As part of my project on automation I’ve begun to engage with the wealth of literature about ‘the future of work’ and in particular the sorts of imaginings of a ‘post-work’ society that have emerged in popular discourse, not least in relation to idea(l)s of using automation to liberate workers. Many will be familiar with the sorts of arguments presented in books like “Fully automated luxury communism“, “Inventing the Future” and “PostCapitalism“, often receiving coverage in the left(ish)-leaning press (e.g.). These are often fairly muscular, advocations of using the machinery of capitalism itself to bring about its own demise through the liberation of the workforce.
One of the most interesting and helpful resources I have encountered in making sense of these sorts of arguments and where there may be opportunities to engage is the Futures of Work blog/journal led by Katie Bales, Harry Pitts and Huw Thomas and published by University of Bristol Press. I highly recommend browsing through but in particular the video and the articles linked below I think are really interesting and helpful ways of engaging with these ideas without getting lost (or, in my case, overly cross!)
- Theories of a post-work society: (video) Paul Thompson and Elizabeth Cotton (co-Editor-In-Chief of Work, Employment and Society) discuss theories of a ‘post-work’ society, presented at WES Conference 2018.
- From the future of work to futures of work: The inaugural editorial of the blog/journal outlining how we might shift to plural registers for considering how work may continue/change
- Management consultancies: inventing the future: Andrew Sturdy and Glenn Morgan discuss the ways in which management consultancies move debates around future work from the speculative to the definitive and what this effects.
- Post-work fallacies and the social reproduction of capitalism: Alex Wood argues that claims about job displacement/replacement via automation are founded on fallacies around demand, value and misunderstandings of skill and history.
- Against Industry 4.0: Putting the fourth industrial revolution in its place: Al Rainnie and Mark Dean argue that popular articulations of a fourth industrial revolution misunderstand how and where the agency of workers is enacted in contemporary realignments of industry and work.