IN QUEST OF A JOB VS. ENGENDERING EMPLOYMENT

COMMENTARY ARCHIVES, 24 Jul 2009

Anthony Judge

Escaping Economic Disempowerment Through Enabling Metaphors and Software

In memory of a little boy with a stock of six individual matches for sale on the pavement on the occasion of a congress of the World Futures Studies Federation (Cairo, 1979).

Introduction

The current worldwide economic crisis, following the financial crisis of 2008, is making it increasingly evident that "jobs" as currently defined may become a "scarce resource" in society, even a "non-renewable resource". This would make the challenge "jobs" represent for the future to be of a similar nature to that of other resources — such as land, water, food, energy, and the like. This was argued by Jeremy Rifkin (The End of Work: the decline of the global labor force and the dawn of the post-market era, 1995).

The question here is whether there are other ways of thinking about "jobs" which would help to reframe that challenge. The exploration follows from a presentation to a workshop of the World Academy of Art and Science (Re-enchantment of Work: Hi Ho, Hi Ho, Its Off to Work We Go: Engagement in the 21st Century, 1996).

It also follows from more recent concern with the general problem of lost opportunities resulting from dependence on "frozen" categories, as in the case of "job" (Framing the Global Future by Ignoring Alternatives: unfreezing categories as a vital necessity, 2009) and from earlier concern framing the challenge as one of "switching" from "being unemployed" to "being employed" (Recontextualizing Social Problems through Metaphor: transcending the "switch" metaphor, 1990).

CONTINUE READING IN THE ORIGINAL – LAETUS IN PRAESENS

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 24 Jul 2009.

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