-doubtedly one of the worst philosophicalarguments ever penned-not to mentionthe shocking fact that there are in thiscase four hundred pages of naivete in themaster's masterpiece. Nor have other at-tempts to get from the first to the secondmaxim had better success. Sartre and,272 ETHICSfollowing him, Beaufrom my concrete, indom to freedom as aalways with curious sophistry-exceptperhaps in the argument that I cannot befree unless others are so. It is true thatminimal requirements of civil and eco-nomic freedom are the sine qua non of myfreedom. Yet we believe in freedom forothers not only because it facilitates ourown. This argument, though valid, is in-sufficient. And what is worse, the politicswhich is developed on this basis has,despite its opposition to dialectical ma-terialism, the same lifeless and mechani-cal quality as the article it seeks to re-place. One need only instance the longseries of articles called What Is Litera-ture? in which, after a rather ingeniousanalysis of the differences between thearts, Sartre embarks on a completelystock Marxian account of the functionsof the prose writer, in which RichardWright becomes the greatest Americannovelist and Flaubert is no good becausehe did not take his political responsibili-ties seriously, and so on.Yet it does seem likely that somehowand in some sense the concept of authen-ticity does involve not only the winningof freedom but the respect for freedom,not only the achievement of dignity inthe individual but the acceptance of theKantian maxim of the dignity of all indi-viduals. Some such connection does seemto exist; one cannot imagine an authenticindividual who really has no respect forthe liberty of others, and one cannotimagine the existence of authenticitywhere some sort of liberty does not exist,in idea even if not in fact. But there hasbeen, so far as I know, no convincingphilosophic statement why this should beso. Certainly to take away substantivevalues as mauvaise foi and then to putfreedom back in as a substantive value isnot good enough. But on the other hand,like Heidegger, to view the existence ofothers only as a means to my freedom isworse than not good enough-it is posi-tively evil. Yet it is difficult, at least inexistential language, to say why.Perhaps this failure of existentialism-its failure adequately to relate my free-dom to freedom in general-is connectedwith the more limited or more concreteproblem which it equally fails to treat,that is, the problem of the manner inwhich authenticity is determined or de-fined or influenced by the direct relationof one individual to another in his free-dom. Both Jaspers and Marcel have in-troduced concepts of communication intoexistentialism, but in both cases thetreatment is so vague and sentimental asto contribute little. Yet it is here, in thequestion of communication as well as inthe implications of the concept of authen-tic existence for the general concept ofliberty, that more needs to be said.Is it wholly in loneliness that authen-ticity is achieved? If genuine existence istranscendence successfully accomplished,giving form and meaning to the meaning-less succession of hours and needs, does itnot, in transcending contingency andnothingness, in some sense transcendloneliness as well? Is not-sometimes, atleast-the transcendence of lonelinessneeded for the very achievement ofauthenticity? True, authenticity itself,the core of genuine existence, is a valuewhich must center in the individual whobears it; the inner dissipation of the selfin seeming devotion to other selves is,existentially speaking, deeply immoral.Even the "self-sacrifice" of an authenticperson perfects and dignifies the individ-ual and inalienable person that is him-self. Yet, if one can distinguish betweena fraudulent and an authentic aspect ofthe self, may one not distinguish also be-AUTHENTICITY: AN EXISTENTIAL VIRTUE 273tween a fraudulent and an authentic rela-tion between selves? The quality of theconcern with others on the distractivelevel is evident in all gregariousness; itsmost extreme expression, perhaps, is thecozy friendliness of radio announcers totheir disembodied audience. But, in theprojection toward one's own freedomwhich focuses distraction into authen-ticity, the bewildered and bewilderingdiffusion of everyday sociability wouldseem likewise to be, if not replaced, atleast reoriented in the direction of a gen-uine and decisive reaching-out to the fewothers whose existence shows a signifi-cant kinship to one's own. Even ifauthenticity is in an essential aspect "be-ing to death," it is in that very aspect, inthe light of the ultimate dissolution ofthe person loved or loving, that the ur-gency and the reality of communicationare most strikingly exhibited. In short,between the two Beauvoir maxims, be-tween the sadism of the Hegelian masterand the sainthood of Zossima, there lies awhole range of kinds of and endeavors atcommunication-of times and places inwhich, fleetingly and in devious ways,perhaps, but still truly, minds do meet.And, without the actuality and possibili-ty of such meetings, the irrevocableloneliness of human life, however authen-tic, would be indeed too great to bear.But whether existential philosophy assuch can produce an adequate solutionfor this problem-whether it can buildagain the bridge it has broken-is an-other question. Every philosophy "ex-plains" only such phenomena as itspremises already include; it can onlyamplify what its basic beliefs already as-sert. So, for example, Descartes's failureto understand the living-both animallife and human passion-is determinedby the concept of "clear and distinctidea" with which he starts. If, then, forthe existentialists the beginning is the in-dividual in loneliness and peril, the wholecontent of their doctrine is the elabora-tion and expansion of this same theme:and, to go further, to describe the ties ofmen as well as their isolation, their loyal-ties as well as their momentary decisions,demands at least, as we have suggestedearlier, a recognition of the complexity ofthe free act, of the element in every actof submission to a claim as well as re-sponsibility for choosing to submit.This is not to deny the significance ofthe existential insight but to demand itsinterpretation in a wider, other thanexistential, setting. Without some suchimmersion in a more inclusive view ofman's nature, existentialism remains asignificant but static insight into one as-pect of human consciousness. True, it isan aspect peculiarly characteristic of ourpresent mentality, and existentialism is aphilosophy peculiarly descriptive of thecrisis of our time. But it is the kind ofphilosophy which sees something thatmust be seen and goes no further. And togo further, or rather to go back, to makea new and richer beginning, is no longerexistentialism. Yet if, for the existential-ist, freedom is transcendence, he shouldperhaps be willing to acknowledge that,in the projective creation of the future,existentialism itself is among the data tobe transcended

