This course approaches the future of work beyond its technology-driven reconfigurations. It engages the social and ethical transformations unfolding in the world of work by interrogating how technology changes the experience and possibilities for work, and hence of life chances, along lines of social and global inequalities of race, gender, ability and class. In so doing, it unpacks the differential social and global impacts of technology in work.

Contemporary public discourse on the ‘future of work’ tends to focus on the progressive power of technology. Indeed, the study of technology has gained increasing significance in the field of business and management. Much of this work addresses how technology shapes and fulfils organisational, business and market imperatives. However, interest in the future of work also demands an examination of how workers/employees, and society at large, experience and respond to technological change. This latter intervention aims to interrogate how technology impacts the meaning of work – i.e. what counts as work/what we do for work – and employment relations on a global scale.

Overall, the purpose of the course is to facilitate meaningful engagement with technologywhile reckoning with the perpetuation of social imprudence and injustice in the eager push towards technological advancement.