Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Books: Research
There have been many, many books written to answer the question of what good work is and what bad work is. Studying work always involves making normative claims about what is wrong with work. How questions get asked affects the route to finding possible solutions. So where the question is ‘How does exploitation happen?’ and the answer is through the alienation of a homogeneous class of workers, then possible solutions are radical class-based transformation. This kind of reasoning and political thinking is both powerful and important, but also limited. It underplays spatial and temporal differences between people, singularities become generalities and some kinds of work get ignored. Where the question is ‘What is good work?’, answers refer to fairness at work, meaningful work, dignity at work, even the pleasures of a work ethic. These bring forward thoughts about work being better when it develops individual capabilities, when it offers self-fulfilment as well as material benefits.
Time and again, I read the formula ‘From X to Y’, where X is the past and Y is the present: industrial to post-industrial; Fordist to post-Fordist; manufacturing economy to service economy. The newer version of this formula is more complex: from the first to the second to the third to (now) the fourth industrial revolution. The first was mechanisation, the second was mass production, the third is automation and the fourth is the digitalisation of life itself, including artificial intelligence (AI), robots and nanotechnology. For some, this fourth stage heralds the ‘end of work’, a transformation of work that means humans won't have to do it. This kind of commentary is not to my taste. It assumes a straight line of progress, and it has a deliberately simplistic idea about what kinds of economic activity matter: the production of things. There is nothing outside of technorational capitalist production.
I mentioned earlier that ‘neoliberalism’ provides a strong but overwrought explanation for the organisation of contemporary work as flexible and as precarious. In Part One of the book, I have shown that economic explanations tend to dominate questions about work. They are persuasive, but they are always partial. All-powerful but nebulous forces such as ‘neoliberalisation’ (see also globalisation, technology and economy – the four horsemen of the infernal alternative) need more delineation, especially when applied to explaining precarious lives. Familiar arguments return again: what kinds of work are being considered in claims to increased precarity, what complexities are being downplayed in the sweeping claims of a new world of work? Paid work has always had precarious elements if you look beyond the labour aristocracy of unionised (male) manufacturing in countries with decent welfare state settlements. Day labouring has long been common in construction; agricultural work relies on desperate seasonal workers; domestic service workers are vulnerable to being dismissed (without employer references) if they don’t show respect or respectability.
Sample dialogue from my life:
What's your book called?
‘What's wrong with work?’ It's about the ethics and politics of how work is changing at the moment.
Good title. You should talk to my partner, who's an XXX [insert name of almost any job].
What's your book called?
‘What's wrong with work?’
That's going to be a long book.
What's your book called?
‘What's wrong with work?’ It's about…
How long have you got? I hate my job, I hate my boss, I hate the customers.
If ever a book title was an invitation to grumble, one that asks the question ‘What's wrong with work?’ is it. Someone once answered ‘I don't have a couch in my office’, but I think they were joking. Answering a question like ‘What's wrong with work?’ could well involve writing a list, as that's a normal way to provide answers. I wish it were that easy.
The Anthropocene era describes now: a world made by human-economic activity that has fundamentally changed environments. The Anthropocene is a human-induced threat to human life (and to all other life). Dualist philosophy separates nature and culture to make it seem like nature is a resource for human use, and a source of value. That makes humans dominant actors. This is problematic. Decentring humans to understand them as part of natural, technical, informational and economic entities is essential to relearning the position of the human. Decentring unmasks the idea of autonomous human activity and reveals human dependency on nature. Nature affects everyday life in dramatic ways through ‘natural’ disasters and in routine and habitual ways.
The road outside my house acquired some new potholes last winter. If your job is to repair potholes, then your ability to do that is a composition of the skills you have, the materials at play, the weather and road use, the underlying soil structure, how pothole repair is (or is not) funded, the effectiveness of the private contractor or local government repair team that employ you. Many factors affect how long that repair will last. In this chapter, I think about what work does in the world. I will argue that we understand work better when we think about encounters with machines, with non-human others (soil, animals, weather) as well as with human others (colleagues, managers and customers) and with institutions. This greater insight comes from paying attention to the mundane and ordinary practices of bodies doing work in order to see how the world is shaped by work.
Informal work preceded neoliberalism, and it exceeds capitalism. A snapshot of informal work research reveals subsistence activities such as street vending in many cities, cash-in-hand babysitting for neighbours in the UK, a complex economy of favours and non-market exchanges in Russia, and a whole host of other hardly visible, ordinary work activities. Estimates of the prevalence of informal work vary; the ILO has recently suggested 60 per cent of employed people work in the informal economy.4 In the first of three chapters that explore the specific knots that mark present times as especially challenging (see Chapter One), this chapter looks in detail at informal work as part of how everyday life is lived. I suggest in this chapter that what's wrong with work can't be understood without acknowledging the mesh/mess of work and life together, and that a focus on informal work is essential to seeing that.
Technorationality, a cousin of the monolithic conceptualisation of ‘The Economy’ as a special space, is a common theme in talk about work at the moment, especially in those horror stories called ‘The Robots Are Coming’. This vision of social and economic change driven by the inexorable march of technological progress has a certain appeal, based on ideas that progress generated by science, rationality and logic is morally and practically good. It also has a seductive charge for commentators on work, thrilled to be scared of a future where human workers are not needed. Luddite objections could be made: that this march of progress is not at all desirable. I am drawn to make a pragmatist's objection: that this techno-dominance is a promise of a smooth, error-free future that is based on a pretence that software works, that IT delivers its promises, that putting a machine in the place of a human worker can be done smoothly without generating other kinds of work.
