Good Work: Eroding and New Standards in a Changing World

Abstract

The changing context of work – for example, through globalization, intensification of competition, deregulation, growth in employment flexibility, technological changes, digitalization, or the Covid-19 pandemic – increasingly triggers debates about the quality of working life. Grote and Guest (2017), for example, recently made a “case for reinvigorating quality of working life research“ and Warhurst and Knox (2020) just published a “Manifesto for a New Quality of Working Life”. These debates are evoked by concerns about the well-being of employees which seems to become more and more threatened through contemporary developments in work and society. For example, while changes in technology enable employees to better access information or to work more flexible, they can also lead, for instance, to increased demands through work intensification or work-home interference, loss of control, and higher job insecurity. Another example is the Covid-19 pandemic which changed the working situation of employees around the globe leading to increases in working hours, job insecurity and large inequalities between different groups of employees (e.g. Eurofound, 2020).