This critical, international and interdisciplinary edited collection investigates the new normal of work and employment, presenting research on the experience of the workers themselves. The collection explores the formation of contemporary worker subjects, and the privilege or disadvantage in play around gender, class, age and national location within the global workforce.

Organised around the three areas of: creative working, digital working lives, and transitions and transformations, its fifteen chapters examine in detail the emerging norms of work and work activities in a range of occupations and locations. It also investigates the coping strategies adopted by workers to manage novel difficulties and life circumstances, and their understandings of the possibilities, trajectories, mobilities, identities and potential rewards of their work situations.

This book will appeal to a wide range of audiences, including students and academics of the sociologyof work and labor history, and those interested in understanding the implications of the new normal of work and employment.

Stephanie Tayloris a Senior Lecturer in Social Psychology at the Open University, UK. Her interdisciplinary research on identification and a complex gendered subject is internationally recognised. She has also authored and edited popular textbooks on discourse analysis and qualitative research.

Susan Luckmanis Professor of Cultural Studies and Associate Director of Research and Programs of the Hawke EU Centre for Mobilities, Migrations and Cultural Transformations at the University of South Australia. 

1. Collection Introduction: The New Normal of Working Lives; Stephanie Taylor and Susan Luckman .- Section 1: Creative Working .- 2. Online Selling and the Growth of Home-Based Craft Microenterprise: The New Normal of Womens Self-(Under)Employment; Susan Luckman and Jane Andrew .- 3. Hope Labour Revisited: Post-Socialist Creative Workers and Their Methods of Hope; Ana Alacovska .- 4. From Visual Discipline to Love-Work: The Feminizing of Photographic Expertise in the Age of Social Media; Karen Cross .- 5. Creative Labour, Before and After Going Freelance: Contextual Factors and Coalition-Building Practices; Frederick H. Pitts .- 6. Searching, Sorting and Managing Glut: Media Software Inscription Strategies for Being Creative; Frédérik Lesage .- Section 2: Digital Working Lives .- 7. Negotiating the Intimate and the Professional in Mom Blogging; Katariina Mäkinen .- 8. Vlogging Careers: Everyday Expertise, Collaboration and Authenticity; Daniel Ashton and Karen Patel 9. From Presence to Multipresence: Mobile Knowledge Workers Densified hours; Johanna Koroma and Matti Vartiainen 10. Affectual Demands and the Creative Worker: Experiencing Selves and Emotions in the Creative Organization; Iva Josefsson .- 11. Coworking(s) in the Plural: Coworking Spaces and New Ways of Managing; Sylvia Ivaldi, Ivana Pais and Giuseppe Scaratti .- Section 3: Transitions and Transformations .- 12. Investment in Me: Uncertain Futures and Debt in the Intern Economy; Kori Allan .- 13. Letting Them Get Close: Entrepreneurial Work and the New Normal; Hanna-Mari Ikonen .- 14. Self-Employment in Elderly Care: A Way to Self-Fulfilment or Self-Exploitation for Professionals?; Elin Vadelius .- 15. Creating Alternative Solutions for Work: Experiences of Women Managers and Lawyers in Poland and the USA; Ingrid Biese and Marta Choroszewicz .- 16. Beyond Work? New Expectations and Aspirations; Stephanie Taylor.