The Shift: The Future of Work is Already Here. Lynda Gratton

force, the pieces around urbanisation and global migration play a role; from the carbon and natural resources force, the piece around soaring energy costs puts a break on travel and encourages virtual working; from the demographic force the piece on the rearrangement of families breaks many of the natural bonds that keep isolation at bay. Finally, the societal force brings three pieces – ebbing trust, declining happiness and increases in passive TV watching. It’s a toxic brew that could potentially bring isolating work to billions of people by 2025.

      The force of globalisation: the world became urban

      One of the key drivers of isolation has been the explosive growth of cities and urban areas across the whole globe. In 1800 just 3% of the world’s population lived in urban areas, and by 1900 this had only increased to 14%. Yet by 1950 – when the Baby Boomers were born – it had moved up to 30%. The extraordinary fact is that in their lifetime that percentage had shifted to 50% – and there is no evidence that the trend will decrease. By 2010 in many Western countries more than 75% of people lived in an urban area.

      Urban and rural living have different communities and rhythms. In the mid-nineteenth century in Europe or America most people lived in the countryside, on a small farm or in a small town. The typical family grew some of its own food, raised livestock and took their surplus to the market to exchange for goods they did not produce. If, like me, you love the novels of Jane Austen or Henry James, then their vivid descriptions of life in the nineteenth century resonated with the scale and domesticity of life. Jane Austen’s Emma and Henry James’s Isabel do occasionally go into town – but remember that in the 1860s London was home to 3,189,000 people, New York to 813,000 and Boston to 177,000. Had our heroes been explorers, when they entered Bombay or Shanghai they would have found cities of around 600,000 and 700,000.

      This all changed in the West around 1870 when a host of innovations in transportation, energy creation and manufacturing created remarkable industrial growth, which sucked the population into the towns. The great chroniclers of this migration, Charles Dickens in the UK and Émile Zola in France, described both the excitement and the misery that this created. Between 1870 and 1900 New York’s population tripled from 942,000 to 3.4 million and London’s nearly doubled from 3,841,000 to 6,507,000. In the East, Bombay (now Mumbai) and Shanghai also grew – from 645,000 to 813,000 in Bombay and from around 600,000 to 1,000,000 in Shanghai. 2008 saw the balance tip from a majority of rural to a majority of urban world inhabitants. By 2030 it is estimated that the number of people living in urban spaces will have risen to almost 5 billion.⁹ In China, by 2010, it was almost half and half between the urban and rural populations, although of course the 54% of the population living in rural China produce a much lower share of its GDP.

      What this move to the cities means is that more and more people are dislocated from their roots, living in cities where they know very few people, often in neighbourhoods with very little community spirit and activity. It’s from this dislocation that isolation grows. But it is not just the migration to the cities that could be a cause of isolation – there are other migration patterns that could impact on the way we relate to work and our working communities.

      The demographic force: global migration increases

      The isolation that many workers feel in 2025 has also emerged from the dislocation of families and communities as people migrate to get better jobs or to escape war or natural disasters. It is true, of course, that people have always migrated ever since the first homo sapiens ventured from Africa across Eurasia 60,000 years ago; people have continued to migrate in order to establish new communities, move their existing communities and join other communities.¹⁰ Since that time the pace of migration has accelerated as a consequence of commercial and technological developments, and is often spiked by occasional grand economic ventures, as well as political and ecological crises. The colonisation of the Classical period, the forced migration of the transatlantic slave trade and the mass emigration from Europe to the New World were all significant in determining the present distribution of cultures across the face of the globe. We can anticipate that while the direction and strength of migration flows are unpredictable, migration will increase. The actual rate will depend on environmental factors (rising sea levels forcing people to migrate, earthquakes leaving areas uninhabitable, drought decimating areas), political factors (refugees moving away from war-torn regions) and technological developments (labour-saving inventions putting people out of work).