Experiencing the New World of Work

Is there one future of work? This excellent volume shows that employment continues to be contested. For some, the the digital frontier of control has moved into the home or the delivery van. For others, the care home or field continues to be the site of low paid manual work. If you want a serious and evidence based analysis of current trends and future possibilities, then read this book. Martin Parker, Professor of Organisation Studies, and Lead for the Bristol Inclusive Economy initiative, Department of Management, Bristol University

In an increasingly volatile, but also strangely predictable world, it is more important than ever that we remain academically alert to both the changes and continuities that characterise the experience of work. This rich and timely collection, focusing on the impact of contemporary workplace practices of - amongst others - embodiment, spatiality, and digitisation, makes a vital and accessible contribution to this endeavour. Philip Hancock, Professor of Work and Organisation, Essex Business School, University of Essex

Why, asked the poet Philip Larkin, did he find the toad work squatting on his life? His answer was typically laconic: because inside himself, he observed, there was something toad like too, cold and heavy, always weighing on him. Work was its outward expression. Without the in-trays, regular hours, pension rights, class exploitation, and doleful routine he would be like those roaming or stumbling around the parks mid-afternoon with only empty chairs for friends. Within work, well, he was at least distracted from the inevitability of death. Nowadays, the toad has become a pond skater, neither heavy nor cold: it is elusive, nebulous, and humming with mediating technologies, and the empty chairs around the park bandstand have become workstations. It is in such a setting that the essays in this volume become incredibly timely. They give voice to a new, mobile cast of characters in the world of work: hackers, nomads, teleworkers, learning algorithms, makers, and platforms, in short a veritable commedia dell arte for our technologically mediated times. We learn how working humans are being joined by (better?) working non-humans, how exploitation has become a lifestyle choice - or intensified by poverty and confined invisibly to the peripheral spaces of the globe - and how, if there is any meaning to be found in such fluid, often exaggerated, and transitory experiences, it comes doused in irony. The field of study that is still, rather quaintly, called human relations needs completely uprooting. This volume makes an admirable foray into this radical work. Robin Holt, Professor, Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School

Jeremy Aroles is an Assistant Professor in Organisation Studies at Durham University, UK. His research currently focuses on new ways of working, the management of culture, and the relation between fiction and organizational worlds. His research has notably been published in Organization Science, Management Learning, New Technology, Work and Employment. Franois-Xavier de Vaujany is Professor of Management & Organization Studies at PSL, Universit Paris-Dauphine. His research deals with collaborative practices in open contexts (e.g. open sciences, maker movement, coworking, digital nomads, campus tours, learning expeditions). He has authored or edited eleven books and more than 130 articles, chapters and communications. Karen Dale is Professor of Organisation Studies at Lancaster University. She has researched and written on embodiment, including Anatomising Embodiment and Organisation Theory (2001) and about architecture, space and sociomateriality, including The Spaces of Organisation and the Organisation of Space: Power, Identity and Materiality at Work (co-authored with Gibson Burrell, 2008).

Foreword John Hassard and Jonathan Morris; Introduction: Experiencing the New World of Work Jeremy Aroles, Franois-Xavier de Vaujany and Karen Dale; Part I: Experiencing at Work; 1. Embodied Inter-Practices in Resonance as New Forms of Working in Organisations Wendelin Kpers; 2. Wherever I Lay my Laptop, That's my Workplace - Experiencing the New World of Work in a Hotel Lobby Fiza Brakel-Ahmed; 3. 'So Many Cool Things to do!': Hacker Ethics and Work Practices Michael Peiro; 4. Experiencing Making: Silence, Atmosphere and Togetherness in Makerspaces Franois-Xavier de Vaujany and Jeremy Aroles; Part II: Digital Platforms and the New Work of Work; 5. Exploring Inequalities in Platform-Based Legal Work Debra Howcroft, Clare Mumfrod and Birgitta Bergvall-Kreborn; 6. Workers Inquiry and the Experience of Work: Using Ethnographic Accounts of the Gig Economy Jamie Woodcock; 7. Digital Nomads: A New Form of Leisure Class? Claudine Bonneau and Jeremy Aroles; Part III. Politics, Imaginaries and Others in the New World of Work; 8. Bypassing the Stage of Copper Wire? New Work Practices Amongst the Peasantry Gibson Burrell; 9. Critical Theory and the Post-Work Imaginary Edward Granter; 10. Exploring the New in Politics at Work: A Temporal Approach of Managerial Agencies Franois-Xavier de Vaujany and Aurlie Leclercq-Vandelannoitte; Conclusion: Experiences of Continuity and Change in the New World of Work Jeremy Aroles, Franois-Xavier de Vaujany and Karen Dale; Afterword Stewart Clegg.