The Handbook for the Future of Work (Routledge International Handbooks)

The Handbook for the Future of Work offers a timely and critical analysis of the transformative forces shaping work and employment in the twenty-first century.

Focusing on the past two decades, the handbook explores how technological advancements, automation and a shifting capitalist landscape have fundamentally reshaped work practices and labour relations. Beyond simply outlining the challenges and opportunities of automation, the handbook integrates these emerging realities with established discussions of work. Importantly, it moves beyond dominant technology-centric narratives, probing into broader questions about the nature of capitalism in a time of crisis and the contestation for alternative economic models. With contributions from established and emerging authors, based in institutions around the world, the handbook offers a systematic overview of the developments that have sparked radical shifts in how we live and work, and their multifaceted impacts upon social relations and identities, practices and sectors, politics and environments.

The handbook is unique in its exploration of the potential for economic transformations to reshape the centrality of work in our social and political imaginaries. A useful resource for students and researchers, the handbook serves as an essential guide to this new intellectual landscape.

Chapter 9 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives (CC-BY-ND) 4.0 license.

Julie MacLeavy is a Professor of Economic Geography at the University of Bristol, UK specialising in feminist political economy, economic transformations and new forms of work. She is the Theme Lead for the ‘Innovation, Transition, Change’ challenge within the new Academic Research Hub for the Prevention of Gambling Harms at the University of Bristol, co-Editor-in-Chief of Geoforum and Treasurer of the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) Economic Geography Research Group. Julie is the co-editor of The Handbook of Neoliberalism (Routledge) and author of Enduring Austerity: The Uneven Geographies of the Post-Welfare State (University of Bristol Press), which examines how austerity policies create an uneven landscape of work and welfare opportunities across different communities.

Frederick Harry Pitts is a Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Exeter’s Cornwall Campus in his hometown of Penryn, where he is also the Director of Business Engagement and Innovation for Humanities and Social Sciences. He is a Co-Investigator of the Economic and Social Research Council Centre for Sociodigital Futures, a Fellow of the Institute for the Future of Work, Secretary of the British Universities Industrial Relations Association and an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at University of Bristol Business School. He is the author or coauthor of five previous books, most recently Marx in Management and Organisation Studies: Rethinking Value, Labour and Class Struggles (Routledge).