BERT CAMUS sought, in TheMlyth of Sisyphus, to establishthe absurdity of the humancondition.2 There and in The Rebel hefurther sought to derive an ethic fromthat condition-the ethic of the absurdman. Here we shall see that in thesecond task he failed completely, while,in the first, partial success is purchasedat the price of triviality and, even so,rests on .paradoxical ambiguities in hisnotion of "absurdity."To grasp Camus's notion of the ab-surd, one must juxtapose it against abackground of the philosophical ideasof the Greek Neo-Platonist, Plotinus.Plotinus envisioned the world as a"chain of Being." That is, he conceivedof reality as a hierarchical arrangementof different sorts of entities culminatingin the One or Absolute. Embracing theeternal and unchanging Platonic ideas,or essences, as a pattern for "explain-ing" or "accounting for" the varied andchanging world of ordinary experience,Plotinus felt that the Platonic formsthemselves required an explanation. Hedid so primarily from one of the mostbasic and pervasive motives that hasentranced philosophers from the days ofthe Greeks to the present-the idea thatdiversity has to be explained in termsof some ultimate unity. For, where dis-tinctions remain, the monist feels thatthe relationships among the diversethings require explanation. The searchfor an explanation, on this pattern, canonly come to rest in some all-embracingunity, which, allowing of no distinctionswithin itself, somehow accounts for allthe diversity that there is and, in turn,requires no explanation. It is, in itsway, the old idea of the one and themany. Plato sought to account for themany particulars of a certain kind interms of the universal form in whichthey all participated. But, for Plotinus,the Platonic forms, being many, couldnot then be the ultimate source of ex-planation and, hence, of reality. The ul-timate sources of explanation and realitycoalesce, since to explain a thing is toaccount for its being in terms of someother entity. Thus the explanatory orderreflects the "chain of Being." The ulti-mate level of explanation and source ofreality could then only be some absoluteunity. Being the source of the Platonicforms, the One was not, in turn, a formor idea itself. Since the ideas or formsalso functioned as the objects andmeans of rational thought, the One washeld to be incapable of being rationallycomprehended. Another line of reason-ing led to the same conclusion. Rationalthought, for Plotinus, inescapably in-volved two dualisms: that of knowerand known and that of subject andpredicate. First, in thought there wasthe distinction between the knower andthe object of knowledge and, second,judgments involved ascribing a predi-cate to a subject. Rational thought,involving such dualisms, was thus heldto be incapable of comprehending abso-lute unity. The comprehension of theOne must then go beyond rationalthought and beyond all dualisms. Pla-8788 ETHICStonic rationalism, pushed to this ex-treme, lapses or, perhaps, leaps intomysticism. In the mystic experience theOne is finally reached and grasped. Butthe diversity characteristic of reasonand ordinary experience must be avoid-ed, hence the soul, in experiencing andcomprehending the Absolute, becomes"one with the One." The mystic finallyescapes diversity and gains comprehen-sion by being absorbed into the Abso-lute.By providing the ultimate explana-tion for, and source of, all things, theOne constitutes the productive cause ofall else. The pattern of Plotinus thusprovides a dividend, for not only doesthe soul fulfil its desire to comprehendin the obliterating mystical experience,but it attains the very source and causeof its existence. In reaching the One, itjoins the highest link in the chain ofbeing and, consequently, achieves salva-tion. Starting out to explain the ordi-nary world, one thus ends by discoveringits insignificance and the need to fleefrom it to something higher. The Abso-lute provides a haven as well as anexplanation. By so doing, it gives manan end or destiny, union with it, as wellas an ethic. One's life is to be lived soas to prepare for salvation. This is aunion not only with the ultimate sourceof reality but with the absolute good,for the One, as man's final end, is theultimate source of value. The "chain ofbeing" is simultaneously a "chain ofvalue," and something is good insofaras it is real. If one then asks how evilcan come from the ultimate source ofall, which is the absolute good, one istold that evil is simply the absence ofgoodness or reality and, as such, is non-being. The further one gets from theAbsolute, the lower one sinks on thechain of being and of value. Since theordinary world is the lowest link, toflee it is to flee from a lesser state ofbeing and of value to the highest ofboth-to the true, the good, and thebeautiful.One can see, on the basis of the pre-ceding sketch of Plotinus' view, someof the things that would appeal toChristians eager to find a metaphysicaldefense for their faith. However, thereare pitfalls. One is the so-called prob-lem of evil. Unlike Augustine, some mayfeel that there is still a puzzle in recon-ciling the absolute goodness of God withthe evils of the world. The contrastseems, if we may anticipate, "absurd."A second problem is found in the deter-ministic element of Plotinus' worldview. The Absolute is not modeled ona mind confronted with choices aboutwhich it exercises its free will. Thethings of this world are explained by theAbsolute's being their necessary groundor condition. Hence all flows from it asrigorously as theorems from axioms indeductive systems. Orthodox Christian-ity obviously cannot make its peacewith such a theme. In part the issueerupted in the Middle Ages in the scho-lastic attempts to reconcile a personalGod's "knowledge" of all with man'sfreedom to create the future. For, somewondered, in what sense does man free-ly create what God knew he would do?These problems are not confined toChristians. They will bother anyonesimultaneously intoxicated with thePlotinian pattern, man's freedom, andevil. Camus is such a one. Around thesethemes he attempts to construct anethic

Introduction Organizational members at workplaces become victims of meaninglessness when they gradually lose their ability to believe in the importance and usefulness of any action, and eventually consider work as a burden or a meaningless chore (Lips-Wiersma and Morris, 2013). Causes of meaninglessness can be multifarious. A concerted effort by the research community can help identify antecedents, outcomes, scope conditions, semantic relationships and mechanisms surrounding this construct. In this paper, we focus on one precursor of meaninglessness – institutional inconsistency. Institutional inconsistencies arise when competing institutional prescriptions clash, for example, during occasions of institutional change. Such occasions require organizational members to think of alternative ideas and values. Frequently, it becomes necessary to identify new means for resolving conflicts (Creed et al., 2010; Goodrick and Reay, 2011; Greenwood and Suddaby, 2006; Greenwood et al., 2011). Not all organizational members cope with the institutional demands in the same manner. Members of an organization differ in their mindsets (Kegan, 1982, 1994). Hence, there arises diversity in experiences of and reactions to institutional inconsistencies. The same situation may lead to certain organizational members developing a sense of meaninglessness, while others experience no such feeling. Extant research has thoroughly investigated the role of conflicting logics behind different institutions (Goodrick and Reay, 2011), the levels of conflict between them (Pache and Santos, 2010), the relative exposure of organizations and organizational members to the institutional inconsistencies (Greenwood and Suddaby, 2006; Reay et al., 2006) and the ways the institutional inconsistencies can be managed at the organizational and field levels (Besharov and Smith, 2014; Reay and Hinings, 2009). But institutional inconsistencies are more cognitive in nature and are better understood at the