The future is uncertain and the past, even yesterday, so far away. We live in a world of unparalleled immediacy in which ‘now’ is the dominant mode of being, living and working in the moment, less aware of how, historically, we might have arrived at the now we are in because of its immediacy and insecure about how being here-and-now might translate into futures imagined. Consequently, the newness of now is capable of being experienced in a multitude of ways, unrooted in history and unlimited by imaginary futures. For some, as the book sketches in its early chapters, now is the age of collaboration, often digitally mediated in such a way that one is rarely in the presence of the other or others with whom one is collaborating, often disembodied as a virtual co-creator. The non-newness of the potential of this now of makerspaces, their potential links to historical practices of cooperation, industrial democracy and worker participation, have become less than visible in a world made fit for the digital age. In the immediacy of now, solidarity finds new forms in activist communities of practice, such as hackers, who strive to disturb and disorder the architectonics of authority that corporate and political empires have fabricated. Ethically, those claiming this identity do what they are able to do, sometimes for ulterior motives of a common good; at other times, for reasons of less noble ideological persuasion. Seen in one ideological light, the hacker is engaged in a noble pursuit; from another perspective, they are wreckers of the social and moral order, irrespective of the substantive nature of that which is hacked.

Carrying out the innovation creation and delivery plan that was created in the first execution stage is the aim of this final level of The Innovation Pyramid. Launching new innovations has challenges beyond those of a typical internal-company project in that they generally involve collaborators and adopters outside the innovation-creating organization. This means that multiple environments and multiple points-of-view, in addition to the innovation-creator's internal environment and point-of-view, must be appraised. A modification of Drucker's core management-by-objective framework is introduced to assure alignment of all the people and activities associated with the plan's successful implementation.

The remainder of the chapter focuses on performing a post-execution variance evaluation of the plan's implementation. Such a review allows the implementation team to hone in on the learnings attained from carrying out the developed plan. All four aspects of the plan are reviewed: Operations, Delivery, Resources and Risks. A poor plan execution does not automatically mean the implementation team underperformed. The issue may lie with people or environments well beyond the core team.

This edited volume has endeavoured to link micro-social experiences of work with the wider macro-social context in which these changes operate, so as to provide a rich and detailed account of the most prominent manifestations of the ‘new’ world of work. As they delved into the minutiae of the new world of work, the chapters of this edited volume have explored some of the continuities and discontinuities in ways of working, as a means of fleshing out the socio-economic context of the micro-social experiences of work. In particular, three aspects of these changes and continuities have recurrently emerged throughout the chapters. These are: (i) creativity and changing skills; (ii) the time and space of work; and (iii) the changing nature of the employment relationship and beyond. In this concluding chapter, we reflect further on these themes.

Digital nomadism refers to a mobile lifestyle in which freelancers, digital entrepreneurs and remote workers combine work with continuous travel. In this chapter, we draw from Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) to explore whether digital nomads can be seen to constitute a new form of leisure class. In particular, this entails problematising digital nomadism through four dimensions, namely differentiation, emulation, visibility and institutionalisation. Drawing from a qualitative analysis of the mainstream promotional discourse underlying digital nomadism, we show the existence of a whole set of economic activities based on selling a dreamed work/lifestyle to others. These commercial propositions, which rely on online storytelling and visibility, constitute efficient means of emulation that contribute to framing images of success. Our ‘Veblen-inspired’ analysis, we contend, generates a source of questions not only relevant to the study of digital nomadism, but also to miscellaneous aspects of the new world of work.

The Innovation Pyramid is an inverted triangular pyramid. The methodology for creating impactful solutions to real problems separates the innovation's design from its execution. It further bifurcates design into identifying the real problem before crafting a solution to it. Execution is similarly bifurcated into execution planning and implementation. The four stacked levels of The Innovation Pyramid, from top to bottom, represent Problem Identification, Solution Formulation, Planning and Implementation; two design stages followed by two execution stages. The Pyramid has three faces. These three pyramid sections address three different aspects of designing and executing impactful solutions:

What: What is the desired outcome at that level?

