SP442      Half Unit
The Future of Work and Social Policy

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

Work is the central mechanism for the distribution of economic capital in most societies today. It also plays a crucial role in the distribution of non-material goods such as status. A range of social polices embed the world of work, e.g., by regulating access to it or securing individuals when they are out of work. Moreover, in many societies, policies are financed through taxes on income from work. This course starts from the observation that the world of work and employment has seen important shifts over the past decades. Some detect a growing precarization of work in post-industrial societies. In many low- and middle-income countries informal work plays an essential role. Technological change has led to a polarisation of the workforce locally and globally. Projecting out technological change, some fear that automation will lead to dramatic job-loss in the not-so-distant future. Most recently, the COVID19 pandemic led to dramatic reorganization of work routines. Against this backdrop, this course takes an internationally comparative perspective to engage with the questions of what role social policies have played in embedding the world of work in the past and how they will have to adapt to face the challenges that are suggested to come.

The course is structured in three blocks:

First, the course will start by discussing how we define work (e.g. by asking about the difference between paid and unpaid work and gendered consequences of the distinction), then assessing the central role work plays in contemporary societies in low, middle, and high income countries, and by analysing how social policies embed work in different ways across contexts.

Second, the course will investigate the social implications of recent changes in the world of work, such as precarization, informality, digitalization, and technological change, and then cover different perspectives on how we might expect the world of work to change in the mid and long run.

In the third and most substantial block the course will then discuss potential strategies for social policies to deal with the challenges of recent and future developments. The course will consider different proposals that range from “fixing things so that the can stay as they are" to more transformative and utopian ones.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn Term.

All teaching will be in accordance with the LSE Academic Code which specifies a "minimum of two hours taught contact time per week when the course is running in the Autumn Term (AT) and/or Winter Term (WT)". Social Policy courses are predominantly taught through a combination of in-person Lectures and In person classes/seminars. Further information will be provided by the Course Convenor in the first lecture of the course. The course will be taught in the WT.

Case analysis / study in Winter Term Week 9

Students will be expected to produce 1 case study in the WT.

• Autor, D.H., Mindell, D.A. and E.B. Reynolds (2021): The Work of the Future: Building Better Jobs in an Age of Intelligent Machines. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Task Force on the Work of the Future, issuing body.
• Brynjolfsson, E. and A. McAfee (2014): The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. New York City: W. W. Norton & Company.
• Grint, K. & Nixon, D. (2015): The Sociology of Work. Oxford: Polity. (4th edition)
• ILO (2022): Present and Future of Work in the Least Developed Countries. Geneva: International Labour Organization.
• OECD (2019): The Future of Work. OECD Employment Outlook 2019. Paris: OECD.

Essay (100%, 3500 words) in Spring Term Week 3

A summative essay in the form of a policy proposal written from the stance of a researcher for an independent policy organisation of a maximum of 3500 words will inform 100% of the final mark.