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 Women’s 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. 

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.

“A super collection of essays offering a vivid account of the politics of labour and life amidst the rapidly changing tempos and terrains of contemporary work. Exploring the ‘new normal’ of the rise of more creative, knowledge-led and digitized workplaces - yet ones more coupled to work individualization, precariousness and discontinuity – the contributors to this volume tease out the tensions between the promise of work both today and tomorrow, and the persistence of those exclusions and inequalities and that have long pervaded labour organisations and processes.” (Prof. Mark Banks, CAMEo Research Institute for Cultural and Media Economies, University of Leicester, UK)

Explores workers’ experiences from the perspective of the present Investigates the ‘new normal’ world of work and employment Outlines a theoretical framework for capturing the performative role of hope in sustaining creative careers