Aneta Podkalicka

Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. What happens to work when robots, automation and digital tools reshape industries overnight? This book explores how work-life is transformed across sectors like construction, healthcare and retail from the perspective of the workers themselves. Based on five years of international research spanning Norway and Australia, the book offers real-world case studies that illuminate the challenges, possibilities and future anticipations faced by workers navigating automation. It provides clear, accessible insights into one of today’s most urgent social transformations. This fascinating book is essential reading for students, scholars, professionals and anyone curious about the future of work.

This is the first academic book to examine the long running hit series Grand Designs, which occupies a significant place in the popular imagination internationally. The authors apply an empirically grounded, critical perspective to the study of television to reveal how people use the program in their everyday lives. The emphasis on everyday uses and meanings combines creatively with understanding the program theoretically, textually and in terms of its production structures. This position challenges framings of the popular lifestyle and factual television genre that has been dominated by a neoliberal or governmentality perspective for many years. Presented by British designer and writer, Kevin McCloud, Grand Designs follows the progress of home owners as they embark on design, renovation and building projects at almost always dizzying scales of endeavour. Understanding the program as both a text to analyse and a site ofmaterial impact, the book draws on interviews with production members, home renovators, building practitioners and audiences, as well as references to associated media formats to provide contextual depth to the analysis. The authors argue that, as a cultural object, the program is both shaped by and enacts social discourses of home-making, design value and taste. Navigating public, commercial and promotional logics, Grand Designs sparks new forms of cultural production and consumer markets.

This book offers a critical road map for understanding and researching "social innovation media"--initiatives that look for new solutions to seemingly intractable social problems by combining creativity, media technologies, and engaged collectives in their design and implementation. Presenting a number of case studies, including campaigns dealing with young people, Indigenous peoples, human rights, and environmental issues, the book takes a close look at the guiding principles, assumptions, goals, practices, and outcomes of these experiments, revealing the challenges they face, the components of their innovation, and the cultural economy within which they operate.