The transformations that have affected the character of paid work for at least the last three decades under the impact of the “third industrial revolution,” along with the associated processes of globalization, demand that we rethink both the idea of work and the idea of leisure. It is necessary to move beyond the specific opposition between work time and time “free” of work as it was defined and established by the character of work in the twentieth century. The post-Fordist form (...) of work allows us to glimpse a previously unsuspected degree of freedom, responsability, and personal creativity that can be related in a positive and reciprocal manner with the notion of leisure, here understood in terms of intellectual and cultural enhancement rather than simply in terms of diversion, entertainment or mass consumption. In this sense, leisure can become one of the purposes of work and not merely a flight from the sphere of work. (shrink)

Job as a speech act and the end of conventional work Ethics According to the author, the work that takes place in the Cyber Physical System (Smart Factory) has the nature of the «performative speech act». This change determines the end of the conventional ethics of work as duty, task, destiny, etc. which the author analyzes in Christianity as the most important conventional ethics for the Western world. If work is a "s act" then the ethics that constitutes its conditions (...) and meaning will be a form of ethics of communication of which the author establishes the "norms" by integrating the proposal of K.-O. Apel. (shrink)