Work in the Future

Really, I went to grad school because I'm fascinated by work - as a personal activity, as a social institution, as a moral norm, as a historical phenomenon. (If there's one thing I've learned since finishing my degree, it's that actually working is a pretty good way to learn about work.) As ubiquitous as work is, though, it gets surprisingly attention by anyone who's the least bit intelligent about what the future might look like. That's why I love William Gibson, whose science fiction is rife with people doing semi-plausible things to earn a living, and why this piece in the Fall 2005 Rand Review is so good. It's primarily a summary of a recent book by MIT researcher Thomas Malone, who argues cogently that a new structure of individually performed but collectively structured work may be emerging.

In our increasingly knowledge-based, information- driven economy, the critical factors for business success are often precisely the same as the benefits of decentralized decisionmaking: dedication, creativity, and innovation. A prime example of the change we are seeing in business today is eBay. With faster revenue growth since its founding than any company in history, eBay now has 56 million active buyers and sellers.

What is even more telling is that 430,000 of those sellers make their primary living from selling on eBay. If those 430,000 people were actually eBay employees, said Malone, eBay would be the second largest private employer in the country, after Wal-Mart but ahead of McDonald's.

A world of increasingly independent workers does pose challenges, the most prominent of which is that such workers will have no obvious place to obtain the benefits that they traditionally have obtained from employers. One way to deal with this challenge, according to Malone, is with the rise of a new kind of private organization whose job it will be to fulfill the needs of such workers.

Malone likens these new organizations to guilds and envisions them as providing a stable home for workers who move across jobs, companies, and employers. For perhaps a percentage of a worker's income in good times, these organizations could provide financial security in difficult times, as well as health insurance, job training, and even a place to socialize or to cultivate a sense of identity.

That surprise about eBay aside, the historian in me loves the atavism of the possible reemergence of guilds. Mayhaps they are the economic parallel now, as in the Middle Ages, of political autocracy?