The Future of Work is…more than technology
We’ve asked our Work Futures interdisciplinary team to complete the sentence ‘The Future of Work is…’ . This is David’s perspective on the future of work and what it means to him.
For a topic so dizzyingly open-ended as ‘the future of work’, I’m often taken aback by how narrow our range of responses often are. Mostly, we hear the same techno-boosterist premonitions pedalled about the encroachment of various forms of digital technology—automation, robotics, AI and the like—as if they are some unstoppable stormfront coming our way that will revolutionise the way that we work. Many of these discussions imply that the future of work is a foregone conclusion, as if ‘the future’ is like a tightly rolled-up scroll, just waiting to be unfurled. In this techno-boosterist narrative about the future of work, we simply need to upskill to keep up.
Yet it’s easy to forget that this narrative is only one imagination about the future, not to mention one that is classed, raced, and gendered, and excludes the majority of the world’s population who undertake all manner of work that simply aren’t captured by such narratives—not to mention all the unremunerated work of social reproduction that is also completely missing. Crucially, if the future is a foregone conclusion, then that makes things rather boring, because there is no wiggle room, no room for imagining alternative, multiple futures that diverge from this narrative.
Rather than thinking about future of work as a predetermined techno-digital stormfront, I’m interested in thinking about changes to our work practices that are much more incremental and much more everyday. I’m interested in these changes because it is in these subtle, everyday transformations that seeds for the futures of work are sown.
As a cultural geographer, I’m especially interested in how our changing everyday bodily experiences of work are crucial for understanding work futures. Rather than imagining that the politics of work is what gets decided on in Silicon Valley or far-away boardrooms, it’s important to understand how experience itself is a vitally important site of politics. From this perspective, it is through actually doing things and reflecting on them that enablement and constraint happens. What’s more, these don’t stay the same, but change as we do things again and again. Think here of how something like working from home became easier over time (for some!). It’s only by doing something again and again that our configuration of enablements and constraints change.
But figuring out what is enabling for people and what is constraining is often more difficult than first meets the eye. Think of how it’s possible to become overly attached to work practices that might actually be wearing us out. We might think that they are enabling a whole host of things for us and others. But in doing so we can risk overlooking all the depletions that are happening. In short, making sense of what is good and bad for people involves doing deep dives into the way that we make sense of our lifeworlds, the stories we tell ourselves and others, and how our configuration of joys and sorrows change.
Taking this everyday politics of work seriously is exciting, because rather than subscribing to the idea of a single predetermined future, it means that there are always multiple undetermined futures taking shape in the present. This for me is a much more optimistic, egalitarian politics where the future is ours to shape – and we are doing it now.