#Zed books jobs series#
Meanwhile, the nature of work done by these professionals has shifted to a series of bureaucratic tasks. In other words, they are no longer seen as trained professionals, but as workers who possess a series of isolatable ‘skills’. Where professionals such as lawyers, teachers or journalists were once able to play a gatekeeping role over culture, today their work ‘uniquely is crowded out by interchangeable bureaucratic tasks and ‘‘customer facing’’ affective labour’. Today, even white-collar tasks are subject to automation and no longer retain the level of ‘professional’ distinction as they did previously. The lifework regime has come about for several reasons. They argue that there is a need to disengage from this ‘lifework’ regime and to reclaim ‘un-working’ as a part of life. Workers are now required to be available around the clock, and the distinction between work and non-work has broken down. Pfannebecker and Smith begin by noting that every part of human existence has been turned into work. This has not come to pass – if anything, our lives have got busier. John Maynard Keynes famously argued that in the future, people would only work fifteen hours a week.
The first is the gradual shift to a lifework regime. The authors present three distinct strands of thought on why the current discourse on work is problematic. Smith ask how exactly we can put a post-work future into practice. In Work Want Work: Labour and Desire at the End of Capitalism, Mareile Pfannebecker and J.A. Work Want Work: Labour and Desire at the End of Capitalism. As 2020 has witnessed the reshaping of work and workplaces due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this thought-provoking book offers a valuable starting point for envisaging a future post-work world, writes Anupama Kumar. Smith address the problems in the prevailing discourse on work and outline how exactly we can put a post-work future into practice.
0 kommentar(er)
