In academic and practitioner circles, employee experience has emerged as a hugely resonant notion, and the cutting-edge research from scholarship and practice increasingly centres employee experience management at the heart of human resource management (HRM)(eg Maylett and Wride, 2017; Morgan, 2017; Pezet and Poujol, 2020; Plaskoff, 2017; Whitter, 2019). In the contemporary world of work, employees have a strong focus on the nature and quality of their experiences as workers in organisations, seeking to capture meaning and satisfaction on the job and pursuing a strong fit between work and wider personal priorities and projects. Thus, employees’ relations with work organisations seem to encompass significant additional features beyond the utilitarian calculations and material benefits of the past. It is becoming a truism that employees desire more from their work lives, and organisations need to change or accept decline. In this tableau, understanding the experience of work and experiential workers from both mainstream and critical perspectives is crucial to forming a state-of-the-art view of HRM’s frontiers as the field continues evolving. One of the novel academic cornerstones of research in this topic area is due to Pezet and Poujol (2020), who theorise the experience of work as an alternative to the Marxist and humanist approaches to work, although they recognise ample value in those strands of research. Indeed, recent research has adeptly utilised Marxist analysis to show the pernicious consequences of detachment at work, revealing negative emotional and well-being effects for workers in organisations that fall short on the experience front (Shantz et al., 2014). Yet, a historical-materialist perspective does not account for the complex symbolic realities of work and working, as experienced against the emergent challenges surrounding organised life today. Nor is the humanistic perspective towards work, which implicitly undergirds much of HRM research and practice, offers sufficient answers. This is because a sharp mismatch exists between employers’ laudable rhetoric that casts employees as their most valued organisational resource and the unsustainable workplace conditions driven by the bottom line, which reveals the limitations of ostensibly caring, but ultimately limited-in-action humanistic approaches (McGuire et al., 2005). Furthermore, the personal development agendas, which companies promote to their employees to sustain a mutually beneficial relationship, often offer a reductive and convenient picture of employees’ hopes and demands from organisations. The employee experience approach to HRM complements, and in important ways potentially supersedes, relatively more conventional humanistic approaches and Marxist approaches, which significantly, if implicitly, shaped theory and practice surrounding work and workers to date (Pezet and Poujol, 2020). There is, thus, a pressing need to explore the dynamism of employee experience, which is an ongoing negotiated and situated process that can offer emotional dividends and mental satisfaction insofar as denoting a robust concordance with employees’ life projects (Pezet and Poujol, 2020). We thus argue, in this special section editorial essay, that there is a significant benefit to exploring employee experience further, and relatedly, we submit that it is useful to consider workers as experiential subjects within contemporary work contexts. There is a great deal of attention paid to employee experience in organisations for manifold reasons. A key issue is that over the past two decades, a significant shift toward an experience