Search

Many scholars have called for a profound change in capitalist growth-oriented provisioning systems and business models to help address the unique socio-ecological challenges of the 21st century. Reenvisaging how work is organised, constructed, and valued is an essential part of this change. Scholars of degrowth, post-growth, postcapitalist, and craft research have long discussed alternatives to capitalist work from different perspectives and levels of analysis. We believe that cross-fertilisation of ideas between these strands of literature can advance our imaginaries of the future of work and transition pathways towards the vision of dealienated labour. For this purpose, we bring these strands of literature into conversation by performing a critical literature review on work in postcapitalist, degrowth, post-growth, and craft scholarship. Overall, 121 articles were included in the analysis. We identify autonomy, dealienation, and value creation as common themes with complementary insights from the strands of literature. We also observe that macroeconomic policies suggested by degrowth, post-growth and postcapitalist scholars provide an institutional framework that can be compatible with the micropolitics of work, as documented by craft scholars. Lastly, craft scholars provide an empirically grounded analysis of what it means to engage in useful doing, whereas degrowth and postcapitalist literature mainly contains critical theoretical reflections on the decommodification of labour, recognition of reproductive labour and value creation. Degrowth, post-growth and postcapitalist literature can benefit from more empirical research investigating these issues in relation to the everyday realities of workers.

This paper critically examines how capitalist, alternative capitalist and non-capitalist ontologies and relations are negotiated in a hybrid makerspace that hosts both for-profit and non-profit entities and integrates community and commercial aspects. Despite a growing body of knowledge on the distinct characteristics of non-commercial makerspaces, few scholars have analysed them in relation to capitalism. This applies even more to commercial or hybrid makerspaces that remain so far under-researched in diverse economies literature. These spaces, however, can be of increasing interest given what we know about makerspaces as hubs of budding entrepreneurship and that some makers avidly pursue entrepreneurial objectives while others are reluctant to even consider commercialising their projects. In this paper, I employ an extended framework of diverse economies that understands capitalism as not only a form of socio-economic organisation but also a cultural and political architecture. Followed by an overview of existing literature that sheds light on beyond-capitalist dimensions of makerspaces, I explore a case study of the Keilewerf, a hybrid makerspace situated in Makers District in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, disentangling how capitalist, alternative capitalist and non-capitalist ontologies of sustainability-oriented makers co-exist and conflict with economic relations, knowledge production and relations with the state.

This article enriches the existing literature on the importance and role of the social sciences and humanities (SSH) in renewable energy sources research by providing a novel approach to instigating the future research agenda in this field. Employing a series of in-depth interviews, deliberative focus group workshops and a systematic horizon scanning process, which utilised the expert knowledge of 85 researchers from the field with diverse disciplinary backgrounds and expertise, the paper develops a set of 100 priority questions for future research within SSH scholarship on renewable energy sources. These questions were aggregated into four main directions: (i) deep transformations and connections to the broader economic system (i.e. radical ways of (re)arranging socio-technical, political and economic relations), (ii) cultural and geographical diversity (i.e. contextual cultural, historical, political and socio-economic factors influencing citizen support for energy transitions), (iii) complexifying energy governance (i.e. understanding energy systems from a systems dynamics perspective) and (iv) shifting from instrumental acceptance to value-based objectives (i.e. public support for energy transitions as a normative notion linked to trust-building and citizen engagement). While this agenda is not intended to be—and cannot be—exhaustive or exclusive, we argue that it advances the understanding of SSH research on renewable energy sources and may have important value in the prioritisation of SSH themes needed to enrich dialogues between policymakers, funding institutions and researchers. SSH scholarship should not be treated as instrumental to other research on renewable energy but as intrinsic and of the same hierarchical importance.