Beyond Narratives That Evade Responsibility: Designing the Beauty of Work
The transformation of communities and businesses today is inseparable from work transformation. This is not merely a technological or organizational change in how economic activities are carried out, but a deeper metamorphosis that touches society, identity, and meaning. At the heart of this evolution lies the way we conceive of work (and by contrast, otium, or “non-work”) along with the meaning and the ultimate purpose we ascribe to it. We also need to include in the conversation the relationships among people working in different roles and under different conditions, the bond between workers and their company, and, more generally, the connection between the company and the community.
This is the scope of the challenge we face. As we’ve already seen during other phases of radical change (beginning with what, not coincidentally, we call industrial revolutions), the current one also holds serious potential for conflict as far as economic fallout, but more importantly on a social level. Its root cause, in fact, is social rather than technological or productive. For this reason, the current changeover not only requires us to redefine policies and management tools; it also—and above all—compels us to completely rethink the categories through which we conceptualize the value generated by businesses and to ask ourselves what people expect from work. In other words: Why do we work, and for whom?
After debating CSR and ESG for years, and moving beyond shareholderism, the transformation of work inevitably brings us to the moment of truth. To explain, let’s consider what Claudio Demattè[1] defined as “just” values back in 1971, and what Porter and Kramer would later link to the concept of shared value in 2011. If companies intend to generate this value, they must necessarily start from the meaning that work holds for people and communities, and then hone the ability to design organizations in which work can be a source not only of economic well-being, but also of dignity and beauty.
Rethinking work for equitable growth and social community
Without a radical transfiguration of work across the entire value chain (to include the parts that are outsourced for various—albeit primarily efficiency-driven and often short-term—reasons), it will not be technically possible to generate both economic and social value simultaneously. Nor will it be feasible to create value for shareholders, workers, and the community at the same time. To attain fair, widespread growth, we need to completely redesign the organization of work. If we don’t, inequality gaps will tend to widen: between those with high levels of education and those who left school early; between those who can rely on a solid social network that provides effective support and those who live in isolation; between those who perform jobs marked by variety, autonomy, integrity, and skill development and those who are locked into jobs consisting of repetitive and meaningless tasks.
Precisely because the ongoing transformation is such a radical one, to contend with it we must avoid both naive optimism and unfounded pessimism. We must honestly acknowledge that this change will not naturally produce positive—let alone equitable—outcomes. To steer it in the right direction, we need rigor, a sense of urgency, and a willingness to tackle the complexity involved in fostering growth that is not predatory. And we need to start with work.
This means reflecting on the (potential) beauty of work and recognizing its role in shaping identity: an indispensable dimension for personal growth and, at times, even a redemptive one, in the sense evoked by Primo Levi. What’s more, we need to recognize that working together—even in new, hybrid, and “distributed” ways—has been and continues to be a foundational act of community life and helps safeguard social cohesion. Therefore, the challenge posed by new forms of work coincides very closely with the challenge of building a new form of community.
Corporate responsibility: beyond new-work narratives
For companies, this challenge is huge, because it means simultaneously redesigning all the main managerial levers: not only the ones related to people management, but strategic, organizational, financial, and performance measurement levers too. The new scenario also dramatically broadens the scope of the responsibility traditionally recognized and assumed by businesses—a responsibility that has so far remained predominantly economic, focused primarily on shareholders, and limited to internal activities. Beyond this, we should also bear in mind that this process of change has only just begun, so it’s bound to produce effects that we are not yet able to fully predict. For this reason, we call for fewer categorical judgments in the public debate and more experimentation, accompanied by rigorous, long-term monitoring. Based on what this reveals, we will inevitably need to review both corporate policies and relevant regulations. In short, in its own way, we’re experiencing a perfect storm that is impelling us to abandon many of the practices and certainties of the past, while striving to shape the future, guided by a strong sense of responsibility.
Yet, in much of the public discourse (and, it must be said, in academic discourse as well) this metamorphosis has been intentionally simplified and ideologized, focusing on a single new form of work hastily elevated to an archetype: remote work, introduced as an emergency measure during the pandemic. In Italy, it was immediately dubbed “smart working,” resorting to a kind of newspeak that is as fanciful as it is misleading. The result is a monolithic portrayal of work, one that we assume, by definition, is “smart”: automatically productive and almost naturally capable of striking a new balance leading to work-life harmony.
