Social entrepreneur and big thinker Hilary Cottam follows Radical Help, her acclaimed 2018 manual demonstrating how the welfare state should be redesigned for the 21st century, with this equally ambitious call to reconsider how we think about work in our fast-transforming world.
Cottam has a background in economics and history, as well as public policy. However, she has also been named UK designer of the year for her innovative approach to finding new solutions to social and economic problems, one that has involved stepping back from top-down thinking and engaging in a process of collective reimagining instead.
For this book, she employed the pilgrimage as research method, spending five years travelling across Britain and the United States, where she met working people of all ages and walks of life, and asked them one fundamental question: how could we redesign our working lives?
Over three-hour small group sessions that Cottam calls imaginings, participants were presented with paper, pens and a pack of visual prompts. What emerged were a series of common dreams, a set of six foundational principles deemed fundamental to the construction of a good working life in this century.
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Cottam summarises these principles as: basics, meaning, time, care, play and place. In the book, each is examined in depth, with an emphasis on the tangible ways they can be turned into a shared reality.
For example, how would work change if every employer imagined every employee is also a carer, needing to balance their caring responsibilities alongside their time in the workplace? Or if we once again attuned the rhythm of our working lives to pre-industrial, deeply-coded patterns that would allow us to alternate between intense activity and important periods of idleness and reflection?
It is as much Cottam’s understanding of history as her anthropological work that lends this book its optimistic tone. The paid weekend, she reminds us, is a relatively recent invention, as are laws regulating working hours and ages. “Each of these things,” writes Cottam, “seemed, up to the moment that victory was secured, almost impossible to imagine”.