How: How will this be accomplished or enabled?

Who: Who will lead the activities and/or is impacted by the outcome of this level?

This structure streamlines innovation creation as well as providing a structural means for diagnosing the cause of the variance between the actual and forecasted impact of the innovation. This diagnostic aspect is especially important when we may be traversing The Innovation Pyramid structure multiple times, once for say, prototype development, and a second time for the final product launch.

Over the past few years, much has been written on the changing world of work, with discussions focusing, for instance, on the rise of automation (Spencer 2018), changes in the nature of the employment relationship (Sweet and Meiksins 2013), the (failed) promises of the gig economy (Cant 2019; Wood, Graham, Lehdonvirta & Hjorth 2019) or new ways of collaborating and co-producing (de Vaujany, Leclerq-Vandelannoitte & Holt 2020). Importantly though, these discussions are not novel, neither are the phenomena they seek to describe. The history of work is full of déjà vu. Communities, participatory systems, horizontality, democracy at work and nomadism are far from being new topics per se. In the nineteenth century, the Arts and Crafts Movement, socialist utopian communities, anarchy and Marxism had already involved public debates around these topics (see Granter 2016; Leone and Knauf 2015; Tilly 2019). Yet, there is clearly a renewed interest for these themes in research attempting to grapple with the multifaceted nature and the complex meaning of contemporary work (see for instance Aroles, Mitev & de Vaujany 2019; Fayard 2019; Simms 2019; Susskind 2020).

This chapter highlights the daily activities of the hackers grouped together in the same place, making it possible to experience new form of organisation and order social relations. Thus, the analysis of the relationships between the means and ends of organisation suggests that, far from being confined to individual values and attitudes, the pleasure and power given to ‘doing’ represent organisational principles within hackerspace. The study proposed in this chapter is based on an ethnographic study of/within a hackerspace based in the south of France. The fieldwork combines direct participation with a long-term presence in the community, years of archived exchanges and interviews with all the hackers involved in the initiative. It highlights the structuring of the alternative project and hackers organisation according to their ethics. The hacker ethic is reflected in the organisational tasks and the constitution of a legitimate order ; not linked to rational, charismatic or traditional motives, but to a real power given to the ‘doing’: the do-it-ocracy.

The Innovation Pyramid segments the innovation's design from its execution. Focusing on the design first forces us to think about what we are creating before immersing ourselves into the details of how we are creating it. The design portion is further segmented into Problem Identification and Solution Formulation. The first level of The Innovation Pyramid, which is the first stage of the innovation's design, describes a procedure for identifying root causes of general situations. Like The Innovation Pyramid itself, this five-step procedure for Problem Identification is non-linear and iterative process of discovery. Steps may be skipped or repeated depending on where we start or how the process of discovery unfolds. The five-step procedure is therefore more of a guideline than a rigorous process. The guideline requires multiple changes in perspective (broadening or narrowing one's purview) and points-of-view (through who's eyes the situation is observed). Empathy is a key component necessary to remaining in the problem space long enough to uncover the situation's root cause. Given problems are associated with people, identifying the root problem also means identifying the group of people most directly impacted by the root problem.

In summer 1943, with Rodd engrossed in AMGOT, Mary decided to return to Britain. Leaving Philadelphia in August, she brought the family back across the Atlantic on a Portuguese liner, in what was a harrowing crossing; a cyclone forced the ship to turn south towards the Azores before it finally docked in Portugal in late September. Rodd got news of their safe arrival on 9 October and saw them briefly in Lisbon at the end of the month. He was keen to alert Mary to the nature of the situation she was returning to, including the scarcity of food in the cities. He had already told her that, post-war, she would have to make some adjustments to her lifestyle. Her priority, he suggested, needed to be the reestablishment of family life in Herefordshire. But this was going to be a challenge: ‘The position roughly is that if you have servants you will have to work in a factory, or you can do the work yourself instead.’ But he sought to reassure her that he had not been able to detect any criticism of her for having been away from Britain. Mary knew of Rodd's desire to settle down at the Rodd after the war. But she was unsure that this would suit him. In the summer of 1942, she told him that any desire he had to live quietly in Herefordshire for the rest of his life was a ‘nostalgic’ dream; he was meant to get involved in the running of the country in some way, rather than be a country squire or farmer.