Different narratives circulate around this new and supposedly miraculous work, yet they share a utilitarian nature: To put it in the words of philosopher and cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han, “all storytelling is storyselling.” On the one hand, opposing narratives contrast “old” work (depicted as a form of personal impoverishment) with “new” work, understood as individual liberation. On the other hand, degrowth narratives call for a return to rhythms that are seen as natural (ancient villages, traditional breads) and present new work as an escape from the stress of modernity. Both of these are reactionary narratives, founded on the Arcadian myth of escape, and both tend to deny the value of work in personal growth. What’s more, they offer self-justification to people in business (and academia), absolving them of responsibility for designing better work. These depictions pander to a convenient managerial populism, epitomized by the idea that young people, young women, young women with children or [insert any other stereotype of your choice here] no longer want to work.
The populism of the debate, the elitism of management research
While public discourse on work is often tainted by populism, academic discourse shows signs of an equally serious problem of elitism (at least in the field of management science). Management scholars of the past analyzed work by spending much of their research time in factories: Taylor, Fayol, and Mayo (to name just a few of the best-known figures) observed work where it was actually done by most people. They studied the workers themselves, the most common operational practices, and the social and community dynamics that took shape in production settings. Their analyses began with direct observation of thousands of workers engaged in different activities; they then discussed their findings with management and company owners, which led to experimentation and innovation in managerial tools.
Today, the opposite is more often the case. A substantial portion of management research focuses on very small groups of people—predominantly highly educated individuals, often recognized as "talents," who are embedded in a dense network of social relationships. These are often workers who enjoy broad autonomy, receive lucrative compensation, and possess skills that are in high demand in the market. Without delving into methodological choices (from the growing reliance on laboratory experiments to the use of secondary data, at the expense of primary data collection that would require entering companies and working on site), a significant portion of the studies that still claim to be about management present two critical flaws regarding the evolution that is currently underway. The first is their elitist nature. They primarily analyze the conditions and dynamics of a small number of workers who are already extraordinarily advantaged. The second concerns the purpose of the research, which is less oriented toward developing tools for improving managerial practice and increasingly intended to fuel the cycle of publication (and more importantly, citation) in equally elitist journals. In short, the transformation of work cannot be understood or managed through a populist public debate. But neither is it likely to be understood or managed through this type of management research, which is detached from the majority of jobs, people, and organizations it is supposed to help us shine a light on.
Beyond working from home: the diversity of new forms of work
Beyond remote work: diverse ways of working
Sooner or later, however, these narratives collide with the iceberg of reality. Forms of work evolve and diverge beyond the ideological simplifications that dominate the online debate and the often-selective representations offered by academic research. For years now, for most workers, the how, where, and when of work have raised complex issues and produced palpable effects at an organizational, professional, and social level. The work-from-home (WFH) model piloted during the pandemic has only amplified, with extraordinary intensity, dynamics that were already underway.
In recent decades, organizational changes in the geographical distribution of companies’ business units, whether through centralization or decentralization, had already raised the issue of worker mobility, i.e. people commuting to different workplaces. Nor is it anything new for people to work, day after day, without ever setting foot in their company’s physical premises, meeting their supervisors and colleagues only on rare occasions. (Just think of a salesperson, a streetcar driver, or someone in marketing who writes copy for a specialized corporate communications channel, for example.) Furthermore, for some time now, the enormous growth of sales networks and the extension of operating hours seven days week have made weekend work a structural reality for thousands of people, often with serious repercussions on their family and social lives.
The pandemic has certainly accelerated the WFH trend. This term, however, encompasses a wide variety of arrangements: activities carried out remotely for just a few days a month, and work that can be done outside the office for the entire week; working hours based on fixed, scheduled days, and models in which the employee decides when to work from home and when to go to the office (with their manager weighing in, to some extent). Added to these formats are coworking spaces (both inside and outside the company) and the transformation of traditional office environments, with closed offices and assigned workstations gradually being replaced by large, shared spaces and bookable desks, following the hoteling model. At the same time, forms of the short workweek are beginning to spread, with a multitude of shift schedules, redistribution of hours, and compensation.
