Toward work’s new futures: Editors’ Introduction to Technology and the Future of Work special issue

Abstract

This special issue is based in the belief that theoretically informed, methodologically diverse, and sociotechnically inspired research is our best approach for understanding contemporary entanglements between the technological and social aspects of work, and for grappling with what that means for our futures. In this Editors’ Introduction to JCMC’s Technology and the Future of Work special issue, we synthesize emergent themes across the eleven papers included and reflect on productive analytic lenses for anticipating how technologies may shape social and work practices, and vice versa. We identify four themes woven across the papers—visibility, relationships, boundaries, and power—and explicate some of the ways that social, technical, temporal, and communicative dimensions of work emerge across a variety of work contexts. Together, these papers highlight the creative, sense-making, and collaborative dynamics of the technologically infused workplace while acknowledging the amorphous nature of work and place, past, present and future.