Chapter Il lavoro intraprendente nell’economia della conoscenza e della complessità

Abstract

Over the course of history, the idea of labour has changed a lot, both in theoretical representations and in practical life. In the capitalism of ‘800 and in the Fordism of ‘900, the use of rigid machines imposed a standardized and impersonal work, for the performance of purely executive operations and of orders dictated from above or fixed by pre-established programs. Over time, however, when Fordism failed to compress the growth of complexity (after 1970), the experimentation of forms of networked (flexible, creative) labour became necessary. First it exploited the territorial proximity and then, thanks to digital revolution, the new flexibility of machines and algorithms. Consequently, human intelligence became necessary again to manage the growing complexity of products and processes. So, contemporary work is becoming less and less the classical dependent labour and more and more the expression of some form of enterprising activity.