Toward A Future Beyond Employment. By Mehmet Cangul

We live in an age when technological innovations streamline efficiency and begin to replace the need for human labor. Toward a Future Beyond Employment surveys our shifting economic landscape and considers how our very notions of human work and life may need to evolve. In this ground-breaking new work, Cangul proposes that traditional work is losing its conventional importance for people in Western economies, who are moving toward a new sociological paradigm.

As emerging economies become more advanced, the advanced economies face a new stage of their own, a post-employment society that works less and has more time. Based on these conclusions, Toward a Future Beyond Employment proposes an alternative to the overriding narrative about job creation, one that argues for the expansion of existing mechanisms that give people more choice on how they spend their time.

Review: In this engaging book, Cangul challenges us to examine our modern preoccupation with work, a crucially important topic in these troubling economic times. Cangul makes a persuasive case that we can be wealthier and happier if we start thinking of work as just one possible use of our time rather than our reason for living. - Mark D.

White, Chair and Professor, Department of Philosophy, College of Staten Island/CUNY, USA; author, The Manipulation of Choice: Ethics and Libertarian Paternalism Cangul offers truly seminal ideas about life in a world that is eliminating jobs at a mind-boggling place. As the vortex of technological breakthroughs relentlessly speeds up, old paradigms crumble and take with them the binding mythologies that offer the comfort of stability.

This insightful and challenging book addresses the coming world of diminished hours of work which will inevitably present workers in the West with the challenge of filling those hours with still undiscovered activities. This important book should be read by the policy makers who will guide our adjustment to those new activities. - Joseph Dillon Davey, Professor, Rowan University, USA