The Ideas of Knowledge Work of the Future and the Practice of the Ideas for Future Knowledge Work

Our concluding chapter investigates what forms the knowledge work design in the future on a corporate level. The future might be 2025, 2030, or 2035. The methodology is including interviews with researchers working with these issues in the Swedish telecommunication company Telia and the Norwegian telecommunication company Telenor. These are both companies making their living of understanding the future of work both on a corporate level and on a societal level. On One Side of Our Empirical Findings The main finding is that AI and robotics will be more advanced, but the main changes will be found in management and organizational structure. The work will be done more as distance work and through virtual teams. The management and organization of work through the corona virus has opened for more work done independent of time and the workplace and for virtual teams. There is also predicted a lack of professionals and all types of employees in the years to come leading both to a competition for talent and for keeping the people already employed. AI and robotics will not reduce the need for professional and employees. The steps will be taken one by one toward a technology making new opportunities for collaboration and for knowledge work. The real knowledge worker will be using more of his working time to significant business issues. The ideal business model is a framework where a professional knowledge worker is both learning and using his qualifications. The combination of experiences, skills, and attitudes will be the key to delivering excellent results. The framework for the future will be ordinary people achieving extraordinary results owing to their knowledge, experiences, and attitudes. The future of knowledge work is giving people the opportunities to deliver excellent results and to be rewarded for these results as a part of their team. To make ordinary people produce extraordinary results in that project teams will be the future of knowledge work. There will be clusters of corporations globally, nationally, and local demanding individual and corporate collaboration. More people than ever will be better educated with a more common mindset making collaboration and team-work easier. There will be more knowledge workers than any time in 2030. All education will be revamped into a more task focused education creating increased employment. According to Telia and Telenor, corporations and individuals will take environmental issues much more seriously, and large corporation together with the dominating economic over national powers will make the necessary starting steps to save the world. The saving of the earth represents a concentration of both corporate and national power. The number of jobs will increase owing to both economic growth and more opportunities and increasing health service and educated workforce. There will be higher profits and higher sales per employee, This study concludes that there will be many small positive corporate and societal steps for each year toward 2030, improving the way of living and working together with environmental improvements. The reconstruction of the educated middle class as a part of the new working class is also emerging giving us a large underclass of low-paid manual and educated workers. On the Other Side—The Ideas of Bullshit Jobs: The idea of work is a part of the industrial revolution where the work was manual lasting as long as possible and often meaningless as pictured in Chaplin’s Modern times. The workers’ associations and both the political labor and liberal parties improved the working and living conditions for workers and their families. During the generation from 1960 to 1990 the ideas of work changed to become more meaningful through learned skills, experiences, and attitudes where the educated and learning worker became the ideal in the OECD countries. Work life research institutes in UK, Scandinavia, and Western Europe predicted a great future for work involvement, work participation, and work as teamwork. Information and knowledge were defined as the intellectual capital, key resource, and key capability of the future. Today the low-paid manual jobs are back, and professional work is industrialized as controlled top-down jobs. We have gone into a new era of bullshit jobs where the idea of work is changing again to often become mechanistic and meaningless. The reality is that many workers must have several jobs to survive while the knowledge work is industrialized through robotics and AI including a top-down management reality. Are the paradigms of work changing in practice while we are keeping the idea of knowledge work from the 1960s? What are the consequences of the ideas and practice of future knowledge work?