New Work Projects
Projects Overview
`NWNC / New Work New Culture` is a social think tank around Frithjof Bergmann that has spent 40 years intensively engaging with social transformation and its effects on work, economy, and culture. The New Work concept of work philosopher and anthropologist Prof. Bergmann places the human being at the center of this inquiry and explores how one could work much more on what one really, really wants. Since then, the implementation of more freedom at work has been tested and evaluated in countless projects. In essence, all these projects dealt with an economic alternative to the existing economy. An alternative as an ascent – technologically smart, ecologically sustainable, and humane.
New Factory
Today we are able to take concrete first steps toward a decentralized, socially just, and ecologically compatible mode of production. The latest computer-supported organization and manufacturing technologies play a role here, as do traditional craft skills and a creative culture of repair and reuse. Building a network of local centers of community production forms the backbone of an increasingly regionally oriented economy that is less vulnerable to crises, resource-conserving, democratic, and integrative.
„The normal factory could be one hundredth as large as it is now; it would fit into a bedroom if only we decided to do it.“ Frithjof Bergmann
NWNC Center
In practice, New Work has from the beginning in the late seventies sought places where the new organization of work can be tested and communicated. There are two things these centers of New Work, New Culture – such as Tabakfabrik Linz – do for our consciousness and everyday life:
1. Professional support in finding out what one really wants – calling.
2. Advanced do-it-yourself technologies; to see, touch, and apply.
Community Production
Community Production, or product economy, is at first glance an aspect of New Work that is difficult to grasp. Essentially, it is a convergence of technologies and a principle of cooperation. The way we go about organizing it becomes visible in part in the open-source world or in good Web 2.0 concepts such as blockchain: people, communities, entire villages entering into virtual collaboration. Examples such as digital bohemia, cultural industries, the free software movement, Wikipedia, OpenDesign, OpenSourceEcology, and OpenInnovation show that real social power can emerge through the addition and multiplication of the competences of direct producers.
With advancing digitalization, New Work has again gained fundamental relevance and is being put into practice worldwide by people seeking alternatives in the face of the increasing erosion of gainful employment and industrial society. New Work today wants to create an existential alternative for people to what they have long ceased to want: uncontrolled economic growth that asks neither about meaning nor about the prosperity of the people subjected to it.
New Work nevertheless remains entrepreneurial. But it wants to bring about a cultural transformation and generate strengthening and gain for people that is based less on capitalist profit than on a gain in time, quality of life, and long-term security. By using the latest technologies, it shifts human activity out of monomegastructures back into the local and regional sphere, and also into the sphere of self-directed work. Important terms for this emerging new, decentralized production are Community Production, commons, and technologies such as blockchain and AI.
When the term belonging is used in the field of work, it refers to the temporal dimension through which one is incorporated into an institution, no longer to the people who stand above one. When teamwork is discussed in wage labor, Gideon Kunda writes that it is about „exerting pressure in order not to become too dependent on one another, not to promote too much interaction, but merely to wear a mask of sociability.“ The famous Microsoft model – three teams write code and compete against each other – is only one of the worst excesses of these „winner takes all“ markets. It has been found that such arrangements do not increase belonging; on the contrary, people who work in this way try somehow to survive in the system and seek other networks for belonging. In systems of competitive pressure, belonging means exploitation. If we want to take belonging seriously, we must free ourselves from these dependencies and understand that belonging has much to do with talking with one another and listening to one another, and that this is the space in which trust-building transformation can take place.
Consumption and psychological self-determination
The nature of economic value itself is undergoing a mutation: in the past, goods had to have an intrinsic value in order to be sold on the market. Now, by contrast, value is latent in the experience of each individual and can only be realized when the individual’s appetite, the individual’s longing, is addressed and satisfied by the product.
The industrial business model today encounters a social structure increasingly shaped by the new individual, who wants something quite different. It is easy to get a toaster or a car. The costs of these goods have fallen. Why? On the one hand, because automation and logistical perfection have made them cheaper to produce and distribute than ever before; on the other hand, because they no longer have the value for us that they once had. Rather than consumer goods, we would dig deeper into our pockets for resources that allow us to live the way we want to live. Yet such products and services that satisfy difficult-to-fulfill desires are hardly offered. That is the collision.
Project list on Dorfwiki with an overview of numerous earlier projects
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