Project description
Exploring the future of work in a digital era
Work is a significant source of identity. The digitalisation of work processes, however, has also transformed its meaning-making mechanism. To better understand the relationship between identity and work in our digital era, we need a new interpretative framework. The EU-funded CRAFTWORK project is exploring the relationship between identity and work in the context of the 'neo-craft' industries of the digital era. The project aims to significantly innovate and empower the critical study of the new forms of work across different disciplines and research areas and to contribute to the major societal challenge of the future of work.
Objective
The CRAFTWORK project is a multi-methodological, pan-European study that explores the relationship between identity and work in the context of the ‘new forms of work’ of the digital era. To do so, it focuses on the lived experiences, cultures and practices of ‘neo-craft’ work across different sectors and geographical contexts in the EU. The project investigates the subjectivities and pathways to work of ‘neo-craft’ workers, their perception of class location and their cultural conceptions of social status. At the same time, it questions the distribution of ‘neo-craft’ work across the urban-rural divide, and the role of social media in this context. The overarching goal of the CRAFTWORK project is to produce a new interpretative framework to understand the relationship between identity and work, that allows to account for the specificities of the ‘new forms of work’. Conceived as such, the project will significantly innovate and empower the critical study of the ‘new forms of work’ across different disciplines and research areas, and contribute to address the major societal challenge of the ‘future of work’. The project is ground-breaking for three reasons: a) empirically, it is the first comprehensive inquiry on ‘neo-craft’ work, currently hidden in existing data, in the EU area; b) methodologically, it experiments an innovative combination of digital methods and qualitative research for the study of work; c) theoretically, it aspires to provide a rethinking of the interpretative categories for the study of the relationship between identity and work in the context of a society transitioning out of the industrial era and into a fragmented scenario, whereby old and new forms of work coexist.
Fields of science
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Funding Scheme
ERC-STG - Starting GrantHost institution
20122 Milano
Italy