organizational member level (Creed et al., 2010; Suddaby, 2010; Voronov and Yorks, 2015). The origin and diffusion of meaning-making can be better explained at the organizational member level (Suddaby, 2010). Yet, research on how organizational members experience such conflicting institutional prescriptions differently to develop varied levels of meaninglessness is scarce (except Creed et al., 2010; Hensmans, 2003; Suddaby, 2010). In this paper, we wish to develop this theme. Bartunek et al. (1983) advice that developmental stage theories are well placed to deal with the complex nature of many organizational problems. In the context of our inquiry, Kegan’s (1982, 1994) constructive development theory (hereafter, CDT) fits the bill. The CDT highlights the ways organizational members develop and make sense of their personality and the surroundings in the light of their experiences. In this research, we use the CDT to inquire how institutional inconsistencies experienced by organizational members translate into a feeling of meaninglessness. The CDT helps clarify the mechanism through which institutional inconsistencies translate into different degrees of meaninglessness in various mindsets. We expect that our work shall serve as a guidepost for scholars who attempt to develop strategies that can help managers counter the meaninglessness in their organizations. In the next section, we briefly review the literature on institutional inconsistencies. Then, we examine the conditioning role of institutional conformity pressure and disposition pressure that differently affect the conversion of institutional inconsistencies into meaninglessness in different organizational members. Next, taking the difference in organizational members’ mindsets – as categorized in the CDT – we explain the difference in their understandings and reactions to institutional inconsistencies. We drive some empirically testable propositions. We conclude highlighting some limitations of this work and identifying some avenues for future research. Review of previous research: institutional inconsistencies Institutions are underlying beliefs and dogmas that grow to become rules which monitor organizational members’ actions and activities (Jepperson, 1991; Lammers and Barbour, 2006; Scott, 2001). Institutions are dynamic in nature and evolve gradually (Ansari et al., 2010; Fiss et al., 2012; Gondo and Amis, 2013). The ample extant literature shows how institutions change and diffuse and what mechanisms guide such change and diffusion (Ansari et al., 2010; Fiss et al., 2012; Gondo and Amis, 2013). This change in institutions can be an outcome of certain institutional inconsistencies (Creed et al., 2010; Friedland and Alford, 1991; Greenwood and Suddaby, 2006; Rao et al., 2003; Seo and Creed, 2002). Institutional inconsistencies are “ruptures both among and within the established social arrangements” (Seo and Creed, 2002, p. 225). We accept and base our conceptual framework on this definition. Previous literature suggests following important sources of institutional inconsistencies: presence of potentially incompatible institutional norms (Seo and Creed, 2002); a person’s exposure to conflicting and overlapping institutional logics, which are defined as “overarching sets of principles that […] provide guidelines on how to interpret and function in social situations” (Fan and Zietsma, 2017; Greenwood et al., 2011, p. 318); legitimacy that undermines functional inefficiency; adaptation that undermines adaptability; intra-institutional conformity that creates inter-institutional incompatibilities; isomorphism that conflicts with divergent interests (Seo and Creed, 2002, p. 226); and an outcome of organizational responses (Vermeulen et al., 2016) to some institutional complexity (Fincham and Forbes, 2016), etc. Organizational members, in their routine life, find various examples of institutional inconsistencies originating from conflicting institutional logics. For example, Zilber’s study shows that how a conflict originates when the dominant feminist logic is challenged by the therapeutic logic (Zilber, 2002). Two more examples are depicted in the conflict between development and commercial microfinance logics (Battilana and Dorado, 2010) and between commercial and community logics (Besharov and Smith, 2014). The conflict can be across institutional spheres, where a strong sphere competes to be dominant (Dick, 2006; Ladge et al., 2012). Institutional inconsistencies are the breeding places for change. They can bring about institutional and social change at field and organizational levels (Creed et al., 2010; Friedland and Alford, 1991; Greenwood and Suddaby, 2006; Rao et al., 2003; Whittington, 1992). For example, previous research states that, field-level institutional inconsistencies lead to corporate governance change that: revolutionizes the managerial corporate control; changes the relative political position of various constituents; regulates climate of the market; threatens managerial hegemonic positions in a field; creates dissensus; and results in heterogeneous power and resources distribution for action in the field (Davis and Thompson, 1994). At the organizational level, these consequences of institutional inconsistencies have brought drastic changes in various policies (Scully and Creed, 1998). At an individual level, institutional inconsistencies shape a member’s orientation “from unreflective participation in institutional reproduction to an imaginative critique of existing arrangements” (Seo and Creed, 2002, p. 231). They “may facilitate a change in actors’ consciousness such that the relative dominance of some institutional arrangements is no longer seen as inevitable” (Seo and Creed, 2002, p. 233). They do so by providing a change-conducive environment, which identifies the existing gaps between the ways the things are and the things should be (Sewell, 1997; Swidler, 1986; Weber and Glynn, 2006). Moreover, they motivate the members to carve new means to resolve the conflicts (Creed et al., 2010; Goodrick and Reay, 2011; Greenwood and Suddaby, 2006; Greenwood et al., 2011). Researchers have explored the outcomes of institutional inconsistencies that result, for example, from identity-role incompatibility, e.g. being a “gay” and a “church minister” (Creed et al., 2010), a “devoted Catholic” and a “reformer” (Gutierrez et al., 2010) or a “professional” and a “mother” (Ladge et al., 2012). However, very little is known about organizational members’ experience of and reaction to institutional inconsistencies (except for Greenwood and Suddaby, 2006; Hensmans, 2003). Apparently, members may vary in their experience of and reaction to the tensions and conflicts created by institutional inconsistencies (Seo and Creed, 2002). It is suggested that, in the face of institutional change, organizational members either accept new logic or reinforce the existing ones (Tracy, 2004). More work is required to uncover the mechanism that operates beneath acceptance or rejection of institutional prescription and its outcomes, e.g. in the form of meaninglessness. We contend that institutional members’ experiences of institutional inconsistencies and eventual display of behavioral scripts are not free from the effects of internal and external forces. Therefore, in the lines ahead, we unpack the literature on the institutional pressure of conformity (external) and pressure of disposition (internal) that significantly influence the choices that organizational members make. Institutional