Together with Breda Gray and Fabiano Pinatti, I have co-authored Made To Work: Mobilising Contemporary Worklives, which has now been published by Routledge under the “Changing Mobilities” series.
Made to Work analyses the conditions of mobile knowledge work (MKW) in contemporary worklives, contrasting and drawing parallels among three highly significant sectors of the Knowledge Economy: academia, information communication technology (ICT) management, and digital creative work.
It introduces the concept of ‘corollary work’ to characterise the elusive work underpinning the configuration of workers, informational, technological, relational and infrastructural resources in (re)producing liveable worklives. In the book, we unpack corollary work in relation to time, place, productivity and identity in the lives of mobile knowledge workers. The book as a whole ultimately illuminates the myriad strands of corollary work that enable MKW to take place and contributes to emergent debates on how exploitation, at least in the domain of MKW, can be named, resisted and creatively subverted. In so doing, it opens up a conversation about the complex ways in which contemporary worklives are ‘made to work’, and about potential interventions to bring about more just worklife conditions in the future.
The book is the result of a five years of fieldwork and over ten years of collaboration with my co-authors that originated in the “Nomadic Work/Life” project at the University of Limerick.
Made To Work can be purchased as hardcover or as eBook directly from Routledge or from Amazon. If you read the book, we would also be very thankful if you could post a review! Please contact me or my co-authors if you have any questions or want to discuss the book.
Professor Luigina Ciolfi 