The Work We Need: A 21st Century Imagining
Hilary Cottam
May 2025 · Little, Brown Book Group
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infoThis book will become available on May 29, 2025. You will not be charged until it is released.
About this audiobook
Hilary Cottam, author of Radical Help about which the Guardian's Jonathan Freedland wrote, 'this might be the most important book you read this year' now turns to the subject of the future of work
Work, for decades, has been debated and discussed as a narrow economic category. Instead, Hilary Cottam identifies work as a cultural force and one at the heart of good lives, strong communities and nations that have a sense of a shared destiny. Crucially, in these dramatic times, she shows how we can shape this force to meet technological change, our ecological crisis and the challenges of the world's deep injustices. We can create a work revolution.
Ambitious but rooted in the ideas of everyday experts - that is, real workers from all walks of life -- this is a realistic and hopeful book. Hilary Cottam has crossed the UK and the USA; she's spent time in communities considered (by outsiders) as 'left behind' and in places at the centre of financial and technological power. Drawing on a fascinating range of sources including historians, trade unionists, business leaders, philosophers and most originally, on hours of her imaginative workshops with workers, Hilary Cottam, in the belief that we can engineer positive change, boldly asks: how can we redesign work? She answers with the stories from her journeys where she found significant and shared ideas in all our communities. She shows us how work could be re-imagined and in a way that benefits everyone.
Our challenges - political, social, economic and environmental - are tangled and growing. But so are the imaginative solutions. In this exciting, inspiring and optimistic book Hilary shows us how we could work differently and therefore live better.
Work, for decades, has been debated and discussed as a narrow economic category. Instead, Hilary Cottam identifies work as a cultural force and one at the heart of good lives, strong communities and nations that have a sense of a shared destiny. Crucially, in these dramatic times, she shows how we can shape this force to meet technological change, our ecological crisis and the challenges of the world's deep injustices. We can create a work revolution.
Ambitious but rooted in the ideas of everyday experts - that is, real workers from all walks of life -- this is a realistic and hopeful book. Hilary Cottam has crossed the UK and the USA; she's spent time in communities considered (by outsiders) as 'left behind' and in places at the centre of financial and technological power. Drawing on a fascinating range of sources including historians, trade unionists, business leaders, philosophers and most originally, on hours of her imaginative workshops with workers, Hilary Cottam, in the belief that we can engineer positive change, boldly asks: how can we redesign work? She answers with the stories from her journeys where she found significant and shared ideas in all our communities. She shows us how work could be re-imagined and in a way that benefits everyone.
Our challenges - political, social, economic and environmental - are tangled and growing. But so are the imaginative solutions. In this exciting, inspiring and optimistic book Hilary shows us how we could work differently and therefore live better.
About the author
Hilary Cottam is an internationally acclaimed social activist whose work in Britain and with communities around the world has focused on collaborative and affordable solutions to some of the greatest social challenges of our time. Her first book Radical Help was hailed as 'mind-shifting' by David Brooks in the New York Times and has been translated internationally. Awarded an OBE in 2019 for services to the welfare state, Hilary has been recognised by Fast Company in the US for her pioneering creativity and by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader. Hilary's TED talk has had close to a million views. www.hilarycottam.com
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