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Experiencing the New World of Work



Experiencing the New World of Work PDF

Author: Jeremy Aroles, François-Xavier de Vaujany

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Genres:

Publish Date: January 21, 2021

ISBN-10: 1108496075

Pages: 250

File Type: PDF

Language: English

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Book Preface

The New World of Work

Over the past few years, much has been written on the changing world of work, with discussions focusing, for instance, on the rise of  automation (Spencer 2018), changes in the nature of the employmentrelationship (Sweet and Meiksins 2013), the (failed) promises of the gig economy (Cant 2019; Wood, Graham, Lehdonvirta & Hjorth 2019) or new ways of collaborating and co-producing (de Vaujany, LeclerqVandelannoitte & Holt 2020). Importantly though, these discussions are not novel, neither are the phenomena they seek to describe. The history of work is full of déjà vu. Communities, participatory systems, horizontality, democracy at work and nomadism are far from being new topics per se. In the nineteenth century, the Arts and Crafts Movement, socialist utopian communities, anarchy and Marxism had already involved public debates around these topics (see Granter 2016; Leone and Knauf 2015; Tilly 2019). Yet, there is clearly a renewed interest for these themes in research attempting to grapple with the multifaceted nature and the complex meaning of contemporary work (see for instance Aroles, Mitev & de Vaujany 2019; Fayard 2019; Simms 2019; Susskind 2020).

One of the guiding threads of many analyses of new ways of working (and their matching forms of management) is certainly collaboration (Garrett, Spreitzer & Bacevice 2017; Spinuzzi 2012). Collaborative techniques, practices, spaces and sensibilities lie at the
heart of this new world of work. This almost sounds counterintuitive, in that the current world of work is often depicted as increasingly fragmented, individualised, digitalised, entre/intrapreneurial, gigorientated and compartmentalised for the sake of flexibility, speed and integration. Platforms, projects, complex matrix-based structures and Artificial Intelligence allow the materialisation of the ‘minimal’ form of socialisation and integration required to act together and most of all to be constitutive of a society. In this world made of individuals ‘alone together’ (Spinuzzi 2012), in the neo-liberal and post-human context of our societies (Hayles 1999), collaboration is no longer a given maintained through structures, shared routines as well as public standards and institutions. Collaboration then requires new ‘conditions of possibilities’, continuously reinvented by those contributing to this new world of work. But strangely and paradoxically, collaboration, both in what is claimed about it and sometimes in its actuality, appears more as an individualistic form of collaboration (as opposed to what might have traditionally been thought of as collaboration).

Communities are particularly evanescent and ephemeral. They become a strange utopia that is never really fulfilled, a cool, atmospheric, apolitical construct, far from the true public spaces and agora described and expected by Arendt (1998). Interindividual relationships prevail in a neo-liberal order that seems to be more than ever triumphant and calling indefinitely for novelty and rupture in ongoing work practices.

Focus of This Edited Volume

This volume revolves around two dimensions of the new world of work, namely (1) the lived reality (lived experiences) and (2) the claimed novelty of ‘new’ work practices. Experiences are varied, diverse and located within broader socio-economic conditions and relations; they also embody different interpretations of those relations.
The lived reality of new work configurations is explored through many different perspectives in this edited volume. Some chapters, for instance, engage in an experiential, sensible or phenomenological exploration of the so-called new world of work. Such a stance provides deep insight into the embodied dimension of work practices (Dale 2000, 2005; Küpers 2014; de Vaujany & Aroles 2019) and allows accounting for the differential ways in which the aforementioned changes and transformations are experienced. In addition, it gives us a vocabulary to understand the fabric of obviousness and the takenfor-grantedness of our world, as it is produced by our moods, emotions, affects and activities. Other chapters provide more macro-level forms of theorisation around the manifestations of the new world of work and their implications for those involved in such work 2 Jeremy Aroles, François-Xavier de Vaujany & Karen Dale configurations. This helps to locate new work practices within broader socio-economic, historical and cultural conditions and relations.

The issue of novelty is equally crucial to our understanding of new work practices. This volume argues that work, management and organising processes are full of spatio-temporal continuities and discontinuities that become manifested at different levels. The current world of work is necessarily different from, yet similar to, its predecessor: current collaborative practices and processes extend older ones, present forms of precarity reflect past ones, contemporary resistance to automation resonates with very old social movements such as the Luddites and so on. Chapters in this edited volume investigate and unpack these changes and repetitions in the ways in which work activities are both conceptualised and carried out in practice. Connecting these two concerns (experiences and novelty), this volume explores the following question: How is the ‘new’ world of work, envisioned since the late 1980s, lived and experienced? To address this question, we sought to put together a collection of chapters that would offer a provocative, diverse and hopefully agenda-setting account of the new world of work. Through various methodological approaches, theoretical lenses and empirical cases, this volume aims to provide an in-depth, qualitative, reflective and fine-grained analysis of new ways of working and new modes of organising. We contend that a critical, experiential and reflective stance is needed in order to go beyond (technologically driven) utopias, glamorising discourses and immaterialised visions and expectations that, more often than not, are mobilised to depict new work practices and the future of work in general.

Following this introduction, the volume is divided into three parts and comprises ten chapters. The first part focuses on a key tenet of new ways of working: co-presence, shared spaces and collaboration. In particular, it explores, conceptually and empirically, the immediate, sensible, embedded and co-present experience of work practices. The second part explores another key aspect of new ways of working and their experience, which seems to be the opposite of co-presence: digitalisation, although the two are intertwined and interrelated in con temporary work in ways that call out for a detailed exploration. It is an opportunity to explore further key temporal and spatial transformations at stake in new ways of working, in particular those activities that are more and more mediated by digital tools and platforms. Introduction: Experiencing the New World of Work 3

Lastly, with the third and final part, this volume explores the imaginaries, politics and narratives of new ways of working. This is an opportunity to stress the paradoxes, geopolitical absurdities and historical drifts sometimes produced by new ways of working in our experience of the world (of work). The first two sections of the volume focus more on the specificities of experiences of new ways of working,  while the final section brings a broader historical and political sweep tobear on these changes. In the conclusion, we reflect on the changes and continuities explored in this volume through three dimensions: (i) creativity and changing skills; (ii) the time and space of work; and (iii) the changing nature of the employment relationship and beyond. In addition, this edited volume contains a foreword and an afterword, both of which offer insightful reflections on the future of work


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