These new models for work are being implemented in organizations in a wide variety of ways, producing different effects depending on the context, sector, company, and the individual and social characteristics of the people involved. Within this largely unintended heterogeneity lies the potential for inequality—the first question we need to address.
Social, gender, and generational differences
The ongoing transformation of work does not produce uniform effects, nor is it inherently equitable. The implications of this evolution vary according to gender and caregiving responsibilities, age, family status, socioeconomic position, and educational level. Even when performing the same tasks, the quality of remote work depends to a great extent on living conditions, the availability of adequate space, and whether or not the worker has domestic and family responsibilities.
Evidence on remote work and the short workweek
Work touches on profound aspects of the human experience—“a cell of our organism,” as Vitaliano Trevisan wrote in his final, poignant book, Works. As such, work is inevitably influenced by individual and social differences, starting with gender and age. From the beginning of the WFH phenomenon, in all European countries, women work remotely more often than men and report greater difficulties in maintaining a clear separation between their domestic and professional spheres (Eurofound, 2022). More recent data collected at SDA Bocconi confirm unequal access to remote work and differing patterns of use by gender and age (Cappetta, Lo Cascio, Magni, Marisco, 2024). (For an in-depth analysis, see the article by Cappetta and Lo Cascio in the Focus section of this issue of E&M.) In our analysis, women use remote work more frequently and regularly, while men exhibit more varied patterns of use. People under 30 and over 50 also show markedly varied patterns of access compared to intermediate age groups.
A further longitudinal study conducted at SDA Bocconi on the four-day workweek (Cappetta, Lo Cascio, Russo, Saputo, 2026) shows that, one year after its introduction, men and more senior employees tend to adapt to the new model more quickly and effectively than women and younger employees. The latter are more likely to engage in on-call behaviors on their day off, such as making phone calls or going to the office. Notable differences in time use also emerge: Women devote their day off primarily to domestic and caregiving activities, while men spend it mainly on sports. Despite the appreciable reduction in the number of hours people worked, the company in our study did not see a decline in financial performance, suggesting an upturn in labor productivity. However, this increase was accompanied by higher work intensity, partly due to the detailed review of processes and activity timelines that preceded the pilot program. Since the monitoring phase lasted only eighteen months, the long-term implications remain to be seen. Nevertheless, by the end of the observation period, the decline in the time devoted to socializing and in the intensity of informal workplace relationships had already begun to level off.
The risks of segregation and inequality
The long-term effects of this transformation are not yet fully apparent, but they call for particular caution right now. If, hypothetically speaking, remote work were to follow a pattern similar to part-time work, it could become established as a predominantly female work arrangement. European data show, in fact, that one in three women with children works part-time, compared to one in five without children; among men, part-time work is much less common and follows the opposite trend (Eurostat, 2024). If remote work were to be structured in some organizations according to dynamics similar to those of part-time employment, it could negatively affect professional effectiveness, career opportunities and pay, effectively turning into a mechanism of gender segregation.
A similar risk concerns younger generations. If remote work were an option primarily used by younger people—as suggested by the widespread belief that they view it as a necessary condition for accepting a job—this could have consequences for socializing in the organization, for learning work practices, and for acquiring tacit skills. In the long term, these dynamics could slow down the professional development paths of younger generations.
Monitoring change to safeguard equity
New work, therefore, is not inherently smart nor does it automatically produce balance. In some contexts, it augments the permeability between family life and professional life, but this does not necessarily equate to better work-life balance. As is the case with more profound changes, there is a risk that new forms of segregation and inequality will emerge. For this reason, direct, continuous monitoring must be done on a broad, non-elitist population of workers. This is the only way to prevent change from bringing further privilege for those with greater material, relational, and cultural resources while becoming a new source of vulnerability for others.
The responsibility to design a widespread beauty of work
All these new forms of work—many of which didn’t exist in previous decades—has, in any case, become a reality. They were established through working methods that were not intentionally thought out, and more often than not, these changes have been dealt with by applying managerial practices created for an organizational model based on people being in the same place at the same time.
This means that now is the time to turn to management—understood as the social science of responsibility, however fragile and imperfect it may be. With effort, rigor, and urgency, companies are called upon to undertake a new, intentional, and monitored redesign of work that addresses all its characteristics (autonomy, interdependence, integrity, measurability of outcomes, etc.) and its organization, whether that be in hierarchical systems or peer groups. This redesign must be across the board, starting with the work performed by the majority of people, not limited to the most highly qualified or visible positions.
