Rethinking work

E. Fouksman

Chapter 18 in Handbook on Politics and Society, 2025, pp 328-349 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: The aim of this chapter is to surface and then interrogate underlying and often unspoken assumptions around work – and more specifically, around commodified human activity. The first section of the chapter moves beyond a focus on exploitation and working conditions, and thus the often-posed questions of how to make work better for workers and ensure full employment for all. Rather, it draws on scholarship around distributive justice, care, ecological crises, and racial capitalism to denaturalise and decentre the role of commodified work in human society. The second section analyses the way morality and deservingness; distribution and meritocracy; and meaning-making and sociality have been intertwined with commodified work into a moral economy of capitalism that acts as a block to a fundamental rethinking or transformation of commodified work. And the final section looks at debates around the future of work. Moving beyond a deterministic focus on the implications of AI, it examines a range of case studies to argue that future transformations of work are not inevitable, but rather outcomes of agentive collective struggles.

Keywords: Labour; Future of work; Postwork; Care work; Degrowth; Fourth industrial revolution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035301898
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