When we hear of ‘work’, it is usually of the type particular to industrial capitalism. Governments rarely speak of the work of hustling, child-rearing or subsistence farming, or single out the ‘hard work’ of hustlers, parents or smallholders. Instead, work generally is referred to in the narrowly economistic and legalistic sense; as ‘non-domestic, paid, legally codified, institutionalised and socially safeguarded employment’ (Komlosy, 2018, 8). Many of the concepts we have to describe work – ‘informal’, ‘precarious’, ‘decent’ – are constructed against this ideal type.

Yet this model of work is a historical and geographical exception. Recent developments in the social and spatial organization of production have facilitated the decline of wage employment in many regions of the world (Beck, 2000; Standing, 2011; Breman and van der Linden, 2014). Historical forms of precarious work have been accompanied by more recent waves of casualization, leaving a growing proportion of the workforce flexible, poor and devoid of the protections associated with the standard employment relationship. At the same time, digital technologies have facilitated the emergence of new forms of precarious (self-) employment in the burgeoning ‘gig economy’ (Wood et al, 2018). The resultant proliferation of ‘wageless life’ (Denning, 2010) poses a number of challenges to the ways in which citizens, researchers and governments think about ‘work’.

Reflecting on these challenges, Franco Barchiesi argues there is a growing ‘mismatch between the official imagination of work’ and ‘its ordinary material experiences’ (2011, 21). This mismatch is evident, for example, when governments cite low unemployment rates as evidence of economic prosperity. However, it is also evident when researchers and activists seek to ‘formalize’ diverse livelihood activities across different regions of the world. Such ‘wage work-related melancholia’ (Barchiesi, 2011, 246) limits opportunities for critical self-reflection and forecloses alternative futures in which work, identity and security might be woven together differently. By clinging on to the ‘phantom limb’ of wage employment (Gorz, 1999, 58), we are left only with a politics of cruel optimism (Berlant, 2011).