Along with this must come a strategic remapping of the boundaries of the corporate value chain and the related systems for monitoring the performance of the company, its teams, and its employees. The challenge—both technical and managerial—is certainly enormous: With the exception of a few organizations characterized by particularly advanced management practices, many companies continue to rely on allocative solutions, coordination mechanisms, and operational systems built on the implicit assumption of simultaneous physical presence in the same location. The sudden disappearance of this condition requires new and robust organizational mechanisms capable of preserving the communal aspects of the company (without confusing coordination with the proliferation of lengthy online meetings, which are often of little real use).
In this process, which impacts both the organizational and social stability of the company, leadership plays a central role, starting with middle managers. Additional studies conducted at SDA Bocconi highlight that certain negative correlations that emerge in remote work—from satisfaction to feelings of fatigue, from engagement intensity to again perceived fatigue—are significantly mitigated in the presence of an effective leader (Cappetta, Lo Cascio, Magni, Marisco, 2025). Conversely, a fragile leader tends to amplify the unequal effects of new ways of working: For some, they become an opportunity; for others, a source of disorientation, isolation, and reduced learning opportunities. (On the topic of managerial fragility, see Baruffaldi’s contribution in the Focus section of this issue of E&M.)
Equally profound is the change required of HR functions, which in this scenario are tasked with redesigning the organization and its training and evaluation systems, as well as building rigorous monitoring tools. Alongside new skills—such as managing diversity and inclusion, integrating corporate welfare initiatives, and data analysis—old often forgotten skills are reemerging: the micro-design of work, industrial relations, and structured on-the-job training. The HR function has to manage a structural tension: on the one hand, coming up with common systems that ensure fairness and reduce the effects of managerial discretion; on the other, recognizing increasingly diverse individual preferences and needs. The risk is that personalization will lead to a gradual individualization of work, weakening coordination, learning, and organizational belonging. The challenge, therefore, lies in coming up with solutions that are fair yet not fragmented—solutions capable of reconciling the beauty of work and social cohesion with productivity and organizational effectiveness.
Ultimately, the responsibility for designing the beauty of work falls on the company’s top leadership, specifically owners and managers. Because it is through concrete actions—not through words alone—that truly just values are forged. After establishing central units with grandiose names and producing detailed documents on sustainability, the decisive test now is about the quality and fairness of work. And this must be reflected in tangible strategic, organizational, and value-measurement decisions: internalizing the most delicate and costly stages of the value chain; monitoring working conditions at production sites, whether they involve tangible goods or services; encouraging forms of worker participation; setting social objectives, alongside economic ones, throughout the entire chain of responsibility; and linking these objectives to reward systems, both monetary and non-monetary.
It will be a storm for management, in companies as well as in academic circles. But it could be a storm as fierce as it is regenerative, if only we were willing to truly try to navigate through it.
References
Cappetta, R., et al. (2024). “Individual Differences and Preferences in the Remote Work Landscape.” Paper accepted for presentation at EURAM.
Cappetta, R., et al. (2025). “Beyond the Office: An Examination of Remote Work, Social, and Job Characteristics and Their Impact on Individual Satisfaction and Engagement.” Personnel Review.
Cappetta, R., et al. (2026). Four-Day Week and Justice: An Exploratory Longitudinal Study. SDA Bocconi working paper.
Eurofound. (2022). The Rise in Telework: Impact on Working Conditions and Regulations. Publications Office of the European Union.
Eurostat. (2024). 17% of EU workers are part-timers. Eurostat News, November 11, 2024.
Han, B.-C. (2024). La crisi della narrazione. Torino Einaudi.
Porter, M.E., Kramer, M.R. (2011). “Creating Shared Value.” Harvard Business Review, 89(1/2), 62–77.
SDA Bocconi School of Management. (2024). Tutto il valore di Claudio Dematté. https://www.sdabocconi.it/it/news/tutto-il-valore-di-claudio-dematte/.
Trevisan, V. (2022). Works (expanded edition). Torino: Einaudi.
Photo iStock / Tanatpon Chaweewat