pressure of conformity Institutional field is the set of actors (organizational members or organizations) (Hoffman, 1999), governed by approved institutional prescriptions. Institutional field derives its strength from the dominant views of the referent others – “whose perspective constitutes the frame of reference of the actor” (Oshagan, 1996, p. 337). Their views in the form of discourses are the “outward expression of a mental attitude” (Grunig, 1979, p. 741). These views can create, maintain and abandon any institution (Green et al., 2008; Greenwood et al., 2002). It is essential to conform to the dominant socially approved views of referent others, while any violation can lead to social penalties like losing face (Glynn and Huge, 2007; Glynn and Park, 1997; Ho et al., 2013; Kim, 2012; Neuwirth and Frederick, 2004; Oshagan, 1996; Rimal and Real, 2003). This conformity, primarily, relies on the fact that “how widespread a behavior is among referent others” and what are the threats and benefits of compliance or noncompliance (Rimal and Real, 2005, p. 185). The institutional field not only exerts the pressure of conformity, but it also facilitates the deinstitutionalization of the prescriptions with the approval of referent others. In fact, the deinstitutionalization is a two-stage process, whereby a dominant opinion turns hostile to an arrangement, and subsequently exerts pressure on the members to abandon it. Here, it is important to question that, when the organizational members abandon an institutional prescription under social pressure, what extent do they detach themselves mentally and emotionally from the previous institutional prescription. If they find it difficult to detach, how do they experience and behave in this new institutional settlement? Pressure of human disposition In the course of life, organizational members come across various inconsistencies in institutional fields. They respond differently to these conflicts and inconsistencies as per their personal experiences (Creed et al., 2014). These experiences are the product of the institutional practices that are carved in their minds and are internalized in the form of their disposition (Bourdieu, 2000). They result in emotional investment into certain internalized institutional practices (Bourdieu, 2000). Emotional investment can be defined as the emotional attachment of an organizational member to the basic ideals of certain institutional arrangements (Stavrakakis, 2008; Voronov and Vince, 2012; Zizek, 1999) that disciplines the organizational members’ subjectivity and disposition (Creed et al., 2014). Organizational members are considered as more than refined “actors” who initiate and respond to any change in the institutional stimuli (Bechky, 2011; Hallett and Ventresca, 2006). The emotional investment of organizational members’ disposition makes them respond differently to different situations. It may cause them to transcend certain institutional arrangement (Creed et al., 2014; Patriotta and Lanzara, 2006), and alternative institutional arrangements may or may not let them alter their behavioral scripts (Thornton et al., 2012). Even the organizational members may not identify the need to alter their behavior in response to a novel situation (Molinsky, 2013; Swidler, 1986). In a nutshell, the life-long learning process and personal experiences of organizational members impact their perspective to face and understand the institutional inconsistencies (Kegan, 1982, 1994; Mezirow, 2000). On the whole, the field pressure of conformity and pressure of human disposition exert either reinforcing or opposing pressures on organizational members. The disposition sometimes has a counteraction against the pressure of conformity. Thus, apparently, the organizational members exhibit the changed behavioral scripts, but in the very core of mind, the institutional arrangements are still present. This underscores the meaninglessness of newly imposed institutional arrangement. Therefore, to understand the complicity of printed-on-minds institutional arrangements in generating meaninglessness, it is necessary to complement the prior focus on field’s conformity pressure with differences in how organizational members experience the institutional inconsistencies. To explain that how organizational members differ in their experiences of and capacity to understand institutional inconsistencies, we include the CDT in our framework. Constructive developmental theory (CDT) The CDT (Kegan, 1982, 1994) is an extension of Piaget’s pivotal work on life-long progressive psychosocial development, explaining unfolding of mental capacity for complex thoughts throughout childhood and into adolescence (Fisher et al., 2000; Loevinger and Blasi, 1976; McCauley et al., 2006; Rooke and Torbert, 2005). The CDT posits that human cognitive development does not cease once organizational members reach adulthood (Kegan and Lahey, 2009). Rather, their life-long experiences make them differently capable of responding to their surroundings through self-reflection. Mindset development is not necessarily related to age; it means that older people do not have necessarily progressed to the higher mindset stage (Kegan and Lahey, 2009). The CDT (Drago-Severson, 2004; Kegan, 1982, 1994) is an effective tool to understand how organizational members with different mindsets experience institutional inconsistencies differently. Three reasons make the CDT a valuable option to explain the mechanism of translating institutional inconsistencies into different degrees of meaninglessness in various mindsets. First, it supports that people evolve their meaning-making process, which enhances their capacity to reflect on their experiences in a contextual setting they abode (Kegan, 1994; Kegan and Lahey, 2001; McCauley et al. 2006). So, this theory considers the contextual factors affecting organizational members meaning-making of the situations; this brings it close to the institutional theory. Second, the CDT explains that how the process of meaning-making in different mindsets is filtered through organizational members’ emotional experiences like desires, fears and anxieties (Kegan, 1994). Third, the CDT also indicates the differences between the mindset stages and personality variables (Strang and Kuhnert, 2009) in the light of the human actors’ various life-long experiences. Overall, it highlights the difference in organizational members’ capacity of meaning-making of the surroundings. In general, six mindset stages are categorized in Kegan’s CDT (1982, 1994). In this paper, we focus on the three stages, particularly relevant to adults – i.e. socialized mindset, self-authoring mindset and self-transforming mindset. Extant literature also confirms that the vast majority of organizational members’ mindsets fall within these three stages (Kegan, 1994; Kegan and Lahey, 2009; Rooke and Torbert, 2005; Torbert, 1987). Therefore, these three stages better fit the bill (Drago-Severson, 2009; McCauley et al. 2006; Strang and Kuhnert, 2009). Socialized knowers are organizational members who are identified as reliant on valued others for the authentication of their feelings, opinions and actions. They identify with the values and desires of valued others. They cannot externalize view point of valued others as discrete from their own. They avoid concrete conscious deliberation against valued others and feel threatened in case of a conflict that strains valued relations (Drago-Severson, 2004, 2009; Kegan, 1982, 1994; Kegan and Lahey, 