The future of office work
Office anthropology™
The Jolly Contrarian holds forth™ Resources and Navigation
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Template:M intro work working from home
See also
Template:M sa work working from home
References
The after effects of the COVID crisis will reverberate long after the last “krep your distance and wash your hands” notice has faded from the public space. weather or not you agree that it was a black swan, it has presented a unique opportunity to observe what happens in a time of sudden fracturing change.
Pace layers: things revert to how they were.
Being shocked into looking round corners
On the other hand there is attention between our societal drift back to what we are used to comma and the opportunities presented by being forced to look sideways and examine the contents of doors in the adjacent possible. Now we know that businesses can operate remotely for extended periods, there is no sense trying to pretend otherwise. Likewise, and entire aging generation of technophobes were forced to go online. This may mean that the usual impassioned please about post offices and Bank branches needing to remain open because elderly people don't understand the internet will die more quickly than they might otherwise have done.
Bullshit jobs
Counterpointing this is the implicit fact that most businesses suspect that much of what their employees do from day to day is essentially meaningless. This is a buried, subconscious instinct — no one (other than the late David Graeber) says it out loud or even thinks it (it carries the recursive risk that it may be true of one’s own job, so is best left unsaid and, ideally, unthought) — but it propels much of the modernist dogma of contemporary management: offshore in comma outsourcing, downskilling all must be predicated on the theory that what employees do isn't quite as hard as they like to make it out to be)