by ….and I feel fine (if I have the old REM song right). In simpler words, the changes ahead for work could be really good news, but as usual, the transition will be challenging, and we may not get it right. But we could.
I was able to put together a short piece on the “End of work as we know it” for the Career Planning and Adult Development Journal [Please only for personal use and don’t re-post — thanks!] It is aimed at career planners (now there is an interesting job these days!).
The piece suggests work is going through a transformation and makes e case by analyzing three key assumptions about the role of work
- work is central to individual’s identity
- work structures daily life
- work is the primary source of income.
Three driving forces are challenging those assumptions:
- the rise of automation and machine intelligence
- shifts in individual values
- the rise of a new economy – are described.
The challenges to these assumptions are indeed underway and at varying stages of maturity. A key thing to keep in mind, in my view, to keep this discussion ground is that the end of work as we know it does not mean that people will run out of useful things to do, but rather that they will not require jobs in order to be useful.
The implications for career development suggest a dual approach of maintaining a short-term focus on careers and gradually expanding the notion of career development into a more integrated, holistic approach of life planning. Andy Hines
I’ve just finished Ulrich Beck’s The Brave New World of Work, which is as brilliant and relevant an analysis of the futures of work in the Western world as I’ve seen anywhere. In the 15 years since its publication, Beck’s work has lost no ground. One thing Beck’s work does — for me, at least — is clarify why the International Sociological Association’s Research Committee on Futures Research inducted Beck as one of its five inaugural recipients of its Lifetime Achievement Award. Beck keeps good company in that group, which includes William Bell, E.B. Masini, John Galtung, and Fernando Henrique Cardoso.
The interesting thing about Beck is that, as far as I can tell, he never published in any of the academic journals that futurists typically frequent. Neither did he belong to any of the field’s professional associations: while Bell was instrumental in American futures studies and both Masini and Galtung were founding members of the WFSF, Beck doesn’t appear to have been a member of the WFS or the WFSF. That begs the question: how do we make sure that we don’t overlook people like Beck in talking about foresight theory and history?
On a slightly different note, I see that in the chapter you reference, you talk about issues of abundance. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but Abbott has recently published an excellent piece on “The Problem of Excess” (Sociological Theory 32(1)) which goes into how we often repackage an excess of one thing as a scarcity of another. I can see this as applicable to futures studies as one of the ways people might deal with too many future alternatives: recast them as a scarcity of a different kind of future alternatives, and since we’re used to dealing with scarcity, deal with that.