2009). Self-authoring knowers can distinguish their feelings from those of others and take responsibility for their judgments. They derive approval of their actions from the trust what they believe is right (Kegan, 1982, 1994). For them, conflict is a constructive opportunity to improve performance (Popp and Portnow, 2001). In the face of conflicts, they deliberate conscious reflection based on their desired identity to take decisions (Kegan, 1994). While, self-transforming knowers can get engaged simultaneously with multiple and often competing value systems. They can maintain a dialectical relationship with differences, seeking more inclusive perspectives to address or transcend differences in a principled way (Kegan, 1982, 1994). Conflict is an opportunity for self-learning. In the face of conflicts, they reflect on the tensions and challenges using their intuition and emotions to act (Voronov and Yorks, 2015). At each mindset stage, people react differently to process events and to make meaning of them. The differences in mindset stages indicate the differences in the capacities to appreciate institutional inconsistencies, while the possibility of mindset stage development proposes that the capacity for appreciating institutional contradictions may change over time. Previous research verifies that, among professionals, more organizational members are either at the socialized mindset stage or at the transitioning stage from socialized to self-authoring or functioning at the self-authoring mindset stage (Kegan and Lahey, 2009). Hardly 1 per cent of them reach the self-transforming mindset stage (Kegan, 1994). However, we will not exclude self-transforming mindset from our analysis, because employees with such mindsets may considerably affect the meaning-making process in other mindsets. As mindset stages represent more or less durable capacities to reflect on the knowledge that is transferable across institutional spheres, the CDT complements the focus of institutional analyses of the field-specific influences on social behavior (Child and Smith, 1987; Hinings and Greenwood, 1988; Kikulis et al., 1995). Our conceptualization acknowledges more fully the sedimented (Creed et al., 2014) or “sticky” (Patriotta and Lanzara, 2006) effects of the various institutional arrangements that not only govern individuals’ lives in specific institutional spheres (Gladwell, 2005) but are internalized and retain their potency even when they are not directly exposed to them (Bourdieu, 2000; Kegan, 2000). Summing up, we expect that organizational members belonging to different mindsets as prescribed by the CDT experience disposition and field conformity pressures differently. The disposition and field conformity pressures condition the translation of institutional inconsistencies into meaningfulness or meaninglessness differently in three different mindsets. In the lines ahead, we explain the construct of meaninglessness and discuss the level at which it is operationalized in our work. Meaninglessness For decades, organizational efforts are being focused to generate meaningful work for their employees (Lips-Wiersma and Morris, 2013). Meaningfulness is defined as “the value of a work goal or purpose, judged to the organizational member’s own ideals or standards” (May et al., 2004, p. 11). In organizations, it is “the sense made of, and significance felt regarding the nature of one’s being and existence” (Steger et al., 2006, p. 81). Meaning-making is intrinsic to people as: […] by nature, a person is involved in his or her being and in his or her becoming (to which alienation is an obstacle): a subject whose whole being is meaning and which has a need of meaning (Aktouf, 1992, p. 415). Previous research suggests that organizational members with the meaningful approach are more creative, productive, committed and collegial in organizations (Amabile and Kramer, 2012). Traditionally, the focus of all management theories is to motivate their employees to get their work done; for this reason, the managers were supposed to adopt the carrot-and-stick approaches. Sometimes they achieve their objective by enhancing their compensations, and sometimes by making a job more enriched. Despite all efforts, the employees are reported to be engaged in counterproductive work behaviors more than any other time before in the history (Aquino et al., 1999; Ball et al., 1994; Bennett and Robinson, 2000; Robinson and O’Leary-Kelly, 1998). The meaning of life at work often has been treated as more philosophical rather than psychological, and scholars attribute it as one of the reasons behind few empirical studies conducted in this domain (Chamberlain and Zika, 1988; Keeva, 1999; Steenkamp, 2012). In the extant literature, there are three different levels to interpret meaning related to work. The first level is “meaning in work” that is about the organizational member’s reason behind working and his/her objective to pursue work-related activities (Isaksen, 2000). The second level is “meaning of work” that indicates the role of work in a society, depicting norms, values and traditions of work in the daily life of people. The meaning of work can be linked to values emanating from the organizational member, religion and society at large (Team, 1987). Nelson and Quick (2000) stated that the meaning of work differs from person to person and from culture to culture. In an increasingly global workplace, it is important to understand and appreciate differences among organizational members and among cultures with regard to the meaning of work. The third level is “meaning at work” which relates to the meaning within the specific context (Chalofsky, 2010). It implies meaning extracted through the relationship between the organizational member and institutional context. This last level of meaning at work is the aggregate of total work experience. Meaning at work is derived from or through the attachment of the employees to the organization, its procedures, their engagement in social relations and the evaluation of the worthiness of their work. In our theory, we are concerned with last two levels of meaning at work. This is because of our special interest in the importance of institutional context that cannot be neglected in the experience of meaningfulness or meaninglessness. Literature views meaninglessness (and its antonym meaningfulness) as an experience (Battista and Almond, 1973; Baumeister, 1991; O’Connor and Chamberlain, 1996; Yalom, 1980), as a perception (Fabry et al. 1979; Hackman and Oldham, 1975; Thompson and Janigian, 1988) and as a feeling (Kahn, 1990). As per Oxford dictionary, a feeling is an emotional state or reaction, an experience is a practical contact with and observation of facts or events and a perception is defined as an awareness of something through senses. In our conceptualization, we treat meaning or its absence as a feeling and experience. Therefore, we adopt the definition of meaninglessness as stated by Shephard (1971) – i.e. “the inability to understand the events in which one is engaged” (Shepherd, 1971, p. 14). The phenomenon of meaninglessness as a form of alienation appears when work roles are perceived lacking integration with organizational goals. In organization and management research, several important antecedents of meaninglessness have been identified. It has been found that meaninglessness can be an outcome of: burnout, apathy and detachment from one’s work (May et al., 2004); physical, psychological and emotional sufferings that leads to