Work and Employment in the Great Reshuffle: Navigating the Polycrisis
BSA Work, Employment and Society Conference 2026
9-11 September 2026
University of Bath School of Management, UK
About the Event
The contemporary world of work is shaped by a confluence of accelerating and interconnected crises – a polycrisis – that fundamentally disrupts established employment relationships, social protection systems, and the very notion of decent work. The concept of a polycrisis highlights how climate degradation, geopolitical instability, technological disruption, demographic shifts, and mounting pressures on health and social care systems intersect and mutually reinforce one another, rather than unfolding as discrete or isolated events. Workers, organisations, and communities are confronted with the need to navigate these converging processes, while also facing the extensive labour-market reordering associated with the ‘Great Reshuffle’ – when established expectations of work, identity, and institutional security are being renegotiated or unsettled. These developments call for renewed sociological reflection on the structural, cultural, and relational shifts shaping this period of transitions.
Over recent decades, multiple waves of economic, technological, political, and environmental change have repeatedly reconfigured the landscape of work and employment. This period has been characterised by the fragmentation of global production systems, the reshaping of labour processes through digital platforms and AI-enabled organisational technologies (e.g., Gasparre & Tirabeni, 2023), shifts in labour supply driven by migration, ageing populations, and increasing care demands (e.g., Jenkins, 2025), as well as climate change-induced industrial transitions and heightened exposure to environmental risks. At the same time, financial volatility, authoritarian tendencies, and institutional weakening have contributed to the erosion of mechanisms that once underpinned labour rights and social protection. These transformations manifest unevenly across different world regions, generating new inequalities and dependencies while also creating openings for new forms of regulation, mobilisation, and collective agency.
Taken together, these shifts prompt a re-examination of the conditions under which work and social life are organised and experienced. Technological acceleration – particularly through digitalisation and AI – promises efficiency and new opportunities for participation (Siegmann et al., 2024), but it also expands regimes of surveillance, algorithmic decision-making, and platform-mediated precarity (Wood et al., 2019; Johnston & Slye, 2025; Schor et al., 2023). Demographic transitions, climate-driven displacement, and pressures on care infrastructures highlight the growing fragility of social reproduction and the significance of wellbeing, interdependence, and access to care. Meanwhile, economic restructuring, new financial dynamics, and reorganised global value chains generate both constraints and possibilities for workers and institutions. Political polarisation and the weakening of democratic norms additionally shape how labour rights, agency, and governance are imagined and contested.
To advance debates in the sociology of work and employment, deeper insight is needed into how these interconnected crises affect labour markets, workers’ agency, and forms of corporate and institutional accountability. It is equally important to consider how they reshape inequality, precarity, and the prospects for social citizenship within a globally reorganised economy (Servais & Marinelli, 2021). The ‘Great Reshuffle’ represents not merely shifting preferences but a structural transformation of labour and capital that warrants sustained sociological inquiry. We therefore welcome theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions addressing technological change and AI; demographic shifts in mobility, ageing, and social reproduction; the labour implications of climate change and just transition; challenges to health and care infrastructures; economic and financial restructuring in global production systems; and the evolving political conditions under which labour rights, governance, and collective action are enacted.
References:
Gasparre, A., & Tirabeni, L. (2023). Choreographies of Care: A Dance of Human and Material Agency in Rehabilitation Work with Robots. Work, Employment and Society, 38(2), 483–504.
Jenkins, S. (2025). The Struggle for Meaning in Contemporary Care Work. Work, Employment and Society, 0(0).
Johnston, H., & Slye, N. (2025). ‘Get on Board or Get Off’: Nosediving Job Quality for Mental Health Providers in the Age of Platform Work. Work, Employment and Society, 0(0).
Ryan, L., Churchill, B., & Ruppanner, L. (2025). The Gendered Flexibility Paradox and Remote-First Work: How Working Parents Reconcile Work and Care. Work, Employment and Society, 0(0).
Schor, J. B., Tirrell, C., & Vallas, S. P. (2023). Consent and Contestation: How Platform Workers Reckon with the Risks of Gig Labor. Work, Employment and Society, 38(5), 1423–1444.
Servais, J. M., & Marinelli, F. (2021). Covid-19 and the world of work: Where we are and where we should go. LAVORO, DIRITTI, EUROPA, 2021(4), 1–19.
Siegmann, K. A., Ivošević, P., & Visser, O. (2024). Working like Machines: Technological Upgrading and Labour in the Dutch Agri-food Chain. Work, Employment and Society, 39(1), 202–225.
Wood, A. J., Graham, M., Lehdonvirta, V., & Hjorth, I. (2019). Good gig, bad gig: autonomy and algorithmic control in the global gig economy. Work, Employment and Society, 33(1), 56–75.