Rodd warned Mary about the attacks on him in parliament and the press:

The whole process had been ‘very unpleasant’, he declared, adding that any thoughts he had had of being a colonial governor had been set back by this publicity and criticism.

Rodd died at the Rodd on 16 March 1978 and was buried in Presteigne cemetery. At the top of his gravestone – which was designed by letter-cutter David Kindersley – there is an image of the ‘Agadez cross’. This is a prominent Tuareg image which, according to Rodd, probably originated with the ‘Ankh’, an Egyptian hieroglyphic symbol. Further down there is a Tamasheq word written in traditional Tifinagh script, ‘ǁ ⵆ ⵔ ⵗ ⵙ’. Pronounced ‘Al-har-as’, this was (and remains) a greeting meaning something like ‘Peace to you’. Rodd translated it as ‘Naught but good’. This word had been embossed in gold on the front cover of People of the Veil. The references to Tuareg culture on the gravestone were clearly intended to convey the idea that, although Rodd was buried in Wales, a remote section of the central Sahara remained in his heart: he was a man whose interests and emotions straddled different continents. This was undoubtedly true. The landscape of Aïr was always before him. In his bedroom at home, he kept a framed photo of Agellal village and mountains (see Figure 3.4) – an area to the south-west of Iferuan. At the same time, while his interests extended to many countries, geography in some ways pulled him in different directions: it fed both his desire to see the world (through his trips to Africa and Australia, for example) and his wish to settle down (to life on the English–Welsh border).

Throughout his life, Rodd was in a kind of dialogue with the landscapes he encountered. If, as David Livingstone notes, agency can be understood as not solely connected to human intentionality, it opens up the possibility of the natural, non-human world having some element of agency. Rodd's experience illustrates this possibility. Landscapes conveyed a variety of messages to him. He was a restless person, and there is a case for saying that empty or beautiful places suggested to him the existence of a stable, harmonious environment – they hinted at an answer to his restlessness. In this, they provoked an existential response from him. But they also appealed to the aspiring scientist in him. The Enlightenment project of subjecting the world to a rational analysis appealed to his enduring desire to impose order over chaos and be systematic in his thinking.

Rodd got back to Britain in mid-November 1942. In formal terms, he was still chief political officer in East Africa command. But he was uncertain about what to do next. He was also free of personal ambition on the matter – or so he claimed in a letter to Mary: ‘I do not really care what I do and shall take no active steps to do one thing or another. In these two years […] I have ceased to have any ambition to do anything else than what I was doing.’ Rodd even floated the idea with some of his friends that he might withdraw from his wartime work and go to live at the Rodd. This was met with some derision. Rodd's reputation was high. Henry Monck-Mason Moore wrote Rodd a warm letter expressing appreciation for all his assistance while working in East Africa. Platt also wrote him a letter of appreciation while also telling a mutual friend that he found him ‘sometimes encouraging, sometimes provocative, but always a stimulant’. Rodd thought it was a ‘triumph’ to be thanked by these two men, since they did not get on well together, and he had spent ‘appreciable time’ keeping the peace between them.

Rodd was, in fact, full of ideas. There was often in his political thinking a desire to promote a degree of centralisation, as he explained to Mary in April: ‘I am apprehensive, as I always have been, of the disintegration of central authority and the growth of local potentates who won't agree with their fellow potentates.’ This instinct now came out in a plan to bring order to the work of civil administration in East Africa and the Middle East. In early December, at a meeting in London called by Archibald Nye, vice chief of the Imperial General Staff, he suggested that there was a lack of coordination in the British management of civil affairs. He then produced a paper for the Directorate of Military Operations proposing the integration of the system under one person with the title of chief civil affairs officer (CCAO). This person would act as a liaison person between commanders-in-chief of different commands, and between them and the War Office on civil administration issues; a vice CCAO would be attached to each command. The idea was initially accepted.