stressful life events (Newcomb and Harlow, 1986; Tim Oakley, 2010); a situation when work roles are perceived lacking integration with organizational goals (Casey, 2002); and inefficiency, non-adaptability, institutional inconsistencies and misaligned interests that negate the existing institutions making them meaningless (Seo and Creed, 2002). Keeping in view the aforementioned causes of meaninglessness, knowledge of meaninglessness in employees is essentially necessary for managers. This is because of the fact that meaninglessness is a symptom of several wrongs that might be at work in an organization. Sensing meaninglessness can help managers directly go to the cause and fix it. For example, in a recent intra-organizational level of treatment, Bailey and Madden (2016) have interviewed 135 professionals in 10 different professions and asked them to tell stories about incidents or times when they found their work to be meaningful. The results of the study reveal that meaninglessness is not same as other work attitudes, e.g. commitment or engagement, rather it is intensely personal and individual. Unjust and unfair treatment, pointless and unfitting job descriptions, improper judgment and non-supportive behavior of managers have been identified as causes of meaninglessness (Bailey and Madden, 2016). Therefore, managers play an important role in making work meaningless for their employees; thus, poor management is found to be the top destroyer of meaningfulness. Building on the previous work, we adopt the institutional perspective to propose that institutional inconsistencies breed meaninglessness. In doing so, we also trace a cause–effect path to show that originating from conflicting logics, institutional inconsistencies (cause) can result in the development of a feeling of disconnect (effect) in the organizational members who cannot navigate across different logics equally (Voronov and Yorks, 2015). In fact, their actions are affected by a dominant logic, negating the other logics by making them meaningless. This is apparent in the literature of organizational routines that, even in the presence of other competing logics, how one specific institutional logic embedded, for example, in religion, can control organizational members behavioral script (Creed et al., 2010; Gutierrez et al., 2010). Similarly, Kellogg (2011) and Michel (2011) demonstrate that the institutional logic of professionalism may alone shape organizational members’ behavior. But which logic organizational members shall adhere to and is depicted in their behavioral script depends on their mindsets and the emotional investment there against. For example, socialized knowers emotionally invest in the valued-others; self-authoring knowers invest in the desired identity; and self-transforming knowers invest in the moral identity (Kegan, 1982, 1994). This signifies the importance of analysis of variations in organizational members’ cognitive meaning-making, and therefore makes differences in their mindsets more appealing to us. It is important to clarify that institutional inconsistencies themselves do not trigger a change process. Rather, these are organizational members whose understanding of institutional arrangements can facilitate or impede the change (Emirbayer and Goldberg, 2005; Voronov and Vince, 2012). The reason is that the organizational members’ understanding of the institutional arrangements is a very significant factor in deciding that whether these institutions are meaningful or not (Bourdieu, 2000; Glynos et al., 2012; Mutch, 2007; Voronov and Vince, 2012). Thus, organizational members’ mindsets and understanding of institutional prescriptions are significantly important in meaning-making (Voronov and Yorks, 2015). As organizational members emotionally invest in institutional arrangements (Kegan, 1982, 1994), they are reactive to those factors that tend to attack their emotional investments. Here, we suggest that only those institutional inconsistencies that challenge organizational members’ investment (either in valued others, desired identity or in moral identity) can trigger cognitive micro-processes by which meaninglessness develops. Therefore, when organizational members perceive institutional inconsistencies, this brings a reflective shift in their consciousness, making them evaluate the existing institutions (Benson, 1977). This mobilizes organizational members to search for alternative meanings (Seo and Creed, 2002). Mindset stages and feeling of meaninglessness In this section, we shall discuss the ways the organizational members belonging to different mindsets experience institutional inconsistencies and field conformity pressure. Afterward, we shall put forth the propositions, showing the feelings of meaninglessness are conditioned by the factors of field conformity and disposition in the face of institutional inconsistencies. Socialized knowers Socialized knowers depend on the will of the “valued others” for the construction of reality and meaning-making of their environment. They even make sense of institutional milieu via the cues of valued other (Weber and Glynn, 2006). They do not rely on their own direct experience with the institutional arrangements. Their association with valued others is the source of authentication for them and make socialized knowers feel worthy. They subordinate their own needs to the happiness of others (Drago-Severson, 2009), as the level of sensitivity toward the wills of their valued others is high. Their self-subordination to valued-others is a psychological phenomenon, which postulates that they are strongly prone to be identified with others and be liked (Kegan and Lahey, 2009). This is because they depend on respected authorities as sources of authentication of their own opinions, feelings and actions. They perceive the peril of being shunned by the valued others as a threat to their very sense of self-authentication (Creed et al., 2014; Scheff, 1988; Thoits, 2004). Thus, the values, norms, reasoning and emotional experiences of socialized knowers are embedded in their social context (Kegan, 2000, p. 59). They also conform to the beliefs of the valued others about the institutional arrangements. In the face of any institutional inconsistencies, if the valued others preserve the status quo, then possibly such exposure to the institutional inconsistency may less likely develop the feeling of meaninglessness in socialized knowers. As the thought pattern of socialized knowers is actually conditioned by the cognitive and behavioral script of valued others, so they unconsciously subordinate their own opinions to the wishes of valued others (Drago-Severson, 2004). Thus, they are the one highly affected by the field pressure of conformity, exerted by the beliefs of valued others about institutional prescriptions. When it comes to the phenomenological experience of inconsistencies, socialized knowers have just a raw sensation of these inconsistencies. In terms of apprehension of institutional inconsistencies, if valued others defend the institutional status quo, socialized knowers’ cognitive apprehension is blocked. To fulfill the desire to conform to the desires of the valued others, socialized knowers would not deliberate to reflect on the institutional goals. Though cognitive apprehension of socialized knowers is limited, this apprehension can be facilitated, if the valued others highlight these inconsistencies (Voronov and Yorks, 2015), to develop meaninglessness in them (Figure 1). We, therefore, propose that: