Re-politicising the future of work debate
26 Feb 2026
16:15 -17:45
Times are shown in local time
Open to: All
Room W4.05 (Cambridge Judge Business School)
Trumpington St
Cambridge
CB2 1AG
United Kingdom
Join our Strategy and International Business seminar
Speaker: Professor Nicky Dries, KU Leuven
About the seminar topic
One need only look at the level of media coverage, opinion pieces, academic research, and reports by international organisations like the International Labour Organization (ILO) to conclude that the future of work is a booming topic. Some might argue that the current-day hype is somewhat contrived, considering that ‘the future of work’ has always existed. The future is simply the period that succeeds the present, surely a phenomenon of all times. However, in recent years – driven, at least in part, by digitalisation and the increasing hype around AI (artificial intelligence), eg the launch of ChatGPT to the general public in November 2022 – the sense that we may be living in unprecedented times has gained increasing momentum. One point that has been made in the literature is that the future of work is an inherently political topic – whether we want it to be or not. Politics, here, is defined as the activity in which people organise collectively to regulate or transform some aspect of their shared social conditions, along with the communicative activities in which they try to persuade one another to join such collective action or decide what direction they wish to take it.
Although many academics aspire to be as objective and neutral as possible in their research, there are in fact arguments to be made in favor of an explicit re-politicisation of the future of work. Re-politicisation refers to making the political dimension of social issues and social relations visible by turning them into the object of debate and conflict (as opposed to de-politicisation, which is the invisibilisation of the human-societal root causes and processes of change). An example of de-politicisation in the public debate around the future of work is the idea that the robots are coming for your job, or that AI will disrupt entire industries. Such framings create the impression that the technology itself is creating potentially undesirable labour market outcomes when, in reality, these outcomes are created by people – CEOs, managers and entrepreneurs, and also politicians and regulatory bodies.
Re-politicisation, in this case, would mean bringing to bear the vested interests – and the associated networks of money, power, and relationships – of different powerful (and less powerful) groups of societal actors in shaping ‘their’ desired future, understanding that one man’s utopia is another’s dystopia. As the future of work has not happened yet, any communicative activity we engage in as public intellectuals in fact co-creates the future, meaning that we can no longer see what we write and teach as independent from emerging realities. In our view, this is not something we should shy away from, but rather embrace; it means we have an opportunity to create an impact on the real world outside of academia. While typically in our field we study the present or the (recent) past, studying the future allows us to formulate recommendations for practice before something has happened, which can take the form of both aspirational and cautionary tales. The question ‘what will the future of work be like?’ is thus transformed into another question: ‘what do we want the future of work to be like?’
Speaker bio
Nicky Dries is Full Professor of Organizational Behavior at KU Leuven (department of Work & Organisation Studies) and at BI Norwegian Business School in Oslo (department of Leadership & Organizational Behaviour). In Leuven, she runs the Future of Work Lab within the Faculty of Economics, that studies social imaginaries for the future. The Lab’s research builds on methods aimed at triggering people’s imagination about the future, using media analysis, robotic art and design, virtual reality, and science-fiction movies. The mission of the Lab is to re-politicise the future of work, and stimulate democratic debate.
Nicky is a former Fulbright Scholar (Boston, 2012). To date, she has published over 60 international peer-reviewed articles, 2 books, and 20 book chapters. She is very active in science communication outside academia as well, and regularly publishes trade press articles (eg HBR.org, Forbes.com), op-eds/editorials, and podcasts, and has appeared in a documentary TV series on the labour market implications of disruptive technologies (‘The Digital Dilemma’ on VRT). In 2021, Nicky was selected from more than 1,000 applicants to be part of Belgium’s ‘40 under 40’ inaugural cohort representing the nation’s promising future societal leaders.
Currently, Nicky is an Associate Editor at Journal of Management (JOM), as well as being on several other editorial boards (eg HRMJ, EJWOP). She has also been an evaluator of several national and European scientific funding agencies (eg FWO in Belgium, NWO in the Netherlands, the Research Council of Finland, and the European Commission, among others).
Register
No registration required. If you have any questions about this seminar, please email Luke Slater.