Most Popular 10 Work Futures' Posts of 2024
Ten is an arbitrary number, but more would be too much.
I did a bit of stats analysis, and pulled out the ten most commented, liked, and shared posts of 2024, and pulled out a few parts from each.
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I want to thank my followers, subscribers, and especially my sponsors for your attention and support throughout 2024.
Remember, there are hundreds of other posts going back years, all accessible for sponsors (paid subscribers).
1. Meaningful Work For All
Elizabeth Anderson | What Sort of Future Do We Want? | Australian 'Right to Disconnect' | Factoids
One place to build democracy is in the workplace. Neoliberal workplace governance under shareholder capitalism has de-skilled work and degraded workers. It has also inflicted vast moral injury on workers by forcing them to participate in harming other people, animals, and the environment in the course of maximizing profits. If workers had a powerful voice in the government of their workplace, they would not choose to reduce themselves to de-skilled drudges or inflict moral injury on themselves. Democratizing work is a powerful way to promote democratic skills and dispositions, demonstrate that democracy can respond to ordinary people’s concerns, and thereby strengthen democracy at the state level. Most people want meaningful work as understood in the progressive work ethic tradition: work that affords a means for a person to exercise their agency and skill in the course of helping other people. Democratizing work, through workers’ cooperatives and enhanced models of codetermination, is a promising way to secure meaningful work for all.
| Elizabeth Anderson, The Struggle for Meaningful Work [emphasis mine]
Anderson expands on the themes of this essay in her most recent book, Hijacked, which I will be reviewing as soon as possible.
Anderson is also the author of Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don't Talk about It).
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from What Sort of Future Do We Want?
I came to see that behind the swirling possibilities of the Future of Work is a growing contention between what Anderson calls the progressive, democratic (dare I say socialist?) work ethic and the conservative, neoliberal, (let’s just say it: capitalist) work ethic. This contention is shown in the ‘New Luddites’ timeline above.
This insight led me to reread Anderson’s essay, and a dozen or so more.
I also realized that Anderson’s piece had the wrong title. She is not laying out an argument for making work more 'meaningful', but a call for casting off the chains of subservience baked into the contemporary work culture due to the dominant conservative work ethic.
2. Doing Too Little
Joseph Stiglitz | Progressive Capitalism, or Ordoliberalism? | Factoids | Elsewhere
The road to authoritarianism is not paved by government doing too much but too little.
| Joseph Stiglitz, Time is up for neoliberals
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from Progressive Capitalism, or Ordoliberalism?
We are living in a polycrisis of neoliberalism’s doing. We are unfree in the face of climate change, economic inequality, and the right to provide for ourselves without exploitation and precarity. This security is only available to the well-off in countries with neoliberal economies, like the U.S., and shrinking for the middle- and working-class. And that leads to the inevitable next step:
Neoliberal capitalism has thus failed in its own economic terms: It has not delivered growth, let alone shared prosperity. But it has also failed in its promise of putting us on a secure road to democracy and freedom, and it has instead set us on a populist route raising the prospects of a 21st-century fascism.
| Joseph Stiglitz
3. Time and Effort
Phoebe Philo | RTO is a Smokescreen | People-Centric Organizations? | Factoids | Elsewhere and Elsewhen
It takes time and effort to make most things that have meaning. One has to stand for something.
| Phoebe Philo
I am invoking the couturier Phoebe Philo to chastise the CEOs of many corporations who continue to pointlessly pressure workers to return to office. If they’d look at the research—some of it cited in the next section—they would stop. Stand for something. Don’t waste your time on meaningless gestures.
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from RTO is a Smokescreen
I devoured a recent Sloan Management Review piece by Brian Elliott that lays out the case—fairly conclusively, thanks to a key research paper by Yuye Ding and Mark Ma—that corporate executives' ‘Return to Office’ push is a paper tiger designed to conceal poor performance, exacerbated by distrust of employees and a fear of Wall Street retribution for adopting the modern hybrid form of work.
4. Falling Faster
Peter Drucker | Lay Off the Layoffs | Factoids | Elsewhere and Elsewhen
No class in history has ever risen faster than the blue-collar worker. And no class in history has ever fallen faster.
| Peter Drucker
And now, white-collar workers?
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from Lay Off The Layoffs
It’s high time we stop the wanton disregard for the impacts of mass layoffs on people.
5. Negligence and Profusion
Adam Smith | Elizabeth Anderson on The Progressive Work Ethic | TRAPs at Work | Reading Now | Factoids
The directors of such [joint-stock] companies, however, being the managers rather of other people’s money than of their own, it cannot well be expected that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own. Like the stewards of a rich man, they are apt to consider attention to small matters as not for their master’s honour, and very easily give themselves a dispensation from having it. Negligence and profusion, therefore, must always prevail, more or less, in the management of the affairs of such a company.
| Adam Smith (1776)
I love the term ‘copartnery’, and plan to use it whenever I can.
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from Elizabeth Anderson on The Progressive Work Ethic
In The Struggle for Meaningful Work (subtitled Socially necessary labor should entitle us to respect, decent pay, and safe conditions—not a duty to work relentlessly, without complaint), Elizabeth Anderson walks us through the rise of the progressive work ethic from the earliest days of the industrial revolution -- naming the visionaries that pushed for greater democracy and equality at work -- to its apotheosis in the thirty years of the post-WWII era when social democracies in Europe and to a lesser extent in the US adopted what were once utopia ideals:
These countries adopted a suite of policies to achieve the progressive work ethic's goals, including comprehensive social insurance, facilitation of labor unions and sectoral bargaining, codetermination (joint management of the workplace by representatives of both labor and capital), dramatic expansion of affordable or free public higher education, and guaranteed paid vacations and family leaves.
