Craftsmanship, making and do-it-ocracy are prominent elements of the so-called new world of work. In this chapter, we describe the ‘experience of making’ in two makerspaces, one located in France and the other in the United States. In particular, we focus on three concepts – silence, atmosphere and togetherness – in order to flesh out, or make visible, the specificities of Do-It-Yourself (DIY) and Do-It-Together (DIT) processes in makerspaces. We mobilise Merleau-Ponty’s work and an aesthetic perspective on time and place to delve into the experience of making. This leads us to propose the concept of New Collaborative Experiences (NCE), which we define as new modes of feeling and expressing the self and the world in a context that requires a collective production and coordination, as a way of illuminating our two ethnographic accounts.

This edited volume has endeavoured to link micro-social experiences of work with the wider macro-social context in which these changes operate, so as to provide a rich and detailed account of the most prominent manifestations of the ‘new’ world of work. As they delved into the minutiae of the new world of work, the chapters of this edited volume have explored some of the continuities and discontinuities in ways of working, as a means of fleshing out the socio-economic context of the micro-social experiences of work. In particular, three aspects of these changes and continuities have recurrently emerged throughout the chapters. These are: (i) creativity and changing skills; (ii) the time and space of work; and (iii) the changing nature of the employment relationship and beyond. In this concluding chapter, we reflect further on these themes.

Digital nomadism refers to a mobile lifestyle in which freelancers, digital entrepreneurs and remote workers combine work with continuous travel. In this chapter, we draw from Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) to explore whether digital nomads can be seen to constitute a new form of leisure class. In particular, this entails problematising digital nomadism through four dimensions, namely differentiation, emulation, visibility and institutionalisation. Drawing from a qualitative analysis of the mainstream promotional discourse underlying digital nomadism, we show the existence of a whole set of economic activities based on selling a dreamed work/lifestyle to others. These commercial propositions, which rely on online storytelling and visibility, constitute efficient means of emulation that contribute to framing images of success. Our ‘Veblen-inspired’ analysis, we contend, generates a source of questions not only relevant to the study of digital nomadism, but also to miscellaneous aspects of the new world of work.

Over the past few years, much has been written on the changing world of work, with discussions focusing, for instance, on the rise of automation (Spencer 2018), changes in the nature of the employment relationship (Sweet and Meiksins 2013), the (failed) promises of the gig economy (Cant 2019; Wood, Graham, Lehdonvirta & Hjorth 2019) or new ways of collaborating and co-producing (de Vaujany, Leclerq-Vandelannoitte & Holt 2020). Importantly though, these discussions are not novel, neither are the phenomena they seek to describe. The history of work is full of déjà vu. Communities, participatory systems, horizontality, democracy at work and nomadism are far from being new topics per se. In the nineteenth century, the Arts and Crafts Movement, socialist utopian communities, anarchy and Marxism had already involved public debates around these topics (see Granter 2016; Leone and Knauf 2015; Tilly 2019). Yet, there is clearly a renewed interest for these themes in research attempting to grapple with the multifaceted nature and the complex meaning of contemporary work (see for instance Aroles, Mitev & de Vaujany 2019; Fayard 2019; Simms 2019; Susskind 2020).