For about thirty years, the conversation about the future of work has run on the same script. A new technology shows up- teleworking in the 1990s, then hot-desking, then digital nomads, now AI- and organisations scramble to respond. The future gets treated like weather: something that happens to us, something to forecast and brace for.
Our new editorial in the European Management Review argues that this script is wrong, and that getting it wrong carries a real cost.
“Re-imagining the workplace of the future: Key tensions in co-creation,” by Andri Georgiadou, Dorothea Roumpi, Solon Magrizos and Anthony McDonnell, introduces a special issue of twelve studies spanning app-based labour, coworking spaces, work-from-home, platform work, AI-augmented teams and entrepreneurial SMEs. The thread tying them together is easy to state and hard to act on: the future of work is not delivered by technology, office space or an HR policy. It is produced continuously through the interactions between workers, managers, platforms, customers and institutions.
Put plainly, nobody is waiting for the future of work to arrive. We are all writing it, every day, in the choices we make about how people are managed, measured and connected to one another.
The evidence is unusually concrete
What makes the collection worth a non-academic reader’s time is how specific the findings are.
Take algorithmic management. One study of app workers finds the relationship between algorithmic control and well-being is shaped like an inverted U. A little structure and direction helps people. Push past a threshold and the same system tips into intensified monitoring that wears them down. And whether a worker experiences it as support or as a cage depends heavily on whether they believe it is fair, and on how strongly they identify with the work. The technology is constant. The human reading of it is not.
Take AI in teams. Dropping an AI into a group decision does not simply make the group faster or smarter. It introduces a non-human actor into a process that was always social, reshaping trust, authority and who gets believed in the room. The useful question stops being “is AI good for teams?” and becomes “under what conditions does it avoid quietly breaking them?”
Take working from home. A study of white-collar workers shows that the shift to home-based work was never a neutral relocation. People entered it with wildly different resources; some recreated an office, others improvised at the kitchen table with little support. Flexibility, in other words, was stratified from day one. Left unmanaged, it widens the gaps it was meant to close.
Then there is isolation. A study of independent workers separates two things organisations routinely confuse: social isolation (missing people) and professional isolation (cut off from information, feedback and the conversations where decisions get made). Most inclusion efforts target the first and ignore the second. For distributed and contract workers, the second is what actually erodes their ability to contribute.
The collection closes on care; an argument that as algorithms increasingly schedule, rank and mediate, organisations need a culture of care built deliberately into how decisions are made, not bolted on as a wellbeing perk. Care, we argue, has to flow in every direction across the whole stakeholder system, not trickle down from leaders when there’s time.
Four questions worth more than any forecast
Strip the academic framing from the paper’s four tensions and they read as a checklist any serious leadership team could use this quarter:
- Driver or tool? Are you treating your technology as something that produces outcomes on its own, or paying attention to how people actually use, interpret and push back on it?
- Location or infrastructure? Is “place” just where work happens, or have you built the access, voice and feedback channels that decide who is genuinely included?
- Your walls or the whole ecosystem? Are you managing people only inside your own headcount, or governing across the contractors, platforms and institutions your work now depends on, including how value and risk are shared?
- Co-creation or co-destruction? Where might the systems you’ve introduced to be fairer be producing the opposite for the people with the least power to contest them?
Why this belongs on the reading list
Most future-of-work commentary sells certainty: a prediction, a trend, a tidy roadmap. This work does something more useful and more honest. It hands leaders a sharper way to see what they are already doing, and a warning that good intentions and good tools are not the same as good outcomes.
The future of work is not a destination to be predicted. It is being built, contested and negotiated right now, and the organisations that grasp that will design for it on purpose, rather than waking up to whatever it became.
Re-imagining the workplace of the future: Key tensions in co-creation by Andri Georgiadou, Dorothea Roumpi, Solon Magrizos and Anthony McDonnell is published in the European Management Review (2026). Read it in full: https://doi.org/10.1111/emre.70082
Prof Andri Georgiadou 