6. A Storm in Which We Are All Lost
William Carlos Williams | Tempo Rubato | CFBR | Factoids
Time is a storm in which we are all lost.
| William Carlos Williams
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Tempo Rubato is a piece that, looking back, captured 2024 for me, including the sense of broken time from Covid. I drew on writing from Katherine May, Tara McMullin, and some of my earlier writing, too.
Last year, my recovery consumed almost three months as I fell through ‘the cracks of life’. This year’s brush with Covid was only a pale shadow of the previous encounter, but I sank deep enough to hear the robbed notes in the theme of the movie I’ve been cast in. The calendar and the clock were pushed to one side, and the winter light dimmed.
Perhaps, as May figures, this is how wisdom is made. Maybe. But the making comes with a cost, and the reëmergence back into the world of calendars and clocks presents additional trauma but eventual recuperation. A lesson learned in the body, more than the mind.
7. A New Order of Things
Niccolo Machiavelli | Making The Case for Hierarchy | Factoids | Elsewhere
There is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things.
| Niccolo Machiavelli
I confess, in these days, I am thinking more about ‘more dangerous’ rather than possible upsides of a near-term new order of things. In the longer run, though, everything is on the table.
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from Making The Case for Hierarchy
I read an article by Nicolai Foss and Peter Klein, Rethinking Hierarchy, in which the authors argue that hierarchy is still needed, if only to manage large projects or organizations, but needs to be reconsidered in light of the need for greater autonomy in knowledge-based work.
8. In Times of Dread
Toni Morrison | Debiasing Strategic Decisions | Factoids | Elsewhere, Elsewhen
This is precisely the time when artists go to work—not when everything is fine, but in times of dread. That’s our job.
| Toni Morrison, No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear
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from Debiasing Strategic Decisions - Part 1
The basic assumption in business is that strategic decision-making requires three basic elements:
fact-gathering and analysis,
the insights and judgment of a defined group of people (stakeholders or advisors), and
some process -- ranging between very formal to very informal -- for that group to make a decision, reflecting that analysis and judgment.
However, as Dan Lovallo and Olivier Sibony reveal,
Our research indicates that, contrary to what one might assume, good analysis in the hands of managers who have good judgment won’t naturally yield good decisions
And why is that? The authors go on to draw our attention to the third part: the process. After extensive analysis of 1,048 major decisions over a five-year period, including investments in new products, M&A decisions, and large capital expenditures they determined that
process mattered more than analysis—by a factor of six.
9. Trust and Reciprocity
Elinor Ostrom | Culture Isn’t Talk | Factoids | Elsewhere
When individuals are well informed about the problem they face and about who else is involved, and can build settings where trust and reciprocity can emerge, grow, and be sustained over time, costly and positive actions are frequently taken without waiting for an external authority to impose rules, monitor compliance, and assess penalties.
| Elinor Ostrom
Ostrom won the Nobel in economics for her ‘work studying the properties of successful, durable commons’ (as Cory Doctorow put it).
But the idea she sketches is also a model of how enlightened, emergent organizations work, relying on autonomy and trust rather than rules and authority.
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from Culture Isn’t Talk
I read an essay by Charles Lambkin last fall with great interest, entitled Culture Isn’t Talk. I want to focus on a few of the most striking ideas he offers up.
He sets context:
Corporate culture is not as mysterious as we often make it out to be.
To see this, however, we must first admit certain things leadership often does not want to admit. Chief among these—surprise, surprise—is what actually determines culture.
Executives tend to treat culture as a sort of branding exercise, as something they can simply speak into existence.
10. Shivering into Possibility
Margaret Renkl | Progressivity, Not Productivity | Factoids | Elsewhere
From my Journal
I was searching for something in my journal, which led me to a daily note from 2021-11-03. The search was a dead end, but I noticed an entry at the top of the note, which I did not recall writing, even after rereading it, now, several years later:
A dream [about a talk] where I gave a short intro to some subject characterizing the various themes as all being on fire.
'The only difference' I said, 'is whether you decide to turn your attention to the fire that is hottest, brightest, or largest. Because everything is on fire.'
That metaphor still seems pertinent today, especially after a long weekend fighting a pernicious cold.
I offer this from Margaret Renkl as a spring offering and counterbalance.
Turn your face up to the sky. Listen. The world is shivering into possibility. The world is reminding us that this is what the world does best. New life. Rebirth. The greenness that rises out of ashes.
| Margaret Renkl, Spring Brings Joy, Even in a World on Fire
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from Progressivity, Not Productivity
Yesterday, I saw this tweet by Anne-Laure Le Cunff:
Anne-Laure Le Cunff (@neuranne)
Many people think productivity is about getting work done. But it’s not. Instead, it’s about making intentional progress. Sometimes that means taking a break, making time for thinking, exploring ideas, chatting with a friend.
I replied:
One of the reasons I like the term 'progressivity' instead of 'productivity'.
I want to thank my followers, subscribers, and especially my sponsors for your attention and support throughout 2024.