What Does it Mean to be Passionate about Your Job? Three Meanings of ‘Collectively Oriented Passion’ in UK Pubs

This article examines how understandings of passion shape people’s agency at work, through interviews with UK publicans. It addresses calls to rethink how ‘passion’ is conceptualised in the sociology of work. While discourses around passion are often thought to legitimise individualised working practices, the article explores more collective interpretations. It analyses how publicans exercised agency in negotiating externally imposed problems including the pandemic and exploitative relationships with leading industry actors. It identifies a collective understanding of passion centralising notions of community, which shaped participants’ agency in responding to these problems in three ways: providing motivation to persist in the industry; a frame for critiquing perceived injustice and (occasionally) mobilising against it; and a resource for reinvention in pursuing business sustainability. The main contribution is thus new concepts for analysing how ‘collectively oriented passion’ shapes individuals’ agency at work.