The Future of Work is...

Current @Work Program Objectives

The Role of Technology & the Private Sector

The Future of Work

The future of work is going to be altogether unrecognizable to those who insist on looking at it from fixed past perspectives. Our predicament is that this future is grave indeed -- and worse yet in that it is already hard on us! And what we face here is not just a simple matter of economic housekeeping and marginal policy adjustments, but is indeed far closer to a major constitutional crisis. To come to grips with the crisis, and the society-threatening challenges that lurk behind it, new thinking, new tools and new ways of organizing our communities and our daily lives are required. The ice needs to be broken. But where does one start?

A synoptic, somewhat vigorous statement of the problématique as we see it will be found just to your left in the linked section entitled, Point of Departure. The 'bones' are part of a little report that was prepared by EcoPlan and The Commons back in 1994 for the European Commission under the title, Rethinking Work: New Ways to Work in an Information Society. Some five thousand copies of that "thinking exercise" were printed and distributed at the time, and it is freely available in its original version in our library here for your information and, hopefully your comments and suggestions. Print copies of the report can be had from the office of Peter Johnston at DG XIII (Telecommunications) of the Commission, who can be contacted by email via peter.johnston@bxl.dg13.cec.be.

In the meantime six more years have passed and those responsible for the decisions that shape the fundamental underlying structure of work in our post industrial societies give every evidence that they have simply failed to get the message. Working from their own comfortable economic plateaus and gated communities, isolated from the harsh daily life realities of the cost of system failure, and blinded by their choice of analytic techniques and measurement systems, they appear to be determined to muddle through as long as they can, and why not?

But the role of government (think of "government" here in terms of, not some distant bureaucracy but rather an expression of our collective consciousness and will) in situations as grave as this is not to try to administer, control, cajole and manage the information, interpretations and actions of individual citizens and groups from some increasingly irrelevant center. Rather the challenge is to engage a profound effort, first in an attempt to understand and then, in the wake of this new understanding, to liberate the enormous problem solving potential of society. Thus, what is required in our increasingly knowledge-based, democratic, networked societies is a veritable renaissance of experimentation, recombination and continuing adaptation by those most directly concerned. People, "ordinary citizens", can do that -- they are far smarter, potentially more energetic and infinitely better positioned to understand and to act than government bureaucracies. Which, in fact, frames the basic challenge: What is it that needs to be done to engage the citizenry directly in the problem-solving process? If this takes more books, conferences, skull sessions and pages on the World Wide Web, then so be it. But that cannot be the objective!

Back to top

@Work on the Web Program Objectives

There are three main objectives of the Rethinking Work program overall are essentially unchanged since its inception in 1994, namely:

1. Clarify the true dimensions of the problem of work in post-industrial society
2. Show why new and radically different approaches are needed.
3. Advance the New Work agenda by concrete actions.

Indeed, it is precisely because we believe that the present thrust of not only the proposed remedial action but also the very discussions behind it are altogether inadequate, that our first step in this process of attempted redress must be to call attention to the truly dramatic extent of the problems that are involved. And to the fact that its true dimensions are most egregiously being overlooked or, at times, even concealed. This to some may appear as a negative approach. However, if you take the time to observe the documents thus far been generated under this program and the others to which we refer, you will note that they also contain both (2) a number of powerful arguments as to why new, much more far-reaching approaches are needed and (3) a good number of specific proposals as to how we can now begin to engage the process of getting control of the issues and forces involved.

In this last regard, we have tried to ask ourselves and to respond to the following question: What are some things that we and others concerned could begin to do, starting say tomorrow morning, which might not necessarily involve engaging enormous sums of taxpayer money, not get in the way of other on-line or planned programs that are tying to deal with the issues, and yet somehow help us improve our understanding of what needs to be done and what can be done to come to grips with the real underlying problems. And then, once we have this understanding, what can be done to begin to show the way by means of specific implementations of these new ideas and approaches, which then can be communicated to others in search of new ideas. We are thus talking about a step-wise process here.

Up until this point, I can well image that this sounds like a basically reasonable if still rather abstract set of propositions. And reasonable though all of this may be, it should nonetheless not obscure one salient fact -- and that is that it is quite certain that once all the necessary basic homework has been done and the issues have been adequately clarified, the kinds of remedial activities and new initiatives and arrangements that are to be engaged are going to amount to some pretty severe pattern breaks. We need to be very clear on this point. "New Work" as we see it is not going to emerge as little more than a lightly massaged version of present arrangements. Rather it is going to very different... very, very different.

And if this worries you overly, let me inject here that what this really going to boil down to in the best cases at least is, basically, a radical refitting of what we call work to make it much more "education" intensive, less mindless, and more personally involving. And more universal (both in terms of the numbers of people involved as well as what one might call the international geography of work). But you will find all of this and much more when you turn to the mouting stack of reports and working papers that are already in the @Work Library.

Back to top

A Personal Note on the Role of Technology & the Private Sector

Specifically I want to go on record here with a linked set of summary observations, that is set out at considerable length in the two Rethinking Work editions that are already available to you, which some may discuss but which I for one feel that is incontrovertible, and which under the present circumstances of great urgency need to be taken as datum. Now, this is not rocket science, so we can be very brief:

1. The primary cause of the tectonic shift that is creating so much turmoil in the world of work is technology (along with all the organizational and management accoutrements that go with it)
2. This is both the bad news, and the good news.
3. Of all these technologies, those which have been most directly responsible for this on-going transformation are the so-called "information technologies".
4. One of the primary means of redressing this situation will be the wise deployment of these same technologies in new and more thoughtful and responsible ways.
5. This can only be done if we can find ways to engage the entrepreneurial vigor of the market economy and all the firms and people who make it up -- without putting them into a Procrustean bed of complicated and ever-changing rules, regulations, scrutiny and conditions of oversight that are not only going to make work and life uncomfortable for them but what also are going to work against the best interests of society as whole.
6. The challenge there is thus to find a convivial and ultimately simple solution, that will give them this stable operating platform against which their formidable energies and resources can be released.
7. The other side of the simplicity coin, however, is that whatever these global ideas and new business structures are, they are likely to be both: (a) very powerful in their ultimate impacts (indeed they must be, otherwise they simply will not attain their full impacts), and (b) very strange, even altogether unacceptable when first put forward as ideas. They will be contested and fought, and will only see the light of date if and where they are able to generate the considerable public understanding and support that will be needed if they are to pass into law and practice.
8. The simple truth, however, is that nothing less will be able to do the job.
9. Even at that this engagement of business, industry and technology will not deal with all of the unresolved issues of work in the 21st century, but it will give us a formidable start. Moreover, to the extent that the move to these new structures is able to gain broad and deep public support, this also suggests that many other changes will be made en route, mainly by the people, groups and places that need them most.