The New Meaning of Work essay

The meaning of work greatly changed over the past 50 years and we could mention that many “high” assertions were made about changes not only in the workplaces but also about these changes’ impact on people’s life and the role of work in the everyday activity of every person. To exist, a man must not only cognize outward things but also change them, carry on labour activity. In my opinion two reasons of these changes are transition from the centralized economy to the market economy and serious change of people’s attitude to the work.
In general sense work is a kind of activity, the purpose of which is creation of public useful product, with material or spiritual character. Nowadays, following the sociotechnical model, we see that it is necessary not only to do something important and earn money for this, but also create something that will contribute something important to society and to others. It is possible to mention that sometimes people seem bored at their working places and exactly job enrichment allows to fill their work with specific essence that will lead employees to job satisfaction through increasing of responsibility level, for example. Thinking about the new meaning of work, we should pay our attention on fact that labor is closely related to cognitive activity, because any work requires knowledge and experience. We live in time of new technologies and they make our life easier and in some sense they have ambiguous impact on our life. In some cases new technologies add new knowledge in our life, but in some cases they simply make narrow our level of many processes understanding.
Every person wants to improve the quality of own life and a psychological contract allows to do it effectively during looking for new job and in my opinion it also greatly impacts on the new meaning of work appearance. In modern terms a “psychological contract” is a set of mutual and unprescribed expectations, existing between workers and employer. It does not have legal force; however it is a kind of “mortgage” for an employee and employer. An employee gets verbal guarantees that he will develop himself and move upwards job ladder and so on. An employer in exchange gets loyalty and good efficiency of work.
Labour of people, as a rule, has public character. For the conclusion of my essay I want to say that self managed teams are also important component of contemporary work in many organizations, because they include a group of people who are working together with the purpose to achieve one concrete common goal, but they are doing it in their own ways and are responsible for their actions inside their team. Summarizing information presented in this essay it is necessary to say that it was analyzed contemporary attitude to the work and through it was described the new meaning of work.

Work cited
Thornburg, David. The New Basics: Education and the Future of Work in the Telematic Age. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2002.