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Is work not working anymore? Futures of work and meaningfulness of work in post-industrial scenarios

2026

Is work not working anymore? Negotiating meaning, boundaries and new practices of work in the ruins of employment

  • Costanza Guazzo
  • Gianmarco Peterlongo
DOI
https://doi.org/10.3280/SL2026-174001
Submitted
luglio 24, 2026
Published
2026-08-26

Abstract

This paper examines the shifting relationship between subjectivity and work in contemporary post-industrial societies, focusing on the ways in which workers are renegotiating the meaning, boundaries, and practices of employment amid the structural erosion of stable labour. Drawing on the metaphor of "ruins," the introduction argues that the decline of the Standard Employment Relation has not produced a simple collapse of work-centred identities, but rather a layered process of decay and reconfiguration, in which moral expectations surrounding work persist even as their material foundations are progressively undermined. Within these ruins, new interrogatives and a re-imagining of social priorities have led some individuals to rethink the relationship they have with their jobs, opening up spaces of possibility in which the contours of a new world of work are potentially beginning, unevenly, to take shape. Though often fragmented, these spaces of possibility reveal attempts to redefine the meaning, boundaries, and conditions of work, seeking to establish a more sustainable relationship from within the "ruins of stable employment”. 

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