There’s been talk of late of the withering effects of corporations on workers’ souls.

It’s true that many jobs in corporate America are draining and can challenge one’s ethical code—telemarketing posts come to mind. And during this recession it appears many firms acted in shortsighted, callous ways that have helped kill workers’ spirits.

But I don’t think large companies are beyond redemption. In fact, the seeds of renewal are at hand for a better place to work for employees and managers alike.

Among the chief critics of the corporate workplace is Matthew Crawford. Crawford owns a motorcycle repair shop and writes about the virtues of manual labor and the moral perils of “knowledge work.”

In an essay published earlier this year in The New York Times Magazine, Crawford makes some interesting points about the way working as a mechanic prompts attentiveness, receptivity and humility. His earlier work as a writer of article abstracts and as leader of a Washington think tank, by contrast, pressured him into misrepresenting others’ ideas and fitting facts into foregone conclusions.

“Mechanical work has required me to cultivate different intellectual habits,” he wrote. “Further, habits of mind have an ethical dimension that we don’t often think about. Good diagnosis requires attentiveness to the machine, almost a conversation with it, rather than assertiveness, as in the position papers produced on K Street.”

But many workers in modern corporations have to pay close attention to business operations or market trends to succeed. And they are keenly aware they can fail with a new software product or ad campaign or manufacturing process.

As Kelefa Sennah suggested recently in The New Yorker, a retail marketing specialist tweaking a display rack is interacting with the physical world not too differently from the way a motorcycle mechanic does. “Why shouldn’t a retail display rack count as a tool, in Crawford’s sense of the word?” Sennah writes. “It’s a physical device meant to perform a particular function, and the shop’s cash registers generate a fairly accurate record of how well it succeeds.”

The real question with work, Sennah argues, is whether it is dull and repetitive, not whether it is manual.

Crawford’s vision for work that is absorbing and meaningful, ultimately, is the same one companies have for their workers. Firms want engagement, given that passion and commitment lead to better business results.

Engagement appears to have slid during the recession. A recent report from consulting firm Watson Wyatt Worldwide found employee engagement levels for workers overall dropped 9 percent since last year. Engagement fell close to 25 percent for top performers.

It seems many companies over-reacted to the downturn with meat-cleaver-like cuts, at times adding insult to injury when axing employees. The willingness to whoosh workers out the door is the latest episode in a three-decades-long trend that has prioritized shareholders and treated employees as largely disposable.

But there is still hope for corporations and workers, it seems to me. Regulatory, demographic and cultural trends are pushing firms to become more careful about job cuts, more socially responsible, more transparent, more democratic and more sustainable. Companies out ahead of these forces include Indian technology services provider HCL and online retailer Zappos.com, whose egalitarian, high-performance culture helped persuade Amazon.com to buy it.

U.S. workers themselves haven’t given up hope on companies. A recent report from staffing Randstad finds that Americans’ ideal employer cares about its employees and delivers on its promise to customers. The report also shows Americans want leaders who hold people accountable.

Caring, integrity, accountability. What workers want in organizations are soul-nourishing characteristics. Will companies fulfill those wishes?