Extract from Rethinking Work, first edition

The purpose of this initiative is to create an open forum for concerned people and institutions around the world in an attempt to draw attention to what I believe to be some potentially promising tracks of inquiry and action in the face of the perplexing jobs/work/society conundrum which is being so unsuccessfully joined in most places to date, whether in Europe, North America or, for that matter, any where else in the world. Given the enormous stakes and the failure of policy makers to make any major inroads in the problems thus far -- and I do not for a moment accept the claims that these problems have been successfully resolved in the United States or anywhere else, what they happen to have is just different problems but no less intractable than the ones that are being faced in Europe! -- it is clearly most important for all concerned to think long and hard about the changing nature of work in the closing years of the 20th century.

The situation is not without irony. Most of us recognize, one way or another, that a building which is clearly not structurally sound is not a good place to move into. Perhaps if no one moves, if no one breathes, it may hover there for a while and protect us from the rain. But in a world of great and growing stresses, countervailing forces and ever-accelerating change, we need structures that have solid foundations and rational architecture.

Our world of work, for most of us at least, is structurally unsound in more ways than we care to realize. Many of its fundamental underpinnings, pillars and buttresses have either shifted greatly or disappeared altogether over the last decades, while others have appeared and begun to take their place, without our being always aware of all these changes. We are, I think it is not too much to say, hemmed in not so much by abject poverty or lack of means but by ignorance and indifference. Those who are paying the price of this policy failure are not well represented; nor are those who are in command positions in our various countries really threatened in any fundamental personal way by these failures.

In the face of this plight what we are seeing is an ever-increasing number of new pronouncements, proposals, laws, regulations, and would-be remedial institutions – all of which are being housed in a basic structure that is itself still basically unexamined and entirely irrational. The result could have been anticipated. Our various attempts in recent years to "fix it" through all these bits and pieces of management, policy and various forms of band-aiding have at best offered no more than temporary relief, while at worst making things worse and, often as not, locking in the basic problems so that the next cycle of remedial actions face even more deeply entrenched and insoluble difficulties.

This, in a few words, is our challenge: to define the architecture of the new world of work, the basic construct of concepts, institutions, laws and practices within which today's crushing anomalies will somehow disappear.

What might these new structures look like? What could be the new ways of resolving and reconciling some of the most intractable problems that have ensured the failure of much of what has been tried thus far? From where may these new ideas and initiatives come? What might be done to stimulate the best of this thinking and these new practices? Where can we begin, today? This collaborative international effort of communication, information sharing, and peer support, and the several years of research and problem solving efforts behind it, is dedicated to this search for the new structures that we now must somehow begin to define, test, and, when and if they past muster, put into place.

If it is to be successful, this effort is going to have to develop some quite different characteristics from the common run of these activities in terms of both its organization and the basic attitudes that those who contribute and use this information and network bring to it. I see this as a real team effort, fully open, unselfishly participatory, deeply probing, determinedly iconoclastic, and above all profoundly democratic and thoroughly civic in all its parts. We should be coming at this with the same sort of care and intensity of involvement that we would exhibit when it comes to anything that will deeply effect our own children's futures (which of course this does).

It is my belief that the new communications technologies that we now have at our disposal will permit us to pool our brains and energies in ways that have never been possible in the past.