P1a. The degree of meaninglessness felt by socialized knowers is decreased to the extent the valued others defend the extant institutional prescription. P1b. The degree of meaninglessness felt by socialized knowers is decreased to the extent the field exerts the conformity pressure to extant institutional prescription. Otherwise, P1c. The degree of meaninglessness felt by socialized knowers is increased to the extent the valued others highlight the institutional inconsistencies. P1d. The degree of meaninglessness felt by socialized knowers is increased to the extent the field withdraws the conformity pressure to the extant institutional prescription. Self-authoring knowers Self-authoring knowers have a high sense of authority and possess the capacity for making deliberate choices between their own beliefs and expectations of others (Drago-Severson, 2009; Kuhnert and Lewis, 1987). They consider other people around as autonomous beings, being different from them having their own distinct values and agendas. Self-authoring knowers internalize certain institutional goals and treat them as their own desires and wishes. Therefore, they heavily invest in institutional goals. The understanding of the context of an institution is prerequisite for attaining this mindset stage. This context helps them to develop internalized capacity to desire certain things and exercise discretionary judgment based on their values. They draw clear symbolic boundaries between institutions; those which belong and those which do not, because institutions: […] exercise pressures on component organizational members to weaken their ties, or not to form any ties with other institutions or persons that might make claims that conflict with their own demands (Coser, 1974, p. 6). They tend to block any competing source of identification and allegiance. Thus, they develop an idealized desired identity which they seek to gain and to maintain (Anteby, 2008; Carr, 1998; Ibarra and Barbulescu, 2010). They evaluate their thoughts, feelings and actions (Ibarra, 1999), using the desired identity as a frame of reference through conscious reflection. Self-authoring knowers invest in institutional arrangements in which their desired identity is rooted. Generally, individuals governed by different logics can navigate multiple institutional spheres such as work and family. For instance, there can be self-authoring knowers who might prioritize different institutional spheres differently – e.g. they might prioritize their religion more than their profession, and this might be reversed for another person. Likewise, for them, some institutional orders are more demanding and dominate their life more strongly (Coser, 1974). The desired identities of self-authoring knowers are more likely to be aligned with one institutional sphere than another. Thus, they prefer to invest in those institutional spheres in which their desired identity is rooted. According to the scholars of the CDT, self-authoring knowers have a greater capacity for leadership and change management (Kuhnert and Lewis, 1987; Strang and Kuhnert, 2009; Valcea et al., 2011). Whenever there is an institutional inconsistency, they tend to act as change agents. However, their reaction to institutional inconsistencies greatly depends on the degree of their emotional investment in those institutions. Exposure to institutional inconsistencies which triggers dissonance against their desired identity tends to develop defense mechanisms in them. They generate a narrative to rationalize their continued emotional investment in particular institutional prescription to reduce dissonance. Conscious reflection and reasoning are their preferred modes of operation for dissonance reduction (Festinger, 1957). They view conflict as potentially constructive (Popp and Portnow, 2001). They have the cognitive awareness of the presence of alternative institutional arrangements, in case of institutional inconsistencies. In terms of apprehension of institutional inconsistencies, those experiences that improve their ability to rationalize inconsistencies facilitate their apprehension, rendering them meaningless. While, institutional inconsistencies which challenge their desired identity block their apprehension (Voronov and Yorks, 2015). Based on the above-mentioned arguments, we propose the following: P2. The degree of meaninglessness felt by the self-authoring knower is increased to the extent the alternative institutional prescriptions successfully challenges the ones attached to his/her desired identity. Self-transforming knowers This mindset stage is the most difficult to attain, thus is rare among the adults (Kegan, 1994; Kegan and Lahey, 2009; Rooke and Torbert, 2005; Strang and Kuhnert, 2009; Torbert, 1987). Self-transforming knowers take their “unique identity itself as an object of reflection”, experiencing “multiple possibilities of the self as a product of interaction with others” (McCauley et al. 2006, p. 638). They are indulged in what Lawrence and Maitlis (2012) call the “ethic of care”. Ethic of care involves seeing others as relational than as bounded actors and independent. Ethic of care allows them to value the growth of an uncertain future, conceive truth as provisional and local and recognize the ubiquity of vulnerability (McCauley et al., 2006). They consider conflict as inevitable and an opportunity for self-development and development of others as well. Self-transforming knowers are akin to Mannheim’s (1985) free-floating intellectuals, whose subjectivities are less constituted by the extant institutional arrangements and their positions in the arrangements. They can adopt a more skeptical orientation toward the institutional arrangements they encounter. This stage is most conducive to perceive institutional inconsistencies because of self-transforming knowers’ sense of self is least conditioned by particular institutional arrangements. They perceive institutional arrangements as potentially arbitrary social constructions (Gergen, 1997). When exposed to institutional inconsistencies, they use intuition and emotions to explore the tensions and challenges through self-reflection (Kegan, 1994). Their capacity to apprehend institutional inconsistencies makes them better evaluate their meaninglessness. Self-transforming knowers prefer to maintain personal integrity and moral identity (Blasi, 1984) to the extent that they evaluate institutional inconsistencies on the basis of what is morally right. It can be inferred that those institutional inconsistencies that trigger their moral identity strongly can make institutional arrangements highly meaningless. They take conflict as an instrument for learning. They do not adopt defense mechanism. Research shows that self-transforming knowers can help employees to resolve the conflict between community and market logics, by highlighting mutual identifications and by mitigating boundaries (Besharov, 2014). Self-transforming knowers identify themselves emotionally with those who are unprivileged and are more directly affected by the institutional inconsistencies. Their apprehension of institutional inconsistencies depends on the degree to which their moral identity is triggered (Khan et al., 2007). It is facilitated when they have increased emotional connection with people impacted by institutional inconsistencies. On the contrary, having little emotional connection with people impacted by institutional inconsistencies, proper apprehension of inconsistencies in self-transforming knowers is blocked (Kegan and Lahey, 2009; Voronov and Yorks, 2015). The case study on child labor in Pakistan soccer industry by Khan et al. (2007) shows that, in an utmost effort to maintain their moral identity, self-transforming knowers, sometimes, feel more meaninglessness in the face of institutional inconsistencies impacting others (Khan et al., 2007). Based on the preceding, we propose the following: P3. The degree of meaninglessness felt by self-transforming knowers is increased to the extent that they relate institutional inconsistency to the experiences of others impacted by it. Discussion In this paper, we suggest that the pressure of conformity (exogenous) and pressure of disposition (endogenous) condition the course of human agents’ actions in the face of institutional inconsistencies, differently in different mindsets. Grounded on the three types of mindsets as proposed in the CDT, we identify the nature and extent of reactions of different mindsets to institutional inconsistencies under the molding impact of the disposition and pressure of conformity. Thus, we argue that, for socialized knowers, the degree of meaninglessness is directly related to how valued others perceive an inconsistent institutional prescription. If the valued others defend that institutional prescription, socialized knowers will feel less degree of meaninglessness, provided the field also exerts high conformity pressure to that institutional prescription. On the contrary, the degree of meaninglessness felt by socialized knowers is enhanced if the valued others highlight the institutional inconsistencies in an institutional prescription, under decreased conformity pressure. Self-authoring knowers react differently in the face of institutional inconsistencies. They feel a heightened extent of meaninglessness if the alternative institutional prescriptions challenge those attached to their desired identity. Self-transforming knowers feel a higher level of meaninglessness when they realize that an institutional inconsistency is strongly related to the experiences of others impacted by it. Keeping in view the fact that meaninglessness is one of the most significant problems facing humanity (Lips-Wiersma and Morris, 2013; Maddi, 1967), we identify some managerial implications. Our work notes the importance of identification and categorization of employees based on their mindsets and behavioral scripts. The subject–object interview developed by Lahey et al. (1988) can be used to assess and categorize the types of mindsets of the employees. This will also inform the managers that, when exposed to institutional inconsistencies, how much and to what extent the employees will develop meaninglessness. However, what strategies managers would use to contain meaninglessness are yet to be explored, and we invite future researchers to advance this area of research. A better understanding of the organizational members’ perception of institutional inconsistencies and the reaction of the meaninglessness can obviously facilitate development and application of such strategies that can help managers to better organize in the face of institutional change – a perpetual phenomenon. In this connection, the managers should first assess whether the change is desirable. Thereafter, they ought to evaluate their own and others’ reaction to it. In particular, managers are required to better understand their own assumptions, beliefs and convictions, along with those of others, to develop a comprehensive perspective to facilitate or resist change. The feelings of meaninglessness by members with different mindsets can be channelized by the managers either to promote or resist a change. At this juncture, it is important to state the scope conditions relating to our work. Scope conditions can be dealt under three major headings: space, time and value (Bacharach, 1989). First, space or level issues are important to be dealt, because incongruence among levels of theory, measurement and analysis may create problems (Suddaby, 2010). We suggest that, depending on the mindset type, an organizational member’s feeling of meaninglessness might be higher to hihe/sher own previous feelings and lower than the group-level feeling and equal to the overall organizational level of feeling. Second, institutional inconsistencies, mindset and meaninglessness like many other organizational phenomena, are temporal in nature and are subject to constraints of time. Therefore, ignoring the temporal limits and assuming invariance in these constructs can be misleading. We recognize that, just as the type of mindset, the experience of meaninglessness is to be viewed as a state of mind that varies over time. We also suggest that meaninglessness is considered to have both the temporal scope condition – it increases as the employee encounters more events that cause it – and also discontinuous temporal scope condition – one particular event increases meaninglessness but over time it subsides. Third, a limit of the value gets relevant as researchers have their own view of the world and the assumptions (Pierce et al., 1989). Therefore, it is necessary to explicate the background assumptions that we have brought to this conceptual work. In this connection, we admit that our work focuses on theorizing feeling of meaninglessness and not on how employees with different mindsets move from such feeling to take action. We believe that this distinction has better served our analytical purpose and helped us better theorize the differential abilities of various mindsets in apprehending institutional inconsistencies with considerable depth. Moreover, we disregard the fact that institutional logics have their own internal contradictions (Greenwood et al., 2011) and focus on the contest between different logics. Future researchers may investigate the extent to which employees with different mindsets apprehend such internal contradictions and develop meaninglessness. In terms of avenues for future research, our work also paves the way for future research endeavors that may involve an interaction of three mindsets in actor’s meaning-making process (Kegan, 1982, 1994). It is suggested that interaction among three mindsets is largely governed by four major factors: degree of investment in institutional arrangements; phenomenological experience of inconsistencies; blockages of apprehension; and facility of apprehension (Drago-Severson, 2004, 2009; Kegan, 1982, 1994; Kegan and Lahey, 2009). We suggest that mutual interaction within and among different mindset groups should be thoroughly analyzed, as it carries a lot of unrealized potentials to advance this field of study. Lastly, Reay and Hinnings (2009) have suggested taking recourse to a multi-level analysis to explain the institutional change process. This should be complemented by a detailed investigation of meaning-making by different mindsets in the face of institutional inconsistencies at multiple levels. Moreover, for a broader understanding of the phenomenon, future researchers may also consider other “control” variables affecting the organizational member meaning-making along with their mindset types. We propose that, along with different mindsets, religiosity, loyalty, identity, demography and career-specific variables should be examined at the organizational member level. Likewise, commitment, structure, climate at the organizational level and the legal system, technology at the macro level can be examined. Figure 1. Institutional inconsistencies and meaninglessness in various mindsets