Work and the Future

New configurations of work, promising great hope and great risk for society, are emerging. In sites such as Innocentive people can self-organize to solve vexing scientific challenges. The large-scale production of work can be managed rapidly through micro-task labor at sites such as Mechanical Turk. The broad spectrum of technical developments has the potential to liberate people from binding and hard to secure organizational bounds and threatens to prompt de-skilling and organizations’ abilities to sustain innovative practice. Work has the potential to be both more widely assessable and fragmented and cheapened. Ethnographers are especially well positioned to perceive the changing nature of work and its societal impact.