Abstract
Like Dewey, Heidegger understood that people’s context shapes the meaning they give to their experiences and that the significance of meaning of the human world is not dependent on one-to-one connections. Rather, meaning depends on the “whole context”. In this chapter, we explore the transactional nature of the meaning of occupation and how that meaning is shaped—by others and by the constellation of occupations that make up peoples’ lives. We use the work of Heidegger, Dewey and others in relation to meaning to expand a phenomenological study of the meaning of occupation for 12 New Zealand adults who had experienced an occupational disruption. The findings show that the meaning of occupation should be considered from broad perspectives beyond that of the individual, in context and in the transactional relationships with other people and non-human things. The complex layers of meaning are not necessarily obvious and tend to remain hidden if not understood in that context. Implications for occupational therapy and occupational science are considered along with suggestions for further research to strengthen and expand the developing strand of evidence in relation to the meaning of occupation.
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- 1.
Being is capitalized to indicate “being” in the philosophical sense, as the central aspect of who a person is.
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Reed, K., Hocking, C. (2013). Resituating the Meaning of Occupation: A Transactional Perspective. In: Cutchin, M., Dickie, V. (eds) Transactional Perspectives on Occupation. